| Base building | A labor and tenant organizing strategy which emphasizes the creation of organized groups of workers and tenants capable of forming a "base" for socialist politics (not necessarily mutually exclusive with other labor approaches on this list). |
| Cadre | A group of people trained for a specific purpose or job and able to train others. Within leftist political theory, a cadre consists of a group of people who are well-educated in and committed to the beliefs and activities of a group, party, or movement and also promote and support those beliefs and activities. |
| Calling-forward | An alternative to the calling-in/calling-out model, which invites individuals to assume actions come from a place of care, concern, and love, meaning any harm was unintentional. Additionally, resolution to conflict is centered around an ideal shared by all parties to work towards. |
| Calling-in | Calling-in is a practice used within groups of people who have a shared purpose when a member of the group takes an action that does not reflect the values of the group or breaks the named guidelines of group participation. The call-in is usually a one to one conversation in which a supportive member of the group reminds their fellow member that the group has shared values and guidelines. |
| Calling-out | Calling-out is a practice most often, and most effectively used to publicly name the harmful behaviors of people with institutional or systemic power or cultural influence and may include demands for specific behavior change and redress. The call-out can be used to draw attention to harmful behaviors and increase public pressure on the person with power and normally involves the use of shame. |
| Campist | Campism is a framework for understanding political and military conflict that calls for publicly aligning with one of two opposing political blocs. Campists are people who have picked a side. Defining these 2 words can be controversial because the term “campist” is regularly used online as a pejorative, synonymous with other derogatory terms. But within the left, campists are those who support, whether critically or uncritically, the governments and people who oppose the USA and/or the West, whether critically or uncritically. They’re distinct from third campists, who choose not to align with either political bloc |
| Characteristics of White Supremacy Culture | An intersectional framework developed by author Tema Okun, describing a list of 14 white supremacy characteristics that define and express white & owning class values and norms. The characteristics are: Either or Thinking, Worship of the Written Word, Objectivity, Individualism, Quantity over Quality, Power Hoarding, Fear of Open Conflict, A Sense of Urgency, Defensiveness, Paternalism, Progress is Bigger, Belief in One Right Way, Right to Comfort, and Perfectionism. White supremacy culture is inextricably linked to all the other oppressions - capitalism, sexism, class and gender oppression, ableism, ageism, and Christian hegemony. |
| Class Reductionism | The belief that all forms of oppression will be resolved through the achievement of a worker-dominated state. This political perspective asserts that acknowledging any other forms of identity or oppression outside of class is oppositional or somehow separate from class struggle. |
| Controlled Opposition | A party or group that stands as a placeholder for the opposition, but who are completely ineffective and therefore the entire political environment is "controlled" by the ruling parties. This is a purported oppositional party that the ruling party actually uses as a hegemonic tool to serve as a pressure valve to constituents. |
| Demands | A term used in campaign strategy. This is what you want to win or the outcome desired- the more specific the better. |
| Democratic Centralism | A practice in which political decisions reached by voting processes are binding upon all members of the political party. DSA bylaws allow for the expulsion of a member "under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization." This seems to have been against destructive entryism, but could in theory apply to some Leninist caucuses in DSA, though it has never been enforced. As a result, several caucuses have suggested enforcing or deleting this clause (depending on their politics). |
| Dialectic Materialism | A term popularized by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels that describes the impact of material conditions, particularly economic factors, being the primary drivers of social and cultural change. |
| Entryism | A political tactic in which an organization or state encourages its members or supporters to join another, usually larger, organization in an attempt to expand influence and expand their ideas and program. If the organization being "entered" is hostile to entrism, the entrists may engage in a degree of subterfuge and subversion to hide the fact that they are an organization in their own right. |
| EWOC | Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee: A coalition of Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) to provide a grassroots organizing program, informed by socialist guiding principles supporting workers organizing at the workplace. |
| Identity Politics | This is a politic, developed by the Black Feminist group - the Combahee River Collective, where one's perspective is exclusively defined through social identities such as race, gender, or sexual orientation. While this term has been weaponized by both liberals and conservatives, the original purpose of this statement was to communicate and emphasize that "the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression". |
| Military Industrial Complex | Industrial complexes are systems where the supply and demand are both controlled by a single party, and profit is most effectively made through inefficiency. War is then mutually profitable to the ruling class by perpetuating war, imperialism, and the accumulation of capital. |
| NGO | Non-Government Organization: A charity-based, non-profit entity that serves as an ineffective band-aid to the social and economic problems caused and maintained through capitalism. All NGOs are nonprofits, but not all nonprofits are NGOs. NGOs are typically larger, international, and advocacy-focused, while nonprofits can be any mission-driven organization, including small local groups. |
| NPO | Non-Profit Organization: NPO's establish private foundations as a legal way for the wealthy to avoid paying taxes on large chunks of their wealth through tax-deductible donations (lowering the amount of taxable income). Philanthropy is a system that allows rich people to maintain control of their wealth. Ultimately, these businesses are entirely beholden to those who fund them. All NGOs are nonprofits, but not all nonprofits are NGOs |
| Organize the Unorganized | A labor strategy that emphasizes the creation of new unions rather than working within existing unions. Additionally, "Organize the Unorganized" (1927) by William Z. Foster was a key Communist Party USA strategy urging labor unions to aggressively expand into ununionized industries, particularly among Black, immigrant, and low-wage workers, to build revolutionary class consciousness. Foster argued that militant industrial unionism, rather than craft-based unions, was essential for overthrowing capitalism and advancing socialist revolution in the U.S.(https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/tuel/17-Organize%20the%20Unorganized.pdf) |
| Party Surrogate | An electoral strategy where DSA operates as a more-or-less formal faction within the Democratic party with disciplined candidates, an independent infrastructure, and a public persona while using the Dem ballot line. |
| Partyist | A view which holds that DSA should not work within the Democratic Party at all so as to maintain political independence, and should use the Democratic ballot line only tactically where it is possible to do so while maintaining this independence. Partyist caucuses tend to support "red lines" around issues like strikebreaking or internationalist positions, feeling that DSA's elected officials should not undermine other areas of work, such as labor organizing and/or anti-imperialist politics. |
| Petite Bourgeoisie | (aka “little bourgeoisie” and synonymous with “petty bourgeoisie”) depending on who you ask, it’s a semi-distinct class from the working class and bourgeoisie, with its own interests and social status, or within the same stratum as the bourgeoisie. Regardless, this socioeconomic class consists of “small time capitalists” like small shopkeepers, self-employed artisans, managers, and some types of “skilled professionals”; essentially people who work alongside laborers, but also employ them too. The ideological and moral basises of this class is often said to be a reflection of the “haute bourgeoisie” (or “high bourgeoisie”), which they wish to identify themselves with |
| Planetary Boundaries | A framework developed by the Stockholm Resilience Institute to quantify the degree to which human activity affects nine processes critical to the stability of Earth's biosphere. A specific boundary for each process defines a safe and unsafe operating space for humanity. The nine critical processes include climate change, biosphere integrity, land-system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, ocean acidification, atmospheric aerosol loading, stratospheric ozone depletion, and novel entities. As of 2023, 6 out of 9 planetary boundaries have been transgressed. |
| Restorative Justice | A system of justice that focuses on repairing the harm caused by crime or conflict, rather than solely focusing on punishment. |
| Revolutionary Horizon | The ultimate goal of proletarian revolution: overthrowing capitalism and the establishment of a classless, communist society. It represents the long-term vision that guides revolutionary strategy, shaping tactics and organizing efforts toward systemic transformation rather than short-term reforms. |
| Salting | "Salting the workplace" is a union organizing tactic where union organizers, known as "salts," seek employment at a non-union company with the intention of organizing the existing workforce. |
| Scab | A derogatory term used to describe a worker who crosses the picket line and continues to work during a strike. This behavior undermines the collective bargaining power of the union by undermining the strike. |
| Target | A term used in campaign strategy. This is the person or party with the power to give you what you want. A change in their use of power will deliver the outcomes desired from the campaign. |
| Tea Party | A political movement and cacus within the Republican Party that emerged in 2009 in the United States, opposing taxation and government intervention in the private sector while supporting stronger immigration controls. |
| Transformation | Transformation occurs when the two people or parties start out seeing their point of view as in opposition to or incompatible with the other. The two people or parties go through a process that shifts their perspective and allows them to come to a new understanding about what each party needs and how each party might be able to get their needs met. In conflict transformation, the relationship between the two people or parties is where the change happens allowing for shifts in power dynamics, new ways of communicating, or new shared understanding of what the conflict is about. |
| Transformative Justice | A framework for addressing harm and violence that prioritizes healing, accountability, and community safety without relying on the state or reinforcing violence. It seeks to address the root causes of harm, rather than just punishing individuals, and aims to create lasting change within communities. |
| Vanguard | The vanguard, or vanguard party, is something which is defined in [Marxist-Leninism] as the body which helps lead and guard the working class before, during, and after the revolution. This party is made up of people from the working class who are well educated in Communist theory and who understand that their main duty is to serve the interests of the working class (aka, vanguard party members are '[cadre]'). |
| Wastelanding | The process by which certain landscapes and the peoples that inhabit them are disproportionately exposed to environmental harm ("wastelanded") to support advanced industrial lifeways in other parts of the world. First coined by Tracey Voyles to describe the environmental racism involved in uranium mining on the Navajo reservation in the US. |
| White Feminism | A type of feminism that focuses exclusively on middle & upper-class, white, able-bodied women, also known as "girlboss feminism". It excludes and functions at the cost of women of color, working-class women, and disabled women. The success of this form of feminism is attributable to white supremacist capitalist patriarchy (as defined by bell hooks) because it defines success through wealth and superiority to others. An example of this is pick-me culture and measuring the success of the feminist movement through the number of women-CEOS. |
| Wildcat Strike | A labor strike initiated by workers without the approval or authorization of their union leadership. It is an unofficial form of industrial action, often characterized by its spontaneity and lack of formal organization. |