Mizzou YDSA is now in its fourth semester since its founding. This semester has been our most active yet, and it’s difficult to believe we’ve gotten to this point in less than two years.
We started off the academic year by meeting as many students as we could in the August heat of Speaker’s circle.
That momentum took us to our first General Meeting of the year. There, we heard from all of you about what changes you needed in your lives as students. These goals shaped the committees we formed: Environmental Action, Student Labor, Political Education, Mutual Aid, and The Thorn, itself.
We’ve held seminars on DSA as a working class organization, and on the history of the US’s involvement in the 1972 coup in Chile. We’ve also joined with Missouri Jobs with Justice to push for more direct-cash stimulus checks for working families in Boone County and in support of their Neighborhood Pledge to fund affordable housing and focus on infrastructure within Columbia.
We’re excited to build coalitions with all like-minded students on campus, and to see how our power can grow together. We understand that university student organizations aren’t the most effective way to build long-lasting change. None of us are here for very long, very few of our organizations collaborate with one another, and the university has mastered every technique to refuse our demands. Despite this, we know that we have a powerful role as students and workers on campus, and we want to use it.
Our ongoing goal is to build student autonomy – the ability for us to make decisions over our own lives. Especially in the face of the university, which has say over your education, housing, food, and employment.
Moving power to the masses is DSA’s goal everywhere. Building real democracy the only way it can exist – in a space free from capitalism.
How can we achieve this? There’s only one surefire way: through mass working-class power. Even when only looking at our problems here on campus at least one thing is clear: the owning class is the issue, it’s through their undemocratic control of the economy and exploitation of their workers that they remain in power.
However, even though we are being exploited, the working class holds all of the power in our society (even here at Mizzou). It is through the constant effort of the workers that our campus, Columbia, the US, and the entire world is able to continue functioning.
Halting this effort for even a single day can be catastrophic for the owners, something that has been clearly shown by the pandemic. This is the power behind a labor strike, but we can do so much more. By building a mass movement, workers could even freeze an entire nation’s economy. We could tear down and rebuild our social and political systems, but we can only do it together.
It could all start right here.