2026 Member Convention Bulletin

Issue #8 - Tuesday, June 2nd, 2026

Updated Convention Agenda Released

An updated version of the draft agenda for the June 6th, 2026 Chicago DSA Member Convention has been released. Find it here. This updated agenda includes:

1. Amendments submitted to resolutions and the Bylaws Revisions.

2. The Executive Committee Consent Agenda.

3. A new resolution that was not submitted ahead of the deadline but that was referred to the Convention by a vote of the Executive Committee. Amendments will be open to this new proposal ("Towards a Mass Multiracial Organization") until Wednesday, June 3rd at 11:59PM CST.

4. Updated special rules for the meeting. New rules and changes are all bolded for easy reference. 

NOTE: we have a lot of proposals on the Convention agenda. Be sure to make time to read through each proposal prior to the meeting! 

Convention Updates 

Our Convention is this Saturday! Be sure to RSVP if you haven’t already, and if you plan on attending consider signing up to volunteer at Convention day-of.

Key Links:

• Amendment submission form

• Officer Election Candidate Packet

• Volunteer sign up form

• RSVP form

• Microsite with all info

Member Submissions 

For this week, we encouraged members to submit motivations for or against different Convention proposals, or to raise larger strategic and political questions about proposals that would not be in order as a “point of information” during the Convention. 

Anna F, Northside Blue Line Branch

Comrades: I have helped organize general chapter meetings (GCMs) since I joined CDSA. As former co-chair of the Logistics, Planning, and Organizing Committee (LPOC), I contributed much effort to helping these events run smoothly; we created tools like the slides we still use, the voting cards we still hold, and the child watch program we still offer. I am proud of this work, which has improved the quality of our GCMs and made our chapter more welcoming and accessible.

As chair of the GCM Subcommittee, I was not consulted about the “Establishing an Annual Meeting Cadence” resolution. Instead, I learned about it from a call for co-signers in a WhatsApp chat. Had I been asked, as someone with extensive experience in this work, I would have noted that, since the establishment of the subcommittee, we average only five attendees per meeting, all of whom hold other DSA leadership roles. I’d also have noted, as I did in my update to the April Executive Committee meeting, that limited involvement has impeded our progress in completing the tasks with which we were initially charged. 

At this level, we simply cannot take on the additional work of this resolution. If we want less expensive or more frequent GCMs, we must build capacity for the quarterly GCMs we’ve already committed to. This resolution requires engagement to meet its goals, and it is incumbent on endorsers to increase involvement with the GCM Subcommittee. 

A lot goes into planning GCMs, and this work is crucial to ensuring our most important chapter body can gather, deliberate, and debate in spaces that meet our needs. This resolution creates a mandate without sufficient research or commitment, and should be ranked last in priority on the Chapter Convention agenda.

Emma Caterine, Northside Red Line and Labor Branch

I commend the members of the LDC for putting together a bylaws reform package that will hopefully obviate any future need to spend GCM time on an issue outside the experience of most of our members. I am a signer of the amendment to the package because I think our EC needs to be at least in part a representative body. We are not currently large enough to warrant the kind of separate executive versus representative bodies that NYC DSA has (the Steering Committee and Citywide Leadership Committee respectively) and the unamended bylaws revision simply eliminates representation rather than creating a separate body for it as NYC DSA did. And the justification I have heard by comparison to Detroit DSA (which made similar revisions to their structure) is especially concerning to me. While I don’t have personal experience with that chapter, I’m not impressed by their website which still lists the year as 2025, has a blank electoral committee page, and uses inconsistent terminology to refer to their structures (ie their Black & Brown Alliance is referred to as both a committee and a branch). We should build our structure to facilitate socialist organizing, and to do that requires a representative body so that every member in Chicago feels heard.

Joyce (Rejoice), Northside Blue Line Branch

“The Tyranny of Structurelessness" is the title of a famous 1970 essay by feminist and political science professor Jo Freeman, and a phrase whose meaning we discussed in depth in the chapter-wide reading If We Burn. It alludes to how structureless groups or situations can easily be dominated by unchecked claims or untransparent agendas. The phrase immediately came to my mind when I saw the title of the amendment "all power to the members," an amendment, as I understand it, that would necessitate asynchronous voting of the membership at large (though that terminology is never spelled out) in place of chapter-meeting voting in person, divorcing group discussion with isolated and, I would argue, easily manipulated votes. I joined the Democratic Socialists, taking both words of the organizational title seriously but realizing members have different definitions of these words. Democratic? I found and find democracy at in-person chapter meetings where deliberation and debate immediately precede voting, and I further find it in being represented by elected members on the Executive Committee. I have learned that the meaning of democracy goes far beyond voting. It implies engagement and participation as well. And socialist? I believe that to confront deftly the enormous forces we need to confront to achieve socialism requires a form of democracy similar to our current structured form, a structure that allows members to be empowered in supportive, participatory, and transparent ways.

Silvia O, Northside Blue Line Branch, Revolution! Caucus

I would like to address two points on the LDC Minority Amendment to the LDC Bylaws Revision. 

1. The question of the branches on the EC. The EC takes political leadership for the chapter in between GCMs. It is therefore imperative it is representative of the chapter, and the entire chapter. Adding the branches to the EC gives disproportionate voting power to the smaller branches, and creates perverse incentives for branches to split up to have more delegates to the EC. The amendment also makes the Labor Coordinator only elected by the Labor Branch, making it the only officer not to be elected by the whole. Having Membership Coordinator elected just by the MEC would be obviously isolating—it would be a disservice to Labor to isolate and silo it in that way. 

2. The Steering Committee. The amendment enshrines a specific version of a SC of the EC into the bylaws, rather than giving the EC flexibility like we have now and the original LDC proposal has by not including it in the bylaws. Specifically, it does not include the treasurer on the SC, a necessity of any leadership body overseeing spending. This year's Steering Committee has authorized thousands of dollars in spending, which I struggle to see how it could do without the Treasurer who knows our budget and is in charge of knowing liability. The treasurer would only be involved in 8 meetings a year, which is not enough to weigh in on if we are overspending or causing the chapter to be legally liable in some way. 

Sophia N, Northside Blue Line Branch Groundwork Caucus member

When we make plans, either based on external campaign deadlines or internal benchmarks, it’s crucial to provide as many opportunities as possible for members to be involved in the machinery of organization-building and democratic decision making. This is why I’ve signed on to the “Establishing Meeting Cadence” resolution and encourage you to vote yes! 

As our membership ranks continue to swell thanks to our own work and the political crises that continue to develop at home and abroad, we need to ensure that there’s a clear plan in place for how we’re going to engage as many of our members as possible . By establishing a slightly higher rhythm of general meetings, we’ll be able to increase accessibility and ideally make more inroads into activation of our base overall. Vote yes!

Lyra Spencer, Chapter Co-Chair, Northside Red Line Branch, Groundwork Caucus

Hi comrades, I’m motivating against the LDC minority amendment. The amendment has several flaws. To start, it allots each branch 1 representative per branch, regardless of the branch's population. That means that members of the West Cook Branch (200 members) will have 5x the voting representation of either NSRL or NSBL(both 1,000 members respectively). 

Another issue is capacity. Currently, NSRL is struggling to find enough candidates to fill its 5 person Steering Committee (SC). NSBL might have just enough candidates to fill its SC, but not enough candidates for a competitive election. Adding 4 additional geographic based seats to the EC, on top of the at-large positions, will likely lead to more uncompetitive elections this cycle. This is outside of the officer elections which only have 2 out of 7 races that are competitive. While this proposal shrinks the EC, it’s still prone to our current problem of having uncompetitive elections. The base resolution fixes both the capacity and competitive issue, by having a smaller EC with just city wide at-large seats elected proportionally. 

Lastly, this proposal creates a strong SC that is empowered to make decisions for the whole chapter, in between EC meetings (8 per year). The minority proposal does not include a Treasurer on the SC, meaning this body will make budgetary decisions without any vote from the Chapter Treasurer. 

Outside of my political disagreements with the minority amendment, the amendment just isn’t good governance. A Treasurer is a legal requirement for an organization. It’s imperative for the Treasurer to be a voting member of any body that approves budgets, so they can raise compliance concerns, and have a direct vote against any potential budgetary malfeasance. For these reasons, I encourage comrades to vote no on this amendment.

Brian Y, Northside Blue Line Branch Marxist Unity Group

I am writing in strong opposition to the Local Democracy Commission (LDC) Minority Amendment. I oppose it for a number of reasons, in this submission I want to zero in on a difference of vision of how the branches should be viewed and organized. The authors take the branches as a home for members’ involvement in the chapter, I disagree with this view. I think that most members engage with the chapter on the basis of what events most conform to their interests. I doubt that people are stridently partisan for their assigned branch. In my mind branches should operate as organizing spaces rather than as a political home in the chapter. 

I take issue with branch representation on the basis that it goes against the stated goal to make our Executive Committee smaller and more dynamic. In my opinion I think that we should have the capacity to create more geographic branches as needed and having to add a new EC when one is created will result in EC expanding to unmanageable degree in the future. There is an argument to be made for there being an Evanston or Lincoln Square branch now or in the near future, requiring EC expansion for branch expansion is needless in my opinion and will replicate the errors of the past. Maintaining a Labor Branch representative will also create an incentive for all of the working groups in the chapter to seek institutional branch status so that they can have a delegate of their own. The base proposal is not fully my vision of how the EC should be elected, but it is going in the direction of creating a truly executive committee and will allow for greater structural flexibility into the future. I urge all members to vote against this amendment.

Sean Duffy, Northside Blue Line Branch, Bread & Roses Caucus

I am writing in support of the resolution “Ban Chapter AI Use and Fight AI Proliferation”. While I strongly support this resolution on its own, I wanted to specifically applaud the authors for writing a resolution for our Convention that is first and foremost political. Much of the focus of this Convention will be around internal questions — the size and composition of our Executive Committee, for example. While not unimportant I feel like these sorts of questions are far less pressing than external political questions; that is, questions of how we orient ourselves to the wider world around us. 

I don’t think anyone outside our chapter cares whether or not the Political Education Coordinator has a vote or not on our Executive Committee. I think people outside our self-selecting group do care quite a lot about an economic and cultural phenomenon that, at least according to its benefactors, may drastically alter our economy and the nature of production. What are we as democratic socialists saying about that? Further, there is a broad backlash cohering against AI, from college commencement speakers getting booed for praising AI to residents deep in Trump Country packing local meetings to oppose construction of data centers. The working class is in motion; are we falling behind and getting lost in the current, or are we positioning ourselves to guide these moments towards class struggle and a socialist horizon? These are the kinds of questions of politics we should be discussing and debating at length at a gathering like our annual Member Convention

Wally, Northside Red Line Branch, Groundwork Caucus

Comrades! I will be unable to attend the Convention as I will be watching America’s greatest 7 year old ballerina at her recital but I wanted to express my thoughts. I strongly encourage comrades to reject the minority bylaws amendment and adopt the Local Democracy Commission bylaws revision  as put forward by the LDC as a whole. 

First, one of the things that I liked about the main LDC proposal was that it was a compromise of members representing multiple caucuses, tendencies, and ideologies across the chapter, reached through consensus. I think that moving forward on something like this, it helps to have wide agreement amongst comrades. This multi-tendency LDC mirrors the national Democracy Commission process from the 2025 convention. The minority amendment is by definition then, a factional document. Some parts of it are fine, others I have disagreements with, but it was arrived at and is endorsed by a singular viewpoint. 

Secondly, I actually like that the base proposal takes so many extremely important roles in our chapter and removes them from the EC and allows them to focus on the organizing work. We as a chapter have done well so far organizing for Byron and I do not believe that we suffered from not having a dedicated Executive Committee member with a vote. Nor does the Electoral Working Group in my view. And right now, Byron’s election is one of our chapter’s main priorities. Being freed from executive responsibility for the entire chapter makes it easier to focus on organizing; it does not make it harder.

Electoral campaigning is going to be a crucial part of this chapter going forward. Yet this amendment does not believe that kind of organizing needs an EC role. I agree with them. I just don’t think any other form does either.

Cordelia Y, Northside Red Line Branch and YDSA, Springs of Revolution Network

I’ll get the important part out of the way first: I am in support of the bylaws amendment suggested by a majority of the Local Democracy Commission.

Getting at why is the more complex part, because I don’t think it’s perfect—no amendment built through a months-long deliberative process will be, because such an amendment will inherently be rooted in compromise. I have some reservations around maintaining dual responsibilities for chapter officers (such as Labor Coordinator and Membership Chair), and would prefer an executive committee made up entirely of at-large representatives. But the rewrite of Article VI and restructuring of the executive committee proposed by the LDC are unequivocally necessary, even if they fall slightly short of my aspirations. Our current EC faces a two-front crisis: it suffers from significant administrative bloat, and it rocketships any new leaders emerging in the branches straight to citywide political leadership. Keeping the executive committee to at-large members and a small handful of chapter officers effectively solves both issues. We remove the need for a “steering committee” as a redundant subgroup of a large, inefficient executive body, and we keep emerging “middle level” leaders at the branches from burning out with dual responsibilities. 

There is a growing consensus in the chapter that geographic diversity is integral to our development as a force in Chicago politics. As we grow, and as we bring in new members from the South and West sides, I do not want our first line of leadership to be distracted with a dual task. I want the branches to become homes for campaigns, mutual aid, and community building. I do not want them to become factional battle grounds around political leadership positions—that is not their role. The branches are not congressional districts. They are vehicles for the chapter’s work, and we should support them as such. For this reason, I support the imperfect LDC recommendation wholeheartedly.

Alec H, Northside Blue Line and Labor Branch

A new structure to the Executive Committee is understandable, given the turnover officer and branch representative roles have experienced. However, the Local Democracy Commission base proposal structure has a deep weakness in its lack of geographical representation and its Labor Coordinator not representing the chapter’s existing Labor Branch. 

Geographical representation, and particularly branch representation, is vital for a chapter and a city our size. Not only is it necessary to reflect our spread-out existing membership, it also guarantees representation of city areas where we need to recruit. A purely at-large EC is an EC where there is no guarantee of representation, and where existing concentrations of members will continue to have representation. This is especially important with our chapter representation extending out to the inner suburbs in the West Cook branch. While our chapter continues the conversation around the diversity of our membership, that conversation cannot overlook how vital geographic representation is for a city where people deeply identify with South Side and West Side roots. 

For labor representation, there is no meaningful reason to have a labor representative that isn’t tied to the existing chapter Labor Branch. The Labor Branch remains one of the parts of the chapter that is most consistently productive, successful at campaigns and recruitment, and outwardly facing towards the public. It has developed relationships with unions, rank-and-file members, and the broader public effectively since 2019, but the LDC proposal tries to drive a wedge between the new new labor representative role and Labor Branch by claiming it represents labor “at-large”. We should not be developing roles to kneecap existing chapter structures, particularly ones as consistently successful as the Labor Branch. Any representation for labor on a new EC structure must make that representative from Labor Branch, rather than pretend the Branch is external from that role. 

Keefer D, Southside Branch, Bread & Roses Caucus

I am an author of the “Proposed Amendment to Local Democracy Commission Base Bylaws Revision” which, among other things, retains a Steering Committee in the chapter leadership structure. Two shared concerns among the LDC were leadership capacity and ensuring the size of our leadership body was small enough to be efficient. Our proposed amendment has an Executive Committee of 16 members (as opposed to the status quo of 30 and 12 in the base resolution) because it includes branch delegates and retains the Political Education Coordinator as voting EC members. In my view, 16 is a good balance between efficiency and making sure that critical chapter functions are embedded in leadership. However, leadership makes many routine or particularly urgent decisions where a vote of the full EC wouldn’t be best use of energy or timely - these kinds of decisions are better handled by a subset of the EC called the Steering Committee. We have this structure now. In the current form all officers are on the SC. In our proposal it’s composed of the Co-Chairs and At-Large EC members. This allows other officers to focus on their specific responsibilities while retaining the benefits of a SC.

I’ve heard concerns our amendment does not include the treasurer on the SC, which could be an issue as some decisions the SC would handle relate to spending (typically for small items like office supplies). In my view this is not a compelling argument as the treasurer could easily be consulted when questions of spending emerge and the Co-Chairs should have enough knowledge of chapter finances to judge when an expenditure is reasonable or whether it should be referred. Even if this does become a problem, the chapter could easily adopt a policy limiting the magnitude or types of expenses the SC can authorize.

Leonard P, Northside Blue Line Branch

I strongly urge my comrades in CDSA to vote “yes” on the amendment to the base proposal being forwarded based on the work of the Local Democracy Commission.

While the LDC's majority proposal does address a number of issues with our bylaws and organization, the restructuring of the bylaws it recommends is incomplete, insufficient, and, in my opinion, undemocratic. The minority proposal reflects a greater vision of democracy and representation, was written by comrades with extensive and deep-rooted experience in guiding our chapter through good and bad times, and is in the spirit of compromise under which the LDC was assembled.

The majority proposal removes voting rights from elected officers. It strips representation on the EC from the branches, which are many members' primary way of interacting with the chapter and its work. It does not provide for an EC steering committee, which precludes the kind of flexibility and agility that the LDC broadly agreed was a priority. It disempowers the Labor Branch from selecting its own representatives. And it removes an entire middle layer of leadership in which members can develop vital organizing skills and build relationships and solidarity with their comrades.

The minority amendment accomplishes the major goals of the LDC – a smaller, more responsive EC, increased opportunities for membership development, a more open and democratic CDSA, and a reduction of factionalism within the chapter – while still retaining a spirit of compromise.  The majority proposal connotes an ultimate failure to compromise and sets the stage to do the opposite of the LDC's stated goals; it will make the EC more entrenched, remove middle-layer leadership, degrade democracy, and increase factionalism.

Vote yes on the majority proposal and yes on the minority amendment!

Deana C, Northside Blue Line Branch, Revolution! Caucus

Our Chapter’s Local Democracy Commission was created to draft reforms to our chapter’s bylaws. The proposal they created required a supermajority of the commissioners on each item. After extensive research into the structures of other similar and successful chapters they created the base proposal we will consider on Saturday. In part because 57% of our members voted for Executive Committee reform in March, the LDC took up the question. Their proposal would constitute a 12 member committee with all members (except YDSA) elected directly by our entire membership. 

The minority commissioners’ amendment has several issues. Under the amendment, the ~150 member West Cook branch gains equal representation on the EC to both the ~1,000 member North Side branches; the proposed Labor Coordinator, accountable to the whole chapter, is removed for a representative accountable only to the labor branch; and a Steering Committee is created as a subset of the EC. This SC may or may not be able to count EC meetings as SC meetings based on separate quorum and creates situations where a proposal could pass one month but fail the next. The Treasurer is also conspicuously left off the SC, which is to be responsible for day-to-day financial decisions. 

The authors raise fears that without representation on the EC the branches will become siloed from the Party as a whole, but this fear has not borne out in other chapters across the country, almost none of whom represent branches on their EC.  

The base proposal solves the drain the ballooning EC represents on capacity, is in line with our sister chapters, and collectivizes our work by making all EC members accountable to the whole chapter and not subsets of our Party. For these reasons, we should pass the proposal advanced by the LDC without this amendment. 

Holly R, Northside Blue Line Branch

As the current Treasurer for the Chapter, I support this proposed amendment, including proposed changes that removes the Treasurer from the Steering Committee. All of the votes that we have taken as a current SC have been mostly uncontroversial and permit spending on things everyone broadly agrees are important like printer ink or t-shirts, and when we can’t agree the vote is brought to the EC. I don’t see that dynamic changing with the Treasurer being left out of the SC, it’s not like the Treasurer would be unavailable to the SC to answers Qs or provide feedback! To be honest, I wish I wasn’t on the SC now, because that would be one less chat room that I would have to monitor.

Jennifer P, Northside Red Line Branch

I understand the ethical objections to Al technology, and I understand its dangers. I also think this proposal has the wrong focus.

The conversation around Al is often limited to a binary choice between fully embracing or fully rejecting it. I think it would be a mistake for us, as a serious political organization, to participate in this false dichotomy. We cannot go back to a pre-Al world. Even if all the Al companies went under tomorrow, the current generation of trained LLMs has already been approximated by open-source models - meaning it will be around and massively available forever. Those who call for rejecting Al entirely are calling for something impossible.

They are also effectively opting out of the conversation on what the world we live in should look like. They don't fight for coherent policy that could mitigate the harms of Al, because the only policy that they support is a total ban, a return to a pre-Al world. In the meantime, Al companies continue to function entirely unregulated, even as some of their leaders and workers all but beg for regulation. They continue to build datacenters, even though they are extremely unpopular nationwide, and curtailing them would be the most efficient way to slow the growth of Al. And the wealthy continue to use this powerful tool to erode the power of workers and build towards freezing class relations in place forever.

DSA must present a meaningful alternative vision of what the post-Al world should look like. Instead, this proposal aims to ""ban Al use"" within the chapter, creating a chilling effect that will be a hindrance to chapter work when Al is baked into so much common technology. I think we should develop a coherent Al strategy that focuses on opposing datacenters and pushing for Al regulation.

Have thoughts on one of this week’s Member Submissions? 

Submit a reply using the form here. 

Prompt for discussion, week 9

With the Convention this Saturday, we’ll be taking a week off and publishing our final Convention Bulletin on Tuesday, June 16th. This final Bulletin will recap Convention decisions and feature responses for one final prompt, that prompt being: what are your reflections on our 2026 Member Convention? What worked well and what didn’t work as well? Did you like the Pre-Convention Bulletin? What may we want to consider for our 2027 Member Convention?

Member Replies

None submitted this week.

This Week in Midwest Socialist

“Middle-Level Organizing: The Key to a Successful CDSA” by Rachel Monk.

“‘Vote with Your Hands’ and With Your Feet” by Sean Duffy.

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