Our Platform
Preamble
The political reality we wake to every day encourages despair and cynicism.
The national Democratic Party is beholden to capitalist desires, turning a blind eye to the damage they cause to the working class in order to smooth the path for their corporate masters. The Kentucky Democratic Party is broken and powerless, reaping only now what they sowed for decades. The local Democratic Party is so thoroughly captured by their donors that they can’t even select their own insiders to run for office, no longer partners in policy or electoral strategy with the mega-landlords and developers who hold their purse strings but reduced instead to stenographers. All of this plays out against a backdrop of a fraying society, of people abandoned by their political leadership, of a world already rolling down the slope of climate catastrophe and picking up speed.
DSA is not the left wing of the Democratic Party. We are not their youth movement or their volunteer core. We aren’t a non-profit awash in a sea of NGOs dependent on corporate donors. DSA isn’t an organization centered on electoral endorsements for their own sake, or a board disseminating information to a glorified email list of “members”, or a think-tank. DSA isn’t an academic exercise in theory, or a charity, or a social club.
DSA is the largest socialist organization in the United States. Our purpose is building power for the working class nationally and locally, and we are committed to that purpose. We are built for solidarity with the people oppressed by capitalism and the systems it has built to perpetuate itself. We are committed to building class consciousness, in empowering the multiracial working class to take democratic control of our work, our government, our lives.
We have a theory of change and a vision that transcends contradictions. We reject despair and cynicism, because we know that there is hope in fighting for someone you don’t know, in meeting the needs of the many and not the few. There is hope in organizing, in fellowship, in the shared struggle. We can name the problem—capitalism—and by doing so give ourselves the power to solve it; the key has been locked with us inside the cage all along.
Below, you will find our vision for the future. You will find our priorities for our city and our nation. You will find our outrage, our dreams, our demands. This is the platform of Louisville DSA.