By Shaina Cole | Contributing Writer, Rocky Mountain Voice
DSA’s own internal survey shows something specific: more than 80 percent of members 25 and older who responded hold a bachelor’s degree.
DSA’s youth section has spent the last decade building a structured campus operation, with its own curriculum, its own labor strategy, and in at least one Colorado classroom, a university course built to recruit.
That operation runs through Young Democratic Socialists of America, DSA’s youth and student section.
Join YDSA and you’re automatically a DSA member too. It has grown rapidly over the past decade and is, by its own account, the place where a lot of its future organizers get their start.
YDSA has grown from roughly a dozen chapters in 2016 to more than 150 today, spanning high schools, community colleges, and universities. The group describes itself as having “thousands of members,” and calls itself the largest progressive youth organization in the country.
Growth surged again after 2024.
Speaking to NOTUS, a Washington political news outlet, a YDSA co-chair said DSA nationally picked up roughly 5,000 members on the single day Zohran Mamdani won the New York City mayoral election.
At Harper College, a community college in Illinois, a YDSA chapter that had been a social space for its three consistent members now has more than 20 regular members. Its chair, Vito Abromaitis, told NOTUS that Trump has indirectly been “causing liberals here to go further left.”
Political organizing among young people is not new, and it isn’t limited to the left.
College Republicans and Turning Point USA run comparable operations aimed at conservative students. What sets YDSA apart isn’t that it exists. It’s how specific its own materials are about what it’s trying to do.
A curriculum with a name
YDSA doesn’t leave political education to chance.
It publishes a Socialist Night School Manual for chapters to run their own reading groups, and a School of Socialism Syllabus, adopted by resolution at its 2019 convention, covering socialist theory and history.
YDSA’s School of Socialism page, adopted by resolution at its 2019 convention. Session topics include “Beyond Bernie,” “The Coup in Chile,” “The Rent is Too Damn High!,” and “Exploring Martin Luther King Jr.’s legacy, the Memphis Sanitation Workers Strike, and the Poor People’s Campaign.” (Source: y.dsausa.org)
DSA’s national body runs its own version, the National Political Education Committee, with three named introductory lessons: “What is Capitalism?”, “What is Socialism?”, and “Why the Working Class?”
DSA’s National Political Education Committee publishes its curriculum modules, including “What is Capitalism?”, “What is Socialism?”, and “Why the Working Class?”, alongside modules on race and fascism. (Source: dsa-education.pubpub.org)
Jarek Ervin, who chaired Philadelphia DSA’s political education committee, and Melissa Naschek, then a co-chair of the chapter, laid out the reasoning for their chapter’s night school in a 2017 article for DSA’s magazine, Democratic Left.
Colleges and universities, they wrote, “have largely defaulted on their promises to teach,” and students are often presented with “cartoonish misrepresentations of radical thinkers.”
Individual chapters, including ones in Rochester and Atlanta, publish their own reading lists built around Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Trotsky.
None of this stays theoretical.
In 2020, YDSA members voted to build what the group’s own writers call a “Rank-and-File pipeline,” aimed at steering members toward jobs in what YDSA describes as strategic sectors: education, healthcare, and logistics.
By 2021, its National Labor Committee was running a training program called Rank-and-File School and surveying graduating members about their career plans.
In 2018, DSA’s labor commission and YDSA distributed a pamphlet called “Why Socialists Should Become Teachers,” written by DSA teachers in West Virginia after that year’s statewide strike.
From DSA’s “Why Socialists Should Become Teachers” pamphlet: “This pamphlet argues that socialists should take jobs as teachers (and other school-based workers) for the political, economic, and social potential the industry holds.” (Source: teachers.dsausa.org)
Not everyone inside DSA is sold.
Ryan Mosgrove, secretary of Metro D.C. DSA, told In These Times the idea that members should switch careers into union-heavy fields “really not something that most of our members can do.” Many members, he said, work low-wage jobs or live outside the dense metro areas where the strategy works best.
It also has a result to point to.
In 2023, the University of Oregon’s YDSA chapter drove a campaign that unionized undergraduate student workers, certified that November under the name UO Student Workers.
DSA’s own account puts the union at around 4,000 student workers across campus. It’s described as the largest undergraduate student-worker union in the country.
David Purucker, a University of Oregon YDSA member, wrote up the campaign for DSA. Not every core organizer was a socialist or an active YDSA member, he wrote, and “we were careful to maintain an organizational separation between the union and YDSA.” Still, he wrote, “it’s not an accident that the campaign was started and driven forward by YDSA members.”
What it looks like in Colorado
Colorado has at least four YDSA chapters tied into the state’s existing DSA infrastructure at CU Boulder, Colorado State, UCCS, and the Auraria campus in Denver.
The environment extends beyond DSA itself.
In 2023, the Colorado Education Association, the state’s largest teachers’ union with roughly 39,000 members, passed a resolution at its annual assembly stating, “The CEA believes that capitalism inherently exploits children, public schools, land, labor, and resources.”
The clearest Colorado example, though, has a name attached to it. And unlike DSA’s own political education programs, which are voluntary, this one ran through a required university course.
Elia Newsom taught writing at CU Boulder and belonged to Marxist Unity Group, a DSA caucus.
In 2023, he built a section of WRTG 3020, a required writing course on the state’s Guaranteed Transfer pathway, around the theme “U.S. Resistance Movements.”
He wrote about it himself, twice, in the socialist magazine Cosmonaut.
In his own words, he created the course “to propagandize and provide political education to students outside the socialist orbit,” and to give the campus YDSA chapter “college credit for organizing.”
He also disclosed his intent to students on day one, told them disagreement wouldn’t affect their grades, and let them grade their own major assignments.
A year later, he published a more detailed account, along with two YDSA students who’d taken the class.
Anonymous course evaluations, submitted by 16 of 19 students, were largely positive.
One student wrote that Newsom “created a classroom environment where every student felt comfortable to share their thoughts and opinions.” A YDSA student who contributed to the article described the class pushing them to become “a more active and involved leftist” in the community.
Newsom acknowledged a limit of his own, writing that “while I believe perceptions definitely shifted for students who had ambivalent or negative feelings toward socialism, I have no evidence that taking the course galvanized these students to action despite the many avenues to do so.”
He said the course would run again the next year, and published his syllabus for other instructors to use.
Newsom also issued an open call to replicate the model. “To my comrades at colleges and universities, be you student, staff, or faculty, please try to replicate what we’ve done,” he wrote.
The weekly schedule from Newsom’s WRTG 3020 syllabus. Topics ranged from “What is Socialism?” to “Bernie, DSA, The Squad.” Guest speakers included DSA members and a DSA-endorsed candidate for Boulder mayor, Nicole Speer. Readings included Engels, Lenin, the Communist Manifesto, and Che Guevara. (Source: Newsom’s published syllabus)
The university’s Issues Management office later provided a statement:
“Academic freedom is a core value at CU Boulder and gives faculty broad latitude in how they teach and explore ideas. At the same time, university policy and regent law and policy require instruction to support the educational mission of the university. Advancing or organizing on behalf of a particular political viewpoint, candidate or partisan cause would be contrary to this principle, and if the facts are as described, those activities would not be consistent with faculty expectations for course instruction. The instructor is no longer employed at the university.”
RMV sought comment from Newsom through Cosmonaut magazine.
All of it is on the record
YDSA runs its own political education apparatus. It publishes a Night School manual, a School of Socialism syllabus, and a national curriculum built around three named modules.
Individual chapters publish their own reading lists, and the group has a formal strategy for steering graduates into strategic industries.
Colorado’s largest teachers’ union has formally declared capitalism exploitative.
DSA’s own pamphlet spelled out years earlier why socialists should become teachers in the first place. The classroom, it argued, is where the pipeline reaches its next generation.
And in at least one documented case, a section of a required general-education course at a public university was built, by its instructor’s own account, to recruit for the campus YDSA chapter.
He asked others to do the same.
None of that is hidden.
Where those graduates go next — into the unions, workplaces, and industries DSA has named as strategic targets — is a story of its own.