I mean what the fuck else are you doing if you’re not in any other org?

But honestly, if you are not organizing, campaigning, volunteering during time that you are free (and emotionally capable, never overwork yourself and burn out comrade) joining DSA will give you easy access to doing these things. I can hear you all in the comments now “DSA is lib!” and you know what? Yeah. It is. But what does that make you? The armchair quarterbacking I see on here about what DSA should/could do but isn’t honestly breaks my heart. You can do those things. There are commie caucuses that are incredibly influential in DSA policy and punch well above their weight compared to how many comrades are in them. The farther left people are, the more they tend to be active in organizing. There really are so few excuses to not at least be a paper member so you can throw your weight behind something you do deem worthy of your time when it comes up.

No DSA in your area? That’s fantastic. You can start one that will now be 100% the left agenda you want it to be.

Don’t like the DSA strategy? You can actually have some influence on that. DSA is huge in your area but too lib? Join a Commie caucus. No commie caucus? There are national ones. Want to work on the local level? Start a commie caucus. These other ones didn’t just appear out of thin air and I have my doubts that you’re the only leftist in your city. Oh and good thing there is conveniently an entire organization already in place to make it much easier to find your fellow leftists who seek the same change you do.

I know it isn’t easy. No organizing is. I’ve seen “would Lenin be in the DSA?” thrown around a few times on here and you should absolutely know that it doesn’t matter whether he would be or not. You aren’t Lenin. Luckily for you though, he did leave an encyclopedic amount of information on what you can do to emulate what happened in Russia elsewhere. In that literature lies a very key point that the revolution was NOT simply a worker’s revolution from the anti-tsarist starting gun. It was guided by the Lenin’s energized group to take this bourgeois revolution and mold it into a worker’s revolution. The work must be done to cultivate a base ready for revolutionary politics and action, and I’m telling you that you’re far more likely to find comrades amongst the DSA rank and file than you are with your random person in the American working class at this time.

You 100% have the ability to mold the DSA you currently see as incapable into something that might be capable of revolutionary action/politics through collective action on the left, but what do you have to lose by trying? Even if you become another paper member, you are still throwing fuel onto the fire and showing DSA that it has the ability to be a standalone left entity separate from democrats and it cost you absolutely nothing.