About

Spadework is a blog of Communist Caucus, an organized tendency within DSA, and within the tenant and labor movements. You can read more about our general political perspective here. 

The term “spadework” originally comes from the legendary organizer Ella Baker to describe the often unglamorous but necessary day-to-day work of emancipatory politics–the patient development of working people’s capacity and confidence to challenge their everyday exploitation and oppression–that underlies every advance of the movement. We do spadework every time we have a one-on-one with a coworker, canvass our neighbors to sign them up for a local tenant union, or host a Palestine solidarity meeting on campus. It is, in the words of Alyssa Battistoni, “the hard labor that prepares the ground for dramatic action.”

Spadework is less interested in the promotion of a particular political line and more in the exploration of the theoretical and practical questions raised in the course of spadework. What does it mean to lead the union from the rank-and-file? How do we build our unions' capacity to win against bosses and landlords and also intervene in broader social movement struggles, such as the anti-ICE or Palestine solidarity movement? What is the role of DSA? We seek to serve as a point of reflection for organizers in order to iteratively test the hypotheses that have guided our day-to-day political work. It is our hope that these reflections provide the opportunity for organizers in the movements we are a part of, whether they are DSA members or not, to learn from each other and further develop and ground their political perspectives. .