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The International Committee’s mission is to help DSA and its membership to connect in solidarity with like-minded activists, workers, movements, and parties worldwide.
Within DSA membership, we hope to contribute to international political education and to support the growth of international solidarity work in local chapters across the country. We additionally aim to support national campaigns for international justice and to help provide a network for internationalism for membership across the country.
Internationally, we seek to serve as a conduit allowing comrades and interested parties from abroad to connect with DSA, either at the national or at the local level. We also hope to assist DSA leaders and membership to connect to movements and parties struggling abroad for racial, social, economic, and climate justice.
Through this work, we aspire to present DSA to international comrades, both in the U.S. and abroad, as the pluralistic, multi-tendency, democratic socialist organization that it is, and to represent it on this basis.
DSA’s International Committee has been around for more than two decades, and was officially recognized by the NPC, first in 2003 and again in 2015. Over these decades, and often in parallel with the ebbs and flows of DSA as a national organization, the committee has gone through periodic swings between activity, inactivity and rejuvenation.
In mid-2018, a request was made by the NPC for the existing committee to create a structure and procedures to update itself to respond to the new needs and reality of DSA as an organization, and to help build a committee that would reflect the diversity of the organization that DSA strives to be.
In early 2020, a large-scale reform of the International Committee was approved by DSA’s National Political Committee. The pre-existing committee structure was disassembled and two new executive bodies were created: an International Secretariat and a Steering Committee. Following a competitive application process, ten DSA members were appointed to each of these two bodies by the NPC.
The Secretariat was tasked with overseeing DSA’s diplomatic affairs and political work outside the United States, as well as with providing political counsel to the NPC. The Steering Committee was tasked with overseeing DSA’s international political work inside the United States, crucially through the International Committee’s various Subcommittees.
These Subcommittees, whose co-chairs were also appointed by the NPC, will serve as central nodes for much of DSA’s international solidarity and international political education going forward. Through a progressive process, they will be opened to all DSA members in good standing. Opportunities to join these Subcommittees will be publicized on this website and other DSA social media as they arise. The International Committee’s Subcommittees are: Americas, Antiwar, Asia+Oceania, Economics+Trade, Ecosocialism, Europe, Labor, Middle East+Africa, Migration+Refugees.
All NPC leadership appointees and structural reforms are set until the 2021 DSA Convention. At that time, the NPC will renew its instructions to the International Committee, including possible leadership changes and other changes to the body’s political directives and ways of working, on the basis of what does and does not work during this transitional period.
Contact: international@dsausa.org (for matters relating to the Secretariat, i.e., diplomatic and political affairs outside the U.S.); and sc.international@dsacommittees.org (for matters relating to the Steering Committee, i.e., international solidarity and political education within the U.S.).
As with much of DSA, the International Committee is run by volunteers. We aim to reply in as timely a manner as possible, but thank you in advance for your patience.
As democratic socialists, we believe we must also be internationalists. We believe that working people around the world have more in common with each other than they do with the bosses in their own countries. We believe that struggles ranging from peace to climate justice, from anti-racism to women’s liberation, can only be won if we work together.
We believe that we are engaged in a common international struggle, and are therefore concerned about what is happening to the working classes in other countries, about their human rights and workers’ rights, about their struggles for democracy, for justice, and for socialism.
We often face the same enemies: multinational banks and corporations, as well as other financial, political, and military organizations. These enemies work together across borders, and to defeat them it will be necessary for us to unite in our struggle against the multifold oppressions they commit against poorer countries and the vast majority of people and our shared planet.
This is why we do international work, and this is why we believe that DSA is and must always be an internationalist organization.
