On Friday, at the Casa Amarilla “Antonio José de Sucre” in Caracas, Venezuela’s Foreign Minister Jorge Arreaza and Foreign Vice-minister for North America Carlos Ron held a meeting with members of the International Committee of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).
The meeting served to exchange views on the relation between Venezuela and the United States and discuss issues related to strengthening friendly, solidarity-based ties between the two countries.
DSA’s History
Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)—and its two predecessor organizations, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (DSOC) and the New American Movement (NAM)—had their origins in the early 1970s, at the beginning of a long-term rightward shift of U.S. and global politics.
This shift to the right—symbolized by the triumph in the 1980s of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher—somewhat overshadowed the central role these organizations played in the movements of resistance to corporate domination, as well as in today’s ongoing project: organizing an ideological and organizational socialist presence among trade union, community, feminist and people of color and other activists.
DSA made an ethical contribution to the broader American Left by being one of the few radical organizations born out of a merger rather than a split. DSA also helped popularize the vision of an ecumenical, multi-tendency socialist organization, an ethos that enabled it to recently incorporate many thousands of new members, mostly out of the Bernie Sanders presidential campaign.