Bread and Roses Caucus is deeply proud of DSA’s program Workers Deserve More and our central role in creating it.
Workers Deserve More was first published in 2024 as part of a Bread and Roses proposal to the 2023 convention and updated in 2026 after a proposal at the 2025 convention. Several of our members were on the WDM Program Committee, including one of its cochairs. Workers Deserve More has proven successful in building DSA’s profile and ability to express its own politics independent of those of our high-profile elected officials – and it also provides a unifying message for all our candidates to champion. It represents a synthesis of the breadth of politics in the organization, and stands as a new high water mark for the effectiveness of DSA’s multi-tendency democracy.
Bread and Roses believes that DSA’s multi-tendency character is a strength, not a weakness. By bringing together differing positions within socialism under the big tent, we welcome in thousands of new members and encourage them to express and refine their politics through democratic deliberation. These politics form a basis for the work that DSA members carry out every day.
The program speaks to the breadth of DSA’s current work to abolish ICE, win Medicare for All and affordable housing, demilitarize the police and end mass incarceration, oppose US imperialism and achieve a free Palestine. But the beauty of the program is that it connects the demands of this moment to a revolutionary vision of a world beyond capitalism and the transformations necessary to get there. Our socialist horizon is a world where democracy drives all areas of life; a world free of oppression; a world that truly values public safety and the dignity of all people.
The program is a guide for talking about socialism and for putting our ideas into popular discourse, and we are excited for DSA candidates to embrace it across the board. But it is not merely a platform to convince people to vote for our candidates; it’s a powerful image of what socialists truly believe in. It represents the hope and imagination within us that capitalists are desperate to kill. We have confidence that this vision resonates with people beyond the immediate demands of elections.
Furthermore, Bread and Roses is proud to support the exciting and necessary work being done by chapters all across the country. Socialists are winning elections in Oregon, Kentucky, Florida, Michigan, Colorado, Connecticut, and many other states. These victories can not be attributed to one chapter or tendency alone, but are run and supported by all kinds of DSA members. And DSA doesn’t just win elections. We support organizing in workplaces through the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), the work of the National Labor Commission (NLC) and chapter-level labor formations. Chapters all over the country have led the opposition to ICE, organized to end the genocide in Gaza, and are building vibrant local organizations that build community and train members in the democratic practices that are necessary for us to win and run the society we are fighting for.
As DSA grows, our profile grows too. DSA members will increasingly be asked to explain the organization to the media, and the articles we write and the posts we make on social media will draw much greater attention. Given that, it’s important to set better expectations in the organization about how to talk about DSA, and how to conduct debates in public with one another.
As a starting point, we reject any messaging that would pit sections of the organization against one another or downplay our commitment to the socialist horizon. There are strong differences between tendencies in DSA, including what that horizon might look like, but the time and place to work through those differences are in conversation and debate with other DSA members, and through caucus and DSA publications. We shouldn’t hide that DSA members have differences when speaking to the broader public because those differences make us stronger, but in explaining those differences, it is essential to foreground our strength and unity.
We believe in DSA as a national project and reject pushes to differentiate the national organization from its chapters or to elevate the work of a single chapter above others. We believe that a strong DSA is one that maintains its multi-tendency nature and that solves political differences through participatory, deliberative democracy. We are proud of what DSA has built and we are proud that a Bread and Roses proposal followed by years of democratic debate and multi-tendency collaboration produced a strong, unifying national program.
