Ashik Siddique on climate organizing, long-term thinking, and building across differences
"It's the disinvestment and privatization that's put us in this position, but that's also an opportunity to rebuild something entirely different."
Ashik Siddique is an organizer with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), elected to DSA's National Political Committee (NPC) of DSA in 2021, and currently serving as chair on the NPC’s Steering Committee.
This interview has been condensed and edited for content and clarity.
MH: Obviously, our present conditions are rife with all sorts of contradictions. But perhaps none of them are greater than the fact that we have to urgently transform our society to maintain a habitable biosphere, but we're nowhere near powerful enough or organized enough to effect that sort of change. So how do you think we should approach navigating this terrain and those contradictions?
AS: I think part of it has to come with a really compelling, mid-to-longer term vision of what we're doing here in DSA or on the Left. What is the purpose of what we're doing? I feel like there's been a very short-term thinking that's imposed on us by capitalism and this very individualized, neoliberal society. But also, our structure of government is very short-term. People fixate on what happens in Congress, there's turnover every two years. That's a problem, that it’s so short-term. People just think about their election cycles, and that's not a structure for long-term thinking.
As socialists, we should be all about planning. Anytime there's been a socialist government that actually manages to win and start transforming society, the long-term planning begins—five-year plans, ten-year plans, whatever. There's a reason for that: there's a lot of work to do after a revolution to very quickly both avoid the reaction that might exist in parts of society but also bring about the changes that activated people to join the revolution. You have to very quickly redistribute material gains and rebuild the actual infrastructure of society; it's a huge building project. Putting the question of revolution aside, which I don't think any of us are equipped to meaningfully predict or anticipate in the United States, I do think we need to think about material transformation of our society because of climate change.
What got me out of being a climate doomer is meeting and collaborating with enough people across this organization who have been through that period of engaging with how bad things are and reckoning with that doomer aspect, and then are like, No, we just have to build something better and that's the only alternative, because otherwise we are fucked. But we have to figure out what that alternative is and how to make it happen at whatever cost because that's our collective and individual survival. Those actually are the stakes and we can build it together—there are all these reasons to think we can build it together—but we have to keep articulating that in a way that people can actually believe, that we can actually believe and also convince other people of.
What we've coalesced around in DSA for ecosocialist organizing is a compelling vision for transforming society through material changes that people can see and experience in their communities. We're organizing for things like public services, public power, green social housing, public transit. These are all felt demands; working class people experience in their day-to-day lives how bad these things are right now in this very under-invested public infrastructure system, and also everything being privatized. We can organize campaigns that show what the alternative is and then actually start to win them—which is happening in parts of the country, especially when DSA chapters really throw down—and show that it's possible and these aren't one-off things. That is going to be part of that collective survival project.
I'm increasingly thinking longer term. We're used to organizing in cycles of campaigns that are a few months or a year or two based on what might happen in government. We're in a more reflective period in DSA. A lot of us have been here for five years or more now, and a lot of the big things that we were engaged with—like the Bernie campaign—are not possible right now. I'm thinking more long-term about what it's going to take over the course of the rest of this decade and then beyond that.
Before I joined DSA or became a socialist, there was climate alarmism that was like, “This decade, everything has to change by 2030 or we’re totally fucked.” That's not going to happen on that time scale, or not at the scale of transformation that we thought might be possible. That has serious consequences for how the broader breakdown happens. It's punctuated equilibrium, that's the biological concept. Some things can happen slowly, and then they can happen really fast and change things very quickly. It happens in fits and starts, and you can't fully predict it. I think socially that’s the case, and we just have to be ready for that.
And as the reality of the climate crisis and the really bad stuff starts to sink in across society, there is the hyper-capitalist and fascist side of that. There's an increasing mainstreaming of the idea that serious climate adaptation will have to happen in the sense that some parts of the country will just have to be abandoned. Plenty of us who have been engaged with the reality of the implications have been aware of that, but I think that is becoming more and more mainstream. And I think the Right is increasingly developing its own pretty scary narratives around it that are anti-immigrant. The “armed lifeboat” thing is becoming more mainstream on the Right, where people have this idea of gated communities or closing borders and then just hoarding whatever you have and keeping other people out of it. There has to be a socialist alternative to that. That is increasingly clear in my mind. We can organize parts of the country to become socialist hubs or something.
Thinking back to how development happened in cities in the past century or two, there was this period of huge industrialization and urbanization. There was huge social upheaval that happened as part of that and all these social movements and industrial labor organizing. All these things happened to shape how it played out in different places at different times. There's a reason that people to this day talk about Red Vienna and its social housing that happened. That infrastructure was built before the Nazis took over, but that had lasting implications for what was possible after the war and during the period after that. The New Deal in the United States, all this infrastructure that was built from the 1930s to the 1950s has carried over for 70, 80 years—a lot of our infrastructure in the United States still is from the New Deal or the post-war expansion of the 50s.
There were all sorts of political considerations at the time that shaped how that happened. Earlier on, there was mass militant labor organizing that made a lot of public works possible through the New Deal. And then the labor peace that was secured by capitalists to stifle some of the more militant stuff happened at a time when there was this huge expansion in the 50s of car culture and suburbia and all these things that ultimately atomized people and workers in ways that were built into the infrastructure of the country to basically keep people apart. A lot of racial segregation was entrenched during that time. That wasn't inevitable. Those were all political decisions that were made based on who was organized or not at the time, and there were places where people were organized for different kinds of development in the US.
We're now in a period where a lot of that infrastructure is breaking down because of under-investment and being more vulnerable to climate disasters. It's the disinvestment and privatization that's put us in this position, but that's also an opportunity to rebuild something entirely different, with the understanding that there are going to be these longer term changes within the US over the next few years that are already happening. Basically, a next great migration with really huge historical consequences is already starting in the US. That movement is happening both because of the pressures of climate crises—the coasts are vulnerable to floods and entire towns are being burned down and people have to move—but also because of the forces of the market. Hyper-gentrification in huge cities is pricing people out of places like New York City or San Francisco or other big cities.
That's a pattern I'm seeing in a lot of the country right now, where there's very quick growth and development happening in small and midsize cities in totally haphazard ways that's totally market-based. All the same shitty housing development and condo buildings are going up everywhere. But that rapid but chaotic development also is potentially a basis for class formation and organizing in ways that can change the power structure.
There are huge felt needs around affordable housing, transit, and public space that are core parts of what we would consider a Green New Deal. If we're able to start winning those things, in places that are already big cities but are also growing cities, that could determine whether they become more attractive to young and working class people. And then that could build a cycle of working class formation. Basically, I feel like we need a 21st century sewer socialism that is going to make more parts of the country that are urban or urbanizing livable for the long haul and attractive places to be. And I feel more and more that this is something for DSA to focus on. If I had to develop a five-year or ten-year plan for DSA, I would say it's really doubling down on a political program that combines electoral and base-building work to that end, to organize more cities as the base of socialism in the US in the time of climate crisis.
We have to contest state power, especially at the local level, and that's the basis for bigger transformations. Looking back to the New Deal, it wasn't just FDR’s government coming in and quickly changing everything. They took examples from states that already had some things going on. California and New York State had already done some proto-New-Deal-type things with the public sector and public works, and then those things starting to work became the basis to experiment more at the national level. So I feel the more we start to focus on and win those things at local and state levels, that can be the basis for more to come.
Which is why the Build Public Renewables Act is so exciting in New York State, because that's showing what is possible at the state level, one of the biggest economies in the world, and opening up that whole lane of possibility to have the public sector control the energy transition. That is a model. There's still a lot of work to do to enact it now, but DSA did that; that wouldn't have happened without DSA, and a lot of people associate it with DSA. That's why everyone in DSA should feel invested in that. This is a historic win—something we can all build from that shows what's possible and what we have to do. That doesn't mean everybody has to be working on that or something exactly like it, but it's part of a whole vision that we can start to build out and convince people is possible.
Sometimes people think that Green New Deal organizing can only work in places like New York or California. Why and how do you think it can work in the South, where you and I both now live? And how does it look different?
The question is: how can we organize effectively enough on the Left to contest the actual structures of power? There's a reason that right-wing people have been targeting local offices like school boards for many years. They've had a long-term vision for that and enough of them have gotten organized to do it because they’re filling a void. That's a really exciting thing to me from the DSA convention this year: there was a proposal for DSA to seriously invest in organizing school boards. It just seems like there’s a void to fill, and it can help us build our bench electorally in a more long-term way from the lowest levels of government. And it's a very significant one, because education is how you reproduce society. There's a reason why socialists have been so serious about education in the past, and why the Right is so serious about it now. If you can shape how people are educated, then that has huge implications for their entire lifetime and what becomes politically possible. So I think DSA engaging more in that is, I hope, a sign of growing maturity. Public schools are one of the few institutions left in the country that working class people engage in, so that is something to contest and politicize. Also more of our members are becoming parents, and we should consider how we organize in ways that build and reinforce a more multi-generational membership.
Ultimately, a Green New Deal is not just about a far-off climate crisis in the future. At this point, it's really about how to transform our communities that we live and work in now. More and more parts of the country are experiencing this infrastructure breakdown in real time, and it's about how we rebuild. How we build back better, if you will. I think it is a meaningful shift in climate politics that it's no longer this future thing. Recently, we saw all this insane flooding happening in New York City and the trains breaking down and stuff. If you're a person in the United States who's not already really rich or comfortable, you're on the front lines of the climate crisis. Your life has already been or is being impacted by climate-fueled disasters and disinvestment and attacks on public infrastructure.
What we're trying to do is emphasize that all these historical systems of injustice—capitalism, colonialism, and everything like that—have disproportionately extracted from and exploited whole sets of people that have been left out of the gains that have accrued to people who have profited most or benefited from it. Rebuilding in a more just and ecologically sound way has to involve transforming those systems. So there's a sense of reparation—we are repairing what has happened for decades and centuries. We have to rebuild and repair society for the long haul.
How do we deal with the more difficult political conditions?
I think there's a lot of possibility for organizing around housing and transit, in particular, in already more densely populated parts of the South. Organizing for more controls over how housing works and more public transit at a baseline. In most places, there's very little to no public transit. At a certain point, you just can't have more cars [laughs]. We can keep building more highways or expanding the roads, but that just makes it more congested. So I think those types of urban planning things can be felt needs. This can be the basis of a meaningful working class politics that resonates with a lot of people.
That's my theory; I think we need to organize to see what's possible. Across the entire country, housing is one of the main issues that people feel, but it's not really clear how to organize for it in a sustained, long-term way. A lot of members of DSA are interested in tenant organizing but also housing policy, and there's a lot of potential continuity there to connect it all. And I think places in the South are as good as any part of the country to see what works, but there has to be a focus on testing out strategies. This is why campaigns are important: they give you the chance to strategize and lay out a timeline. Try things, then assess whether they work or not, and then decide at a certain point if you should adjust and try something different, not just keep plugging away without ever assessing things. We have to be scientific about this.
I started to go on another thread on the question of reparation. Thinking about Bangladesh and the longer term viability of places like Bangladesh across the Global South, part of why they're so vulnerable to climate change now is because of colonialism and because they've been extracted from for many decades and centuries by global imperialism, which the US has led for almost a century now. More and more global climate policy talk, at least on the Left, is using the language of reparations, which I think is really important but feels hard to imagine. Especially in the US, because there's already been this long-standing discourse about reparations for slavery, and it just feels politically impossible.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò has written a lot about this in very compelling ways, making these connections in the context of climate change. Any talk of reparations, ultimately, is connected to the future as well as the past; we have to have a world-building project for the future, and I think that it's very hard to imagine what it would actually take on a global scale is the transfer of trillions of dollars of wealth from the United States and other wealthy countries to half of the world's population or more. I think It's worth people on the Left seriously thinking about what that looks in the longer term. I've been thinking more and more about what would be the social base in the United States if there's going to be this huge wealth transfer from the richest country ever in the world to the places that it has extracted from. What would it take politically and socially to make that happen? I take some hope and inspiration from the successful examples of DSA engaging with the state. Like New York City DSA now having this whole bloc of elected members who have significant social bases in working class, immigrant, and racialized communities is potentially a model for what could be a longer term international politics that DSA helps develop.
When I was growing up, my family was one of very few who were not white; I was one of three or four kids in my class who were not Irish or Italian. But now, because of all the displacement happening there and all these economic forces, there's a huge diaspora of millions of people from Bangladesh going to other parts of the world. And New York City is one of the biggest hubs now, to the point where if you take the subway in New York, the signs are in English, and then Spanish, Chinese, and Bangla. That's a pretty recent development, where my first language is one of the top three languages that the government feels they have to translate for, and to me is constantly shocking, but exciting. There’s this huge Bangladeshi diaspora population that’s a huge working class base of people who have connections to this part of the world. I think that it’s a basis for longer term politicization if people on the Left are organizing in ways that have as core parts of their political program improving your situation as a person, as a worker, here where you're living now, with these demands around housing and transit and energy and all the things that New York City DSA is campaigning on, and in some cases winning. You feel your life can improve here, and your working conditions can improve, and that expands the sense of what is politically possible.
You also have social connections to your family or people back in Bangladesh. Remittances are a huge part of the economy. Immigrants send money back, so they still care, but I've talked to plenty of people in my extended family from Bangladesh who have this fatalistic view that it's going to be underwater eventually or soon, and that’s messed up, but all you can do is protect your own. It's this black-pilling that happens that's pretty stark, but it's just based on knowledge of current conditions and a realistic assessment that there is not organized power to change these awful conditions on a scale that would matter. But I feel it's possible to organize enough people in their own interest to be part of a collective political project, as part of an organization that is really going to advance and commit to following through on demands for massive redistribution of wealth and power.
I think it could be possible if we eventually contest enough state power to advance these demands, to help people imagine how collective survival could really happen at the scale of global climate justice, for governments of the Global North to be compelled to pay what is owed. I feel like organizing immigrant diasporas as part of a broader working class formation in the US is at least a precondition to a demand for a major transfer of global wealth for climate reparations for planetary survival. So we have the prospects in DSA to make these connections from local to global around the climate crisis and rebuilding our society, and I feel like that has to be our project.
To that point, a persistent conversation and challenge on the Left in recent years has been the role of identity politics and how to organize a working class for itself across differences and inequalities of race, gender, etc. How do you think about and approach those questions?
As I closed my last thought, I was starting to think in those terms. If I'm talking about Bangladeshi immigrants and running for elected office, there's a way of thinking that you can just find somebody who has that set of identities to run for office and they can talk about it and center their lived experience. Plenty of people will relate to that and vote for them on that basis. That has worked, but I think it is a basically liberal mode of politics.
What I think is good and encouraging in the way that DSA increasingly recruits candidates in places like New York City is there's this understanding that people's lived experience based on their identity is really important to shaping them politically and it's very good when there are representatives who can do that, but the point has to be that their identity is the vehicle for what the politics are. Rashida Tlaib is such a good example; a lot of people love her. Yes, she's a Palestinian woman who represents those identities very powerfully on their own terms, but she also is a daughter of an auto worker who talks about that experience growing up in the Detroit area and her dad being part of UAW decades ago. That is her working class experience that she can talk about very authentically and relate to Black working class people in the area in a way that's based on the common experience that they share based on their class. And how she communicates solidarity from that class experience makes her an even more powerful advocate for Palestinian liberation.
I think some of the best leaders that we've had can really make those connections across identity differences. Their own identity powerfully informs their whole deal, but they're able to connect with people across those factors. To me, that's the entire point of socialism and socialist politics: it's about cohering a shared working class identity across many types of difference. Capitalism and people who are in power—elites—very intentionally use identity differences to keep people apart. The entire concept of race was crafted for economic purposes, basically. The whole racecraft thing is really important for people on the Left to understand because it was ultimately an economic project. The idea of Black people as separate was crafted for economic reasons, for slavery, which was an economic arrangement to exploit labor. Imperialism and colonialism created all these racialized concepts to justify European people extracting resources and labor from other people.
The liberal establishment for decades now, in the United States at least, has created all these discourses around identity that have been more and more divorced from class in ways that I think at this point have become harmful and have reinforced this identity essentialism. Within DSA, I was involved in the Multiracial Organizing Committee, which is really informed a lot by Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò’s work. He talks about how there's class reductionism on the one hand and identity essentialism on the other, and they're both not good if your thinking or orientation—especially in organizations—is too based on one or the other. But there is a secret third thing [laughs], which is understanding how identity experiences, especially racialized ones, inform people's experience, but that is not their whole being. There's all sorts of differences across people who share certain identities, and those are contingent on all sorts of factors, especially economic ones. So you can’t essentialize people based on their identity. He calls it constructive politics—the construction of a shared vision for what has to change and how to change it.
I think that's something we need to grapple with and figure out. He's very open-ended about what that can mean. It can mean all sorts of things, from revolutions that have happened where people across identities just decided that their common interest was in overthrowing the existing economic and political order; that was the constructive politics. It can be in a community organizing for public services. So that's where the Green New Deal’s politics is pretty central because that, to me, is a very compelling example of a constructive politics.
The identity stuff, I think about that a lot, because I think social media especially amplifies negative emotions or framings of things. It's all about building your own personal brand, ultimately. This is where Naomi Klein's new book is so good, because she talks about how you're basically encouraged to build this alternate version of yourself that you're putting out into the world, and it's just more and more about maintaining that. There's every incentive to craft some easily digestible version of yourself for the consumption of others. And that's where centering your own identity experiences or your personal experiences just becomes a story you're encouraged to tell and retell, and there can be a social capital that develops around it that I think is a pretty bad incentive.
The Femi Táíwò essay, Being-in-the-Room Privilege, was really an important intervention for me and plenty of other people in DSA, especially people of color. What he laid out there was what a lot of us had been feeling for a long time and struggled to articulate: the problems with the kinds of identity discourse that have developed across society and especially on the Left, that have become sort of essentializing. People are encouraged to talk about their identity and especially their trauma in ways that are ultimately pretty harmful, both for the individual doing it and for the collective project or the organization. It creates this weird incentive for people to lead with pretty fucked-up stuff that happened to them or to others. It feels bad for everybody, and it's not a strong basis to then figure out what to do together.
There are examples people point to in DSA. At a past convention, there was some proposal about disability rights or accessibility that was being argued. I forgot exactly what the thing was, but there were significant differences among people in the room about whether that would accomplish the stated goals. And the people who started to line up for and against were mostly people talking about their disabilities, either for or against it. People who were for it were just like, “I'm disabled, and you have to support this because if you don't support it, you're harming people like me and you’re ableist.” And then on the other side, people felt compelled to talk about their own disability: “Well, I'm disabled, and I don't think this is going to help for this reason.” It was hard to engage on the merits of the proposal if you weren't claiming some kind of disability, and that felt bad for everyone. Another example, there was a resolution about sex work where someone started talking about their sexual trauma in ways that were really triggering for lots of people in the room who had experienced something similar. Whether they were for or against the thing being debated, it was just not helpful for people to talk about their trauma in that way.
This keeps coming up. There are plenty of other more recent examples that we could get into. The way that I think Femi Táíwò put it in his essay and in the book, Elite Capture, is as somebody who had experienced various kinds of trauma or messed-up experiences, his conclusion is that those experiences didn't lead him to any particular conclusion, they just felt bad. Often, your trauma or your lived experience doesn't give you some inherent wisdom or something; it can just fuck you up. And it can even lead to bad conclusions and, maybe even more often than not, limit your own ability to think beyond how bad the trauma was.
So it's a collective challenge in an organization that wants to have space for people who've experienced all sorts of harm based on the systems that we're against to be able to talk about that or not talk about it, but still feel they're part of this project and are experiencing some kind of collective care, that people care about you enough to take you seriously and validate you as a person without feeling like you have to perform your trauma to be valid or to be heard. And to have space for other people who maybe don't have the same identity-based experience or whatever, to validate them emotionally, but also be like, “Well, I have a different approach” or “I think maybe you're wrong about this; not to take away from what you've experienced, which is terrible and really messed up, but what you're expressing about what you went through does not necessarily follow to what you're saying we should do now about the thing that we're agreeing is fucked-up.” That's really hard when people feel very intensely emotional about the thing and have identity-based claims about their experience and why it should be taken more seriously.
We talk about “neoliberal individualism” in DSA. There's also a lot of guilt that people have from their own ideas of their privilege or whiteness or whatever. And it can become easy in those conditions for that guilt to be manipulated or even weaponized in ways that don't help achieve a collective solution and can create their own pretty bad, counterproductive dynamics in organizations. I think that more and more is a challenge that, to me, is at least as serious and necessary to challenge as actual racism or chauvinism, which is a long-standing and still-existing problem that we have much more coherent language to address.
Going back to the class reductionism versus identity essentialism spectrum, it's much easier for us to challenge class reductionism or actual racism when we see it because our whole liberal culture has developed a lot of language to address it or identify it. But it's harder to challenge the identity essentialism and reductionism that can happen. It's a collective challenge to figure out how we do the constructive politics thing of having room for people to understand and express their own identity experiences, but in a way that's channeled toward the collective project.
Social media does not help that [laughs]. There are a lot of analytical and organizing discourse tools that I feel like we have to develop to help people recognize when these dynamics are becoming a problem, and how to counter them or reframe them. I have a lot of conversations about this with other people of color and queer people in DSA. If you're an organizer on the Left long enough, you definitely start to see recurring patterns. It's being exploited very effectively by elites; that's what Elite Capture is all about. Elites in the United States and globally have really effectively absorbed identity language and people on the Left have to grapple with this. A lot of the language we've been using around race and identity for years and decades is now being used by Eric Adams, the cop-in-chief of New York.
We have to develop more people of color as organizers and leaders, but also we have to help white people get over this paralyzing guilt to be able to challenge these narratives that are being used against us by elites. It can be true for example that it's mostly white organizers organizing a building of tenants who are Black and Latino, but if they're good at it, then they should do it.
This is something that the Metro DC DSA chapter learned through Stomp Out Slumlords (SOS), which has been this very effective tenant organizing program that's one of the most long-standing campaigns in the chapter and a model for other DSA chapters interested in housing organizing, with regular self-assessments and informative report-backs that are very readable and easy to follow. For a while, they were part of this coalition of other housing organizations that was organizing for rent control in the city, but then there were strategic differences. The SOS people were more willing to be confrontational against landlords, but some of these other nonprofit orgs were ultimately like, “Oh no, we want to work with small business owners, or even people who might own buildings” or something. So there are basic strategic differences that caused a rift. But, eventually, it got to the point where some of these other nonprofit leaders, some of whom were people of color, just started to attack SOS and DSA as racist and white supremacist and put out this long call-out statement that became a flashpoint in the chapter.
But then it became a uniting factor, with most DSA members seeing how people who are ultimately part of a power structure can weaponize race in bullshit ways. This was at a time where DSA’s newly elected member on the DC city council was a Black woman—Janeese Lewis George was identifying as a socialist and advancing demands around housing and other stuff for pandemic relief. So as our political program was cohering as a chapter, we were facing these really cynical attacks. That was a learning experience that we have class enemies who are weaponizing these identity discourses against us. And I think it wasn't even true at this point; our chapter leadership already had plenty of people of color and Black leaders—and I think might even have been a majority people of color steering committee—through the intentional organizing that we had done to develop that leadership. We were the ones willing, as an organization, to go out and knock doors in the mostly Black wards of DC for campaigns like vaccine relief. Some other local organizations were like, “You can't do that; it's racist for white people or non-Black people to go out and knock doors in Black neighborhoods.” But then once we started doing it, they started to join us and they wanted some of the clout that we got for doing that because it was effective.
All that is to say, there are many examples like that of people figuring out what ways it might be useful to actually organize to address problems, and then working with people across identity differences to do them and just getting over that guilt or feeling of separation, like there are right kinds of people who can do this or not. Because, ultimately, if it's going to be something that benefits the whole working class across differences of identity, then that is what is worth doing—and we should be the ones to do that and figure out how to do it effectively. That is the constructive politics that we have to be building. Getting off the internet and not screaming at each other about things that are not actually material, but working together to do the things in real life, to take power and change the conditions of our lives.