In a recent interview, Spencer Pratt urged his Democratic friends to read the DSA’s website to understand his concerns about Nithya Raman, whom DSA-LA endorsed in September. So I did.

I skipped the recruiting page and read the source documents: DSA’s national constitution, its national program, its What is Democratic Socialism? page, and DSA-LA’s own website.

The national constitution:

“We are socialists because we reject an economic order based on private profit, alienated labor, gross inequalities of wealth and power.”

The national program:

“Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people.”

“If we lived in a classless society and governed ourselves, we could freely build a world without war or poverty.”

The What is Democratic Socialism? page lists “defunding the police/refunding communities “among the reforms it wants to win.

DSA-LA goes further:

“We imagine an economically and socially just world where workers are in control of the means of production…”

“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 oppose the dominant mode of housing under which most housing is allocated first on the basis of generating profit and not first on the basis of human need… Instead, we organize for the creation and construction of new decommodified housing — both through the conversion of existing private housing to non-market housing and the construction of new non-market housing.”

It defines that as housing “permanently removed from the purview of private ownership.”

That is not a tweak to the rental market. “Existing private housing” has no carve-out for duplexes or rented-out single-family homes.

I have been a housing provider in LA for 49 years, so I read these closely. You don’t have to agree with me to read them yourself.

Sources:

https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/constitution/ | https://program.dsausa.org/ | https://www.dsausa.org/about-us/what-is-democratic-socialism/ | https://dsa-la.org/about-dsa/