We are in the midst of a generational resurgence of socialist activity in the United States, of which the growth of the DSA is just one part. As members we are trying, many of us for the first time, to expand the field of class struggle through organizing. Our approach to this task is Emergent Strategy: we must engage directly at the point of struggle (not above or beside it) to build lasting formations, infrastructure, and networks of working class power that become the interwoven fabric of a mass socialist movement.

The form, shape, and structure of our organization is determined by the needs of the people, their current conditions, and their demands for change. The dream of the society that we fight to win does not emanate fully formed from the minds of a select few, but is developed collectively in the course of struggle together. We must always build WITH and not FOR.

We must try new things and borrow from what has worked before—we’ll be informed by our forebears but unburdened by contested legacy. Our praxis will be a living praxis: a theory of both practice and struggle that grows continuously in maturity, capability, and impact. To us, this means committing more than ever to welcoming, training, and developing DSA members as socialist organizers — not within and for ourselves, but through organizing at new and emergent sites of working class struggle.

In Emerge, we will publish less and organize more—and when we do publish, it will be to reflect on our work in a way that collectively benefits all of our efforts. We will fight the enemy and win by acting in solidarity with each other. That solidarity is impossible if we turn a blind eye to patterns of behavior that put individual advancement, prestige, or fear over the flourishing of a mass movement.

We will not win every fight, but we will always grow — we will build and be measured by the institutions that last and that will carry our collective fight forward again, and again.