Purpose

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DSA-LA’s Democratic Socialist Program (Program) establishes a roadmap towards a Los Angeles for the Working Class through municipal, county, and state-level victories in the next six to eight years. DSA-LA, through its membership and committees, regularly endorses and organizes for the election of candidates or passage of policies in the electoral politics arena. At our 2020 Annual Convention, members voted to develop a strategy for this work. This Program attempts to cohere the various demands of our mass organization into a tool not just for electoral strategy, but also for internal accountability and constituency-building.

Content

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The Program aims to definitively distinguish ourselves from the Democratic Party by centering our material needs as workers in LA and serving as a basis for co-developing radical policy and budget priorities with electeds who are rooted in our everyday working class struggles. In addition, the Program is distinct from a conventional party platform, which often includes a list of value statements, but does not consider the strategies needed to enact those values at a policy level or the need for a push and pull between people and the candidates they elect.

Furthermore, the content of the Program is distinct from our national platform. It is built specifically for needs and issues we aim to address through electoral and organizing work in LA County. The Program is not a list of demands to achieve ‘full socialism’ in our county; rather, it is the articulation of what we believe is necessary and winnable in our current moment. To overcome white supremacist, cisgender, imperialist, patriarchial capitalism, we need to move boulders. The Program aims to build power to overcome those boulders by proposing strategies and tactical fights to strengthen our skills, analysis, and constituency. The Program is not inclusive of all demands and campaigns that DSA-LA members are currently or will in the future organize towards.

To be clear, if a specific demand is not on this Program, it does not mean it is not a priority or that DSA-LA does not support it. Our audience is our working class neighbors, friends, coworkers, families, and others not currently in DSA-LA and our goal is to start articulating how our efforts will build our class’ power in LA County. The Program includes three sections:



    • State of Los Angeles County. The first section describes our understanding of the political landscape in LA from 1990-2020. Understanding the historical class and power conditions that shaped LA allows us to articulate how we can work within and change current conditions to advance our Program.

    • Keys to Building Power. The second section provides our analysis of how we as a mass organization can contend for and advance our power as the working class, given our understanding of the State of Los Angeles County and the economic, political, and social forces at play in and beyond the electoral arena.

    • Los Angeles for the Working Class. The final section presents tactical demands that we will pursue over the next six to eight years. These are organized into six overlapping sectors: Housing, Healthcare, Transportation & Infrastructure, Law Enforcement/Public Safety, Labor, and Education.



Introduction

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The prospect of a mass socialist organization achieving political power for the working class in LA is within closer reach today than ever before. At the present moment, the consensus among working class Angelenos is that elected leaders are not adequately responding to the crisis of the pandemic, allow for and even facilitate indiscriminate gouging of rental and home prices, and fail to protect, let alone expand, the social safety nets we as California’s workers need. The frustration with our present conditions is palpable and the necessary policies and protections for poor, working class, and marginalized Angelenos cannot be achieved except by the strategic transformation of power and politics in our county.

National policymaking has been weakened by decades of a shift from universal national programs and safety nets to a focus on state and local government as the means to provide social programs. The results are disparities both across and within states in key policies like minimum wages, healthcare coverage, tenant rights, access to quality education, and more. Indeed, in the national electoral arena, the last few years demonstrate a severe conservative shift toward a White Supremacist republic with intense hostility to the growing multiracial plurality. These changes are reflected in an economic restructuring as well—exemplified in the erosion of worker rights at the expense of so-called innovations in the tech world and sectors of finance and real estate that push more and more Americans into precarity.

In California, we have experienced these demographic, social, and political economic structural changes before. We saw an infamous anti-immigrant ballot initiative, Proposition 187, pass with a safe margin. We also saw the elimination of affirmative action. The state’s economy was built on the military industrial complex, the oil industry, and on the backs of low-wage workers, from farm laborers in rural areas to factory workers in the urbanized cores. We experienced the violent police repression of Black and Brown people protesting in anger against economic exclusion and police violence, which intensified in the 1990s and continues into the present.

Out of the roots of Republican history in the twentieth century and through the tumultuous period of the 1990s, California emerged as a leader in “progressive” policy. Yet, most Angelenos have no direct experience or historical memory of these struggles that shape our political and economic arena today. As a multiracial and diverse working class, we find ourselves in struggle against the “progressive” policies of ruling elites. We fight against neoliberal policies that feign social progress while sacrificing our wellbeing, privacy, and natural environment for massive profits for the few—evidenced by the number of billionaires (189) that call California home.

It is in this context that DSA-LA organizes to take power in the region. We organize in our workplaces, neighborhoods, schools, and buildings to transition LA toward a democratic socialist region. DSA-LA, DSA’s largest chapter in the West Coast, was reborn in January 2017. Our chapter was rooted in Jewish, Black, and Mexican struggles as well as former Communists, Anarchists, and Social Democrats organizing collectively, and was founded and inspired by the great Dorothy Ray Healey, a long time labor and left organizer in California. We have a proud history to lean on as we engage in fighting for implementation of this Program.

State of Los Angeles County

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This section describes the political landscape in LA from 1990-2020. An understanding of the political conditions facing socialists in LA County today must be rooted in contextualizing historical ebbs and flows of political, economic, and social forces.

As socialists, we know that various factions of capital, including landlords and developers, businesses and large corporations, manufacturing, entertainment and tourism compete and form coalitions to advance their interests. The power of the winning faction or coalition of capital interests at any time is legitimized through the Democratic Party that wins nearly every election and then uses seats and policies to maximize profits for electoral donors at great cost to us, the working class. We see this play out through local elected bodies using “progressive” language as a means to advance neoliberal policies, maximize profits for the few, and, thus, entrench their role and power as brokerage layers in our society.

Leading up to the 1990s

In the 1980s, LA suffered from twin economic crises. The first was deindustrialization, through which capitalists moved industrial jobs outside of California and outside of the country where they could more easily exploit workers and maximize their profit margins. The second was Reaganism, a political project that slashed state taxes and business regulations to create “new markets” for capital to exploit. This capitalist offensive against the programs and policies of the New Deal and the Great Society successfully eroded the social safety net and deployment of police departments as tools of discipline for the newly unemployed drove an exponential growth of the imprisoned population and carceral system in LA County and California.

LA’s industrial sector nearly collapsed from the recession of 1981to 1982. Recently-integrated factories closed from South Gate to Van Nuys. Coupled with police repression of Black and Brown organizing of the 1960s and 1970s, young Angelenos entered the 1980s with neither a job to hope for nor a political organization to articulate their needs—just in time for the crack epidemic and the growth of gangs to fill the void in places like South Central while a rise in consumerism and a flood of products disengaged young Angelenos in other areas of the county.

Internationally, neo-colonial exploitation led to a rise of immigration from several regions of the world to the United States. American imperialist expansion in Central America created an international crisis during the 1980s that pulled masses of undocumented immigrants to LA to escape the murderous civil wars. In Asia, as the economic power of China, Japan, and other countries grew, American international and domestic policies were deployed to attract high-skilled workers and open new opportunities for corporations—resulting in a concurrent wave of low-skilled Asian immigrants for the service sectors in developing ethnic enclaves. Undocumented immigrants entered the LA political economy without legal protections or organization as a class of workers, which created substantial predation and underrepresentation even in unionized trades. This economic and political restructuring translated into a massive demographic transition in LA County, from a drastically segregated urban and suburban region to a mixed urban core and periphery.

Reagan’s “Tax Revolt” politics combined explicit opposition to pro-worker politics with white racial hostility to the multiracial democratic movement that had elected Tom Bradley as the first Black mayor of LA. Regressive tax policies like Proposition 13 sabotaged the ability of state governments to raise revenue for public services as a way to re-entrench existing economic relationships and prevent the rising multiracial liberal powers from pursuing more expansive redistributive agendas, and the impact of these conservative victories is to continue to place the tax burden of running California disproportionately on its poorest residents.

To impose this new economic order and warehouse the new masses of workers unemployed by deindustrialization, capitalist interests pushed policies redirecting public budgets from schools to prisons. This trend began after the 1965 Watts Rebellion but took on new speed with racist calls for “law and order” emerging along with the rise in economic inequalities into the 1990s.

Major Battles of the 1990s and 2000s

Through deindustrialization and recession, Angelenos lost 830,000 jobs between 1990 and 1993, including almost a quarter of manufacturing jobs, and unemployment doubled. Repression, poverty, and resentment exploded in the 1992 Uprisings, spawning new movements on the left and right. These movements were characterized by multiracial solidarity coalitions (Black, Brown, and Asian) for economic rights on the left, and a doubling down on “law and order,” immigrant-baiting, and reactionary responses to social issues on the right.

Right-wing backlash to demographic changes and social upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s found its footing in the 1990s. It was expressed by legislative term limits aimed at a Black Assembly Speaker (Prop 140, 1990), the ban on affirmative action in public institutions (Prop 209, 1996), and the criminalization of undocumented immigrants (Prop 187, 1994). These conservative victories of the 1990s prefaced the white nationalist policy of “rule or ruin” over state institutions that were eventually echoed nationwide. In the 1990s, the right-wing victories created conditions for welding together a multiracial coalition within organized labor to challenge the Republican stronghold on politics and reinvigorate the stagnant Democratic Party establishment that managed the interests of a different faction, primarily business and real estate, within California’s capitalist class.

Organized labor spent resources and organizing time to expand collective bargaining for all Angelenos and elect politicians supporting redistributive policies. Justice for Janitors established unions in workplaces who contracted third-party corporations like the American Building Maintenance (ABM) and the International Service Systems (ISS). A fragile and shifting coalition of Black, Latino, and Asian political organizations and newly elected leaders— from Mark Ridley Thomas and Maxine Waters to Judy Chu and Mike Eng to Richard Alatorre and Kevin de Leon— then aligned with organized labor for increased public employment and contracted with capitalists for private philanthropic dollars and expansion of enterprises that promised new jobs.

These relationships formed the basis for the pacification of social and political upheavals of the 1990s. By the 2000s, the economic and political ruling class developed a plan against social movements and social change by mediating or brokering through the newly formed or reinvigorated social justice institutions, unions, and nonprofits claiming roots in past social movements. Yet, the true roots of power continued on in the economic base of the region and not in the representational transactions. The governing coalition set itself up to be disciplined by businesses, elite-funded non-profits, vested interests opposed to a redistribution of wealth.

2008 to Now

The coalition that took power locally in the 1990s and 2000s survived economic booms and busts and compromised with the different regime changes in state and municipal governments to retain symbolic power. Its leaders found jobs as private consultants, nonprofit and foundation staffers, or even federal and state elected officials—but little to no material benefits accrued for the working class and a growing number of Angelenos refuse to stand by and wait for action.

Here in LA, Antonio Villaraigosa’s trajectory from union volunteer to Assembly Speaker to Mayor to gubernatorial candidate to Herbalife rainmaker is the most visible example of someone who, rising from the people and maintaining a left aesthetic, finds final and full expression disciplining poor and working class Angelenos on behalf of capital. In the national electoral arena, the multiracial Democratic coalition found a federal icon in Barack Obama, who also claimed roots in community organizing. Capital’s hold in the coalition, however, grew stronger through global restructuring, economic booms, and land speculation. Splits emerged within the multiracial coalition between organized labor and the next wave of Latino and Black political elites over housing and education and, more recently, big tech and global capital reshaping the coalition.

With the fall of the Republican Party and the peak of immigrant organizing in May 2006, when nearly one million workers marched to LA City Hall, moderate Democrats silently reshuffled the political economy on behalf of new industries dependent on workers not yet unionized. This was a blow to labor, which had expanded immigrant voter turnout from 10,000 in 1996 to over 27,500 in 2005, only to realize its strongest elected leadership shifted base to social reformist capital. Nonprofits thus advanced their position in the power structures, garnering support from the same electoral donors and capitalists’ foundations, to expand progressive policies and reforms, often taking the place of organized labor. The sidelining of class struggle has not gained permanence, though. The collective memory that unions raise living standards across the board remains. From Justice for Janitors in the 1990s to the UTLA teachers strike culminating in 2019, many Angelenos understand the role of unions in building power not just in the workplace but for the common good, shaping policy on housing, immigration, and climate.

The economic restructuring after the 2008 Recession led to another wave of social and cultural changes. Gentrification from East LA to Venice and Highland Park to South Central. Wildfires as opportunities for further privatization of utilities. A ticking time bomb for mass scale evictions amidst a global pandemic. The ongoing brutalization of Angelenos by police in schools, on transit, and in our homes. We are on the burning edge of the economic, climate, and moral crises that define this generation. Despite these threats to quality of life and wellbeing, the state falls short and elected representatives fail to take decisive action. Yet the people of LA are, as they have been for decades, struggling and fighting back through massive strike actions, electoral fights, and a new consensus for justice-oriented, redistributionist, working-class politics. We recognize the choice — for Angelenos, and for humanity — remains socialism or barbarism.

Keys to Building Power

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This section provides analysis as to how we as a working class organization can contend for and advance our power, given the forces at play in and beyond the electoral arena.

To prepare for building power, we outline what we define as the ‘status quo’ coalition, break down the groups that serve or strengthen this coalition, and envision how DSA-LA can make necessary left shifts to the dominant “progressive” framework for social change in LA County.

Outmaneuvering the Status Quo Coalition

The power structure within LA County can be described as a status quo coalition which invokes “progressive” language while espousing neoliberal policies and views. Democrats in office push austerity measures, ramp up funding to further militarize police forces, give away incentives for more development, and, generally, bend to the influence of wealthy political donors rather than the larger populace they serve. This status quo coalition is propped up or at least influenced by:

  • Elected officials who seek to expand their own power or financial wealth. From the County Board of Supervisors to City Council Members in the 88 cities of the county, elected officials have a political and economic incentive to use their positions to barter for their own career interests. They leverage power over land use, development, and budgets in favor of their own districts and refuse to touch issues outside of their geographic boundaries, shying away even from evidence-based policy solutions if they fear it will shrink their power in securing support for their own pet projects. Within the status quo, Democrats who use ‘progressive’ language will endorse and even champion harsh criminalization policies (ex. Mark Ridley Thomas, Kevin DeLeon, Bob Blumenfeld).
  • Factions of capital with highly concentrated wealth who seek to restructure LA to deepen their pockets even more. The stakeholders in these factions include: Real estate developers, landlords, and global financial institutions; Multimillionaires and billionaires across the dominant sectors of the economy, from defense to tech to oil and beyond; Tourism and entertainment industry interests; and more. They compete and form coalitions to advance their economic interests, supporting economic priorities like the 2028 Olympic Games, transit-oriented development zoning and incentives, or commercial property tax reform whenever they stand to benefit financially.
  • Labor Unions tying their power to liberal elected officials in exchange for short-term pro-labor victories. The new labor organizing in the 1990s turned organized unions into a significant force in LA politics, with many labor leaders directly influencing or some moving into elected office themselves and becoming forces propping up the status quo. Former labor leaders like Antonio Villaraigosa (UTLA and AFGE) or Gil Cedillo (SEIU) and recent labor-supported leaders like Herb Wesson are examples of this rational interest to ensure proximity to the elected powers that regularly enact some, albeit limited, pro-labor policies.
  • Organizations and wealthy individuals forming the Nonprofit Industrial Complex. Nonprofits often are reliant on foundations, private health insurers, and other philanthropic sources that serve as tax havens for wealthy individuals with particular agendas (e.g. Eli Broad and charter schools). Our government, as it continues to underinvest in critical social services, turns to nonprofits to provide the services that it should provide. Nonprofits are accountable only to the foundations and philanthropic benefactors and not to the public good.
  • Conservative and reactionary forces with calls for law and order. Despite some of their ideological differences with Democrats, they will often join forces with Democrat officials in power to push for punitive policies toward the unhoused, poor people who “commit crimes of economic necessity,” and others who are excluded from the formal economy. Many democrats in power use this to their advantage, like David Ryu sending mailers with fear-baiting language about crime to Republican voters in an effort to defeat support for his DSA-LA-endorsed opponent Nithya Raman.

This status quo coalition exerts immense influence over the rules and relationships that govern our daily lives as Angelenos, which makes it crucial to break our official elected bodies free from their power. In order to do this, we must engage in political education, find ways to shift consciousness about our power as the working class, and find opportunities to split their base, thus outmaneuvering the status quo coalition. The coalition is not a single unified power, and building an alternative to the coalition will also require winning over some left elements of the coalition. Most notably, in our electoral and non-electoral campaigns we need to strengthen our relationships with labor, winning the labor establishment away from the passive relationships with center-left electeds, and may involve forming tactical alliances with portions of the NPIC (Non-Profit Industrial Complex), particularly those, that already advocate for leftist, anticapitalist demands in strategic geographical or issue areas.

Organizing in Key Terrains

We find ourselves near the tipping point in several key sectors that are fertile ground for organizing and continuing to build a socialist organization.

On the housing front, we see the commodification of a human right. Profit-seeking developers drive up the cost of housing and are fought by a movement of anti-gentrification and tenants rights activists. As more Angelenos get pushed out of their homes, capital and private property are protected more than human life, and the unhoused are increasingly criminalized while our elected representatives rely on inadequate and often carceral non-profit & private solutions which fail to address the root causes of homelessness. At the writing of this Program, the overwhelming majority of LA City Council just passed a motion reinstating Municipal Code 41.18, criminalizing the unhoused in public spaces. Housing and homelessness is shaping up to be one of the main terrains the 2022 election will be fought on.

In labor, the growing influence of the gig economy on industries in the wake of passing Prop 22 in 2020 threatens worker organizing and protections. Many jobs once liveable and secure are now categorized as independent contractors, from truck and taxi (now Uber and Lyft) drivers to restaurant, grocery, and warehouse workers to non-unionized sectors of Hollywood, like visual effects. This transition reaffirms the necessity of robust collective bargaining through unions, especially relevant during the COVID-19 pandemic. Unions have also begun to emphasize organizing beyond narrow collective bargaining goals—the 2019 UTLA strike included demands to protect and improve the quality of education and resources in public schools and teachers stood with students in 2020 to call for the end of policing on the LAUSD campuses.

Connecting to the climate crisis, we see upzoning and transit oriented projects driving neighborhood “redevelopments.” This is a form of greenwashing the climate crisis; while changes to the way we use our land and transportation are necessary to mitigate the impacts of climate change, research and experience has shown that without accompanying protections for tenants, poor and working class Angelenos are pushed out of neighborhoods in the urban core and further from centers of work. The historical development of our transportation and mobility systems has been one of funding and political will historically favoring the auto, while proponents of bus, light rail, or other modes of transportation are left to fight for meager remaining funding. Now, with several recent increases in taxation to fund more than the car, those who used to rely on public transit are pushed to the periphery are left to fend for themselves in a region with a public transit system that is limited and inaccessible. Further, elected officials and candidates pit “clean” and “dirty” jobs against each other for political gain, polarizing the fact that winning a Green New Deal for LA is a labor issue.

The political landscape driven and perpetuated by the status quo coalition in the coming years will augment and intensify the battles we are already facing. LA ramps up to host the Olympics in 2028 which will continue to fuel the criminalization of our unhoused neighbors, climate change will continue to impact to a greater degree the air quality of Black and brown neighborhoods in particular, and we will see many more millionaires and billionaires try and step in to ‘fix’ our city’s problems with untested solutions designed to enrich those at the top. In the coming years, the status quo powers will continue to intensify displacement through speculation, erode the public sector through private and nonprofit outsourcing, and polarize issues to push Democratic candidates towards the center.

The center cannot hold– we need a socialist mass organization of and by the working class to hold not just elected representatives but also the nonprofit industrial complex and other groups that influence our daily living. We must and we will continue to organize in these key sectors to advance our Program through non-electoral campaigns. This entails recruiting more members, particularly from marginalized communities that face the harshest immediate impacts of unchecked capitalism, from organizing workers in sectors outside of the current electoral donor base of the status quo coalition, and from across the different branches of our chapter.

Electing a New Socialist Leadership in LA County

While the status quo powers are many, organized, and powerful, their hegemony over LA’s political landscape is not inevitable or permanent. It is our goal as a mass socialist organization to break the power that the status quo coalition has in order to effect material changes for our broad working class in Los Angeles. The task of shifting power requires us to not just study and understand how power works or organize to build a mass socialist organization in LA County, but also to deploy these first two strategies as DSA-LA and run consistently winnable campaigns.

Although our chapter is currently 5,000 members and growing, the steps necessary for winning a Los Angeles for the Working Class will not be taken by us alone. While outmaneuvering the status quo coalition that currently holds power and building a constituency through organizing in key sectors, DSA-LA is in position to contribute to a growing alignment in support of a new, socialist project. Along with existing powers, constituencies, and candidates who are rooted in these struggles and ready to fight with us as a working class, we can alter existing conditions.

To strengthen the position of a new socialist leadership in LA County, DSA-LA needs to demonstrate our legitimacy– by growing and building a base that is consistently running winning campaigns. These campaigns should include the electoral campaigns, where we run candidates to take strategic office, and non-electoral campaigns, where our base can agitate for transformational reforms that can be enacted by candidates that we elect and who are committed to our Program. The combination of a clear vision of transformational reform for the benefit of our multiracial working class and the practical power of delivering on those demands will strengthen our support and change the landscape on which we contest for power.

And we can win. City council seats are winnable races in some areas of the county, and DSA-LA can contribute to the leftward shift in the extremely powerful LA City Council that began in 2020. School board races continue to be a key battleground over the future of public education, with a delicate balance of power between pro-privatization and pro-public good coalitions. And though winning a voting majority in the statewide legislative bodies is beyond the power of DSA LA alone, campaigns across the state have already begun to show the possibility of socialist influence in the statewide legislature– a necessity if we are ever to enact the most ambitious and expansive aspects of our program.

And once we use these three keys to power to win, these wins must mean something—transformative reforms shift power and as a socialist organization we must be vocal about being, as workers, the agents of change. Our working class neighbors, friends, coworkers, families, and others not currently in DSA-LA already know that our capitalist system is unjust. It is when they see material victories being won through mass organization that their political consciousness shifts and they are emboldened to join the fight.

A Los Angeles for the Working Class

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As a member-based socialist organization that organizes and agitates around various issues affecting working class Angenelos, DSA-LA engages in political struggle across the spectrum of sectors of our economy and society. Our priorities are informed by the inequalities we, as the working class, face under capitalism. We aim to unite many struggles into a collective force towards equality and dignity for the poor, working class, and marginalized. We recognize the violence, both implicit and explicit, necessary for capitalism to exist, so we organize and build power to change the forced exploitation, domination, and false hierarchies across difference— exemplified in social systems such as racism, sexism, homophobia, and others.

As socialists, we imagine a restructuring of the economic, political, cultural, and social conditions and relationships in our society from the status quo towards regeneration, provision for all, collaboration, and equality. We imagine an economically and socially just world where workers are in control of the means of production, where our society is truly democratically run, and where we can coexist with each other and with our natural world. To advance this vision, we organize in key sectors (housing, labor, public safety, infrastructure and climate, education, and healthcare) and mobilize for and marshal resources to elect candidates who align with our political struggle. To secure an endorsement and maintain a relationship after endorsement, we expect that candidates seeking DSA-LA support commit to our Program outlined here.

Housing

As socialists, we are opposed to the dominant idea in our society that housing is a product to be sold and rented for the benefit of capitalists seeking to profit without creating value. We affirm that housing is a human right and is a requirement in order to live a dignified life – tenants, the unhoused, and homeowners have in common the need to live in a safe and sanitary home. Without an economic system that prioritizes people over the profits of the real estate lobby, we will continue to see land speculation, tenant harassment and rent increases that drive out residents and push more vulnerable Angelenos to live on our streets while being criminalized. We oppose the dominant mode of housing under which most residents of LA must rent their housing from landlords or banks, and support alternatives that convert old housing or build new housing that is permanently affordable and not operated for profit.

As socialists, we believe that we can make progress towards this dignified vision of housing for people and not for profit. We can achieve this vision by changing the rules and relationships in our economy and society that maintain the status quo. All people should live free from the vicious dynamics of how housing is conceived of in our society today. In order to change the system, we need housing policies that first give people more control over living spaces and allow them to live dignified lives. Asserting this right is key to taking on the housing industry.

Our Demands

  • Prioritize Housing First Policies for Unhoused Angelenos
    • Convert vacant hotels to permanent housing
    • Repeal L.A. Municipal Code 41.18 and oppose all legislation that criminalizes homelessness
    • Adopt a vacancy tax on housing that landlords have kept unoccupied
  • End Rules and Practices that Displace Working Class Residents
    • Defend and maintain existing public housing as publicly owned
    • Repeal Costa Hawkins (1995) and Ellis (1985) Acts
    • Enact universal rent control and restrict landlords’ abilities to harass tenants
    • Establish and fund housing retrofitting and rehabilitation programs to expand disability access and bring low-income rental units and homes up to code
  • Create permanently affordable, democratically controlled, social housing
    • Support State Assembly and Senate bills to create and fund new social housing
    • De-incentivize “local control” in zoning and the permitting process
    • Repeal Article 34 of the California State Constitution
    • Pass Tenant Opportunity to Purchase (TOPA) policies that encourage the conversion of privately owned housing to tenant- or community owned housing
    • Increase minimum affordable unit requirement for any new developments, especially those receiving density bonuses or other incentives from transit-oriented development or other similar policies

Labor

As socialists, we know that we as workers are exploited under capitalism, and that capitalists earn massive profits by stealing the value of our labor power and time. Our conditions under capitalism enable massive wealth for the few at our expense as workers, and strengthen capitalists’ ability to determine the rules that govern all aspects of our lives. Capitalists use bribes and economic coercion to weaken our right to unionization, pit workers and communities against each other, threaten to move jobs to other places, and deny us access to basic human rights of housing, healthcare, education, food, and other things that would make us less reliant on them. For decades, our unions have been gradually weakened by these capitalist interests, resulting in worse conditions across industry, identity and location.

As socialists, we fight for our rights as workers in every industry, from manufacturing to transportation to nonprofit to service, gig work, retail and beyond. We fight for worker power through unionization because the economy does not run without us and we deserve a better quality of life. Our demands are focused on uniting our class around collective self-interest in our workplaces and in demanding legislation that expands job security, workplace safety, and higher wages and benefits for all, across industry, identity, and geography.

Our Demands

  • For all working Angelenos, establish and enforce more policies to improve quality of life
    • Establish right-to-recall policies, and limit the use of I-9 recertification
    • Increase pay for public employees to cover cost of living and commute expenses
    • Establish local workplace health and safety councils that help assess the need for and implement hazard pay where deemed appropriate
    • Expand civil enforcement mechanisms for penalties for local labor violations
    • Require majority card-check recognition, employer neutrality toward unionization, and enforceable procedures to ensure unions reach a first collective bargaining agreement with employers seeking public resources and concessions
  • For marginalized Angelenos, expand and enforce protections and services
    • Provide guaranteed access to emergency benefits, like health care and nutrition, for displaced workers who lose their employment
    • Expand Sanctuary City protections and establish a public bank for public good
    • Expand and streamline street vending permitting processes to end punitive enforcement measures like the seizure of earnings and equipment
    • End independent contractor misclassifications, enact hazard pay, and enforce strong anti-wage theft and anti-discrimination policies
  • Protect public resources from privatization through robust public sector employment
    • Increase staffing ratios at publicly-owned hospitals and clinics, schools, social service and parks and recreation departments, and other public-serving agencies
    • Limit outsourcing or private contract employment for municipal jobs, and give public-sector unions the right to contest private contract employment for work that a represented public worker can perform
    • Establish and expand publicly-funded apprenticeship programs in collaboration with local unions that guarantee union wages, benefits, and career paths

Public Safety

As socialists, we acknowledge policing is a tool deployed by capitalists to discipline us as workers and protect their false claims to the wealth created from our labor. Policing is rooted in the armed and violent enclosure of the commons, dispossession of indigenous peoples’ lands and natural resources, and enforcement of the economic systems of slavery, Jim Crow, neoliberal globalization, and more. Across our county, police, sheriffs, and ICE have historically been and are daily deployed to enforce housing segregation, suppress labor organizing and social upheaval, and generally create an environment of fear and intimidation in predominantly low-income Black, Brown, and immigrant communities— particularly where large segments of the population are unemployed, underemployed, or otherwise excluded from the formal economy. In neighborhoods where more and more unhoused Angelenos are forced to live on the streets, policing has become more intensified. Through our changing technologies allowing for easier surveillance, the reach of police forces has deepened further into our lives. Further, police connections to the US military and global empire have also become more apparent.

As socialists, we envision public safety not through dominance, coercion, and policing, but through cooperation and community-focused tactics, emphasizing that public safety needs to be addressed on a care-first preventative model, rather than a reactive and carceral model. Services must address systemic racial and economic inequities at the root rather than police communities into the ground.

Our Demands

  • Reduce and stop further expansion of carceral system infrastructure and funding
    • Replace all armed law enforcement officers responding to traffic enforcement and mental health crises with unarmed responder alternatives
    • Redirect police and law enforcement agency budgets towards services such as community care, non-carceral mental health counseling, substance abuse services, job training, public education, and youth services
    • Demilitarize equipment, restrict the use of surveillance and predictive policing technology, and end collaboration with ICE and police exchanges with Israel
    • Decommission facilities like Men’s Central Jail without replacing them with jails or prisons elsewhere in the county
    • Draw down sworn personnel with early retirements/buyouts/austerity budget
    • Reduce scope of criminalization and punishment, such as by decriminalizing drug use and funding safe injection sites and addiction counseling
    • End contracts and collaboration with ICE
  • Prosecute police officers for the abuse and killing of Black and Brown people
    • Demand the district attorney take on “abuse of force” cases
    • Eliminate qualified immunity
    • Require prompt prosecution and permanent decertification of cops who kill or who are complicit in private gangs within departments
  • Eliminate barriers to civic and economic opportunity for justice-involved individuals
    • Restore voting rights for former felons in California
    • Expand noncitizen voting in all local elections

Infrastructure & Climate

As socialists, we understand the relationship between the historical drive to build out our infrastructure is connected to the very economic system that we fight against. From national expansion and east-to-west colonization, to World War industrialization and the ensuing globalization, to the destructive search for fossil fuels and exploitation of natural resources, our infrastructure is tied up with the defense industry and the United States’ role in global empire. The results of developing an infrastructure that is focused on expanding an empire are sprawling housing, ineffective transportation systems, and dangerous energy systems, to name a few. Capitalists intentionally lie or hide information about the impacts of our infrastructure not just on our natural environment and population health in the US, but also on climate, globally. This has resulted in toxic air and accelerated heat waves, wildfires, floods, and other climate-related extreme weather conditions we see today. Attempts to remedy these impacts have led to climate injustice, where the poorest and most marginalized Angelenos, already bearing the brunt of the climate crisis, are further negatively impacted by “progressive” climate policies that are co-opted by capital to maintain the status quo and further entrench their wealth.

As socialists, we fight to reimagine and rebuild our infrastructure to halt human-driven climate change while guaranteeing human dignity for our working class communities. We envision a carbon-free energy system, efficient and robust public transportation systems, and worker protections through a just transition for fossil fuel workers. Further, we recognize that these efforts must be tied to demilitarization and anti-imperialism locally and abroad. Progress toward climate justice cannot happen without addressing the immense damage inflicted by the US military, including through its ties to corporations and corrupt governments.

Our Demands

  • Commit to and secure federal support to decarbonize, expand, and provide access to public transportation systems
    • Free metro access and expanded service (buses, trains, bike share)
    • Ensure disability access on public transit
    • Expand the network of protected bike and bus lanes and repair sidewalks
    • Increase tree coverage with native, drought-resistant plants, focusing on neglected low-income neighborhoods that suffer from urban heat island effect
  • Shift away from fossil fuels by creating alternative and equitable green energy sources
    • Public ownership of all energy systems and creation of a Los Angeles Public Bank with ample funds to build green, equitable infrastructure for the public good
    • Shift to 100% renewable energy and zero carbon emissions by 2035
    • Shut down the LADWP plant in Sun Valley and the SoCal Gas plant in Aliso Canyon that poison local residents
    • Cap and clean all oil industry sites and polluted brownfields with union workers, set aside ample land for green space and mixed income public housing
    • Offer a “just transition” for all workers currently employed in fossil fuel industries to unionized jobs in clean energy

Education

As socialists, we refuse the privatization of our public goods, including our education system and resources. Privatization of schools through charter school mechanisms is the wrong solution to the problems of an inequitable education system. Private industry values private profit over community good, the same motivation applies to their involvement in education. We are against schools functioning as offshoots of the carceral state, where students of color, non-English speakers, students with developmental needs, and others who do not fit the productive needs of our current economic system are funneled into prisons. Likewise, we are against a pro-capitalist pedagogy that reinforces oppressive socio-economic relationships and structures through a deliberately narrow curriculum designed to uphold American imperialism.

As socialists, we fight for a free, universal, democratic, and racially-just public education system from K-PhD that includes ethnic studies, training for skilled trades, and an adequately funded arts and sciences curricula that is multilingual and responsive to different needs of students.

Our Demands

  • Fund a universal public and unionized education system and oppose further charter privatization
    • Support a Green New Deal for Public Schools in LA County– revitalizing buildings with robust, ecologically friendly, climate-resistance infrastructure while also expanding them to be true community resources that offer services to families and communities.
    • Limit further charter approval, stop the giveaway of public facilities to charter schools through co-location, hold charter management organizations to the same standard as public schools on financial disclosure and public governance, have charter management organizations fund the cost of public oversight, and acknowledge charter school employees as public employees.
    • Expand Community Schools model across LA
    • Reinstate and seek new progressive property taxes that redistribute funds from high-earning to low-income areas to pay for public schools
  • Create a universal child care infrastructure in LA County that includes public nurseries, preschools, before-and-after school programs and other services for K-12 school children and their families
    • Programs will be free of means-testing and available to all children and funded through a progressive income tax on top earners
    • Establish county-wide free on-site laundry services
  • Protect and expand student rights to self organize and self advocate for a better quality education system and social and economic justice, among other issues
    • Support implementation of a broad anti-racist and anti-imperialist ethnic studies school curriculum
    • Support the right to hold student-led social and economic justice actions on K-12, community college, trade school, and college and university campuses in LA
    • Remove barriers of physical and language accessibility on campuses and in classrooms to allow all students equal participation opportunities

Healthcare

As socialists, we recognize the inequities of our healthcare system are not a byproduct of capitalism, but are inequitable by design. The for-profit healthcare system yields dividends for the capitalists by profiting off of sickness. People are forced to choose between taking on high medical bills or going without care. Right now, we have a system of healthcare that is accessible only if you have a job, meet certain specific requirements, or fall below a certain income (means-testing). But healthcare is a human right. Everyone deserves the opportunity and guaranteed care to thrive and be healthy, so that all may live dignified lives.

As socialists, we oppose the idea that healthcare is a product to be sold for corporate benefit. We fight for a system that provides cradle-to-grave coverage that is free, on demand, and at point of service funded through public resources that come from taxation of the value we as workers create. Healthcare includes all care and that means medical, dental, vision, mental health, preventative care, comprehensive sexual education, gender-affirming care, and reproductive care, including the termination of pregnancies.

Our Demands

  • Establish a comprehensive, (i.e. medical, dental, vision, reproductive, mental health, long-term care), universal (i.e. including undocumented individuals) single payer Medicare-for-All system at the state level
    • Request waiver from the federal government to allow state-based single payer healthcare
    • Create mechanisms to ensure true healthcare equity and full accessibility to high-quality care for LGBTQ+ and other marginalized groups
    • Support legislation allowing for care to be provided in street-based settings to meet the healthcare needs of the unhoused community
  • Increase the availability of mental health care in L.A. County by increasing the number of inpatient psychiatric beds and expanding outpatient mental health services, including street-based outreach and care, as well as in home and on-site services
  • Increase the availability of harm reduction services and high-quality, evidence-based substance use treatment through L.A. County public services
  • Minimize barriers to care in LA County as preparation for a state single payer system
    • Eliminate all cost-sharing for all patients across all insurers operating in Los Angeles County
    • Guarantee in-person language interpretation at all health care facilities
    • Guarantee transportation support for all patients to health care facilities
  • Expand county-level coverage of care to all residents making under $70,000/year as preparation for a state single-payer system