Co-Chair Candidate Profile: Aron Ali-McClory

The Activist interviewed the candidates for national co-chair at the 2024 YDSA national convention. Current co-chair Aron Ali-McClory discusses their run for a second term.

YDSAs National Convention is on the horizon. Though the event will be online this year, the key elements that make convention important will remain. Hundreds of YDSAers will gather to discuss, debate, and vote on resolutions impacting all areas of socialist organizing, from labor to Palestine, and much more. What passes on the convention floor becomes policy, determining the strategic and ideological direction of America’s largest youth socialist organization. The NCC is YDSA’s highest organizing body, made up of “co-chairs,” who sit on DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) and at-large members. This year, one incumbent co-chair, Aron Ali-McClory, is running for re-election. 

The Activist sat down with Aron and spoke about why they wanted to run again, their platform, and what they’ve learned since their term began.

The platform for McClory’s current campaign can be found here.

The questions and responses in this interview have been edited for clarity. 

Q: You’ve overseen some of the most tumultuous times that YDSA has seen in a while, from Palestine to budget cuts. What would you say had been the most significant lessons about what it means to be a co-chair? Would you say your perspective on the position changed from when you were running to now? 

Aron: To be a co-chair is to have a vision; and I think one of the biggest things that has matured in me over the past year is learning how to become a political leader, learning how to embrace political vision, and then how to enact that [vision] through the position of co chair. Being on the NCC in any capacity is incredibly powerful, and a lot of people don’t realize that. If you have a vision, it’s very easy to pursue it and make transformational change. And that’s something that I feel like I got into the swing of this term, especially compared to my past term as an at-large member. To be a co chair is to be able to weather the most horrific conditions, to be able to be on calls for dozens of hours a week sometimes, to be in war rooms to support Palestine comms that are going 24/7 for two weeks. It’s to be able to drop anything to see through the political vision of building socialism in the heart of empire. At the beginning of this term, I couldn’t have imagined some of the tumultuous events that YDSA has endured. Still, through dealing with those events, I feel I’m in a unique position to have learned what it means to be not just a co-chair of YDSA but the political leader of the most vibrant and thriving youth socialist movement in a century.

Q: You mentioned the importance of having a vision, which reminded me of your initial platform when you were first running. One of the key components of that platform was diversity and inclusion. You wanted to end tokenization in YDSA and have intentional leadership development. Could you talk about what you’ve tried to do since being elected to make good on those campaign promises? 

Aron: This is one of my favorite topics to discuss because I think it will probably come up a lot in this election. The issue of diversity hit me harder when I came into the role of co-chair than I thought it would. To say “we need to develop more leaders,” is something that has to be intentional. With the YGDC just starting up, all these new committees getting started up, and getting into the flow of what this new era of national YDSA looks like, I feel like we lost the sauce of organizing. I think that hurt not only our efforts to build diversity but our efforts to organize and build leaders in general. And that’s not necessarily something that could have been avoided. I think it’s a growing pain, but it is a critique nonetheless. 

That being said, there have been many conversations on the NCC. And many initiatives that we took to increase diversity were successful. We’ve begun a successful round of outreach to HBCUs, and we’re building up chapters at HBCUs again, which is something that lapsed for a long time in YDSA.  Our conference was the most racially diverse in history by far. Furthermore, I think we’re seeing there’s a growth of diversity in YDSA because people are organizing, because people are just going out and talking to underrepresented communities, on their campuses. When we look to the future, we need to step away from platitudes and just get down to organizing. We’re never going to organize more comrades of color, more women, more gender minorities into YDSA if we don’t talk to them, if we don’t have organizing conversations with them, if we don’t do work that interests them, if we’re not including their voices in work. If that’s not at the top of the agenda, and if there’s no co chair that’s saying “How are we organizing black communities on campuses?” or Latina communities on campus, it’s just not going to get done. 

Q: Another element of your initial campaign platform was building democracy in YDSA, strengthening communication structures between YDSA and DSA, and having a stronger grievance system. Please talk a little bit about those two pillars, what you’ve done in office, and what you intend to do if re elected?

Aron, on integration with DSA: We’ve (Aron and Evan Caldwell) been the most active YDSA co-chairs on the DSA NPC in history by far. Relationship building alone has increased the amount of DSA members who feel they can access YDSA. I think that by showing the vibrancy of our youth section, by demonstrating how we win, how we organize, and how we struggle, a lot of DSA comrades who were apprehensive about YDSA at the beginning of my term are now actively thinking about how they can integrate things that we’re doing with what they do in DSA, which is wonderful.

Aron, on increasing democracy: How we’ve done committees this year allowed more people than ever to get involved and stand up, especially with the comms committee. That’s the success story of this year, as far as committees go, because we saw over a dozen general members run a world-class comms campaign around the encampments, boosting local chapters asks, and working with other national organizations in a professional manner. I think that democracy is more than just a vote. It is who can be involved, lead, and organize. And that’s something that I really, towards the end of my term, I’ve grappled with and want to act upon if I get reelected. To make our committees more democratic so that more people can participate and more people can be retained so that our work is more democratic and evenly distributed.

Q: YDSA has been at the forefront of many national issues. What has it been like trying to remain at the forefront of these issues on a constricted budget? How have you tried to work around the budget to ensure these campaigns are effectively organized? And what do you intend to do to fundraise and recoup the money if re elected?

Aron: I think the answer to that lies in YDSA’s history: we have not had a big budget for most of our existence. Furthermore, YDSA has been an effective winning organization long before we had discretionary money to spend on whatever we wanted. So, I think having a smaller budget is not the end all be all of our movement. Nevertheless, I believe that some of the bigger budget items that we have been able to preserve—and that I will go to the ends of the earth to continue to preserve, like NCC stipends and an in-person conference—are crucial to building our organization. I think that if we lost those in the budget cuts, we would probably be seeing a very different YDSA than we do right now. I am politically opposed to budget cuts to YDSA. But the ones that we did have inflicted upon us are not the end of the world. We have to strengthen our position within DSA to continue to advocate for more funding and investment in YDSA.

Q: Impacted by the deficit, the DSA NPC voted on a resolution to try and balance the budget on March 11 of this year. One of the critical components of that resolution was laying off 12 full time employees. I understand that you voted in favor. It was a very contentious subject that led to much discussion and argument. Could you talk about why you voted in favor of it, why did you think it was necessary at the time, and if you’d vote for it again? 

Aron: Many of the reasons why I ended up voting for that resolution go back to why we’re in this mess in the first place: chronic overhiring and overspending, and this belief that we have an ever growing stream of revenue and an ever growing membership base, which, as we saw, didn’t happen. DSA had a declining membership and declining revenue last year.  I think that the NPC didn’t understand, and it continued to overhire. Or, if they did understand… then you can read into that whatever you want. For me, personnel was our biggest category by far and highly disproportionate to what it has been as a percentage of our budget in the past. We already made deep and severe cuts to our organizing priorities. Of course, for YDSA, we sacrificed tens of thousands of dollars to have our convention online instead of in person, committee co chair stipends, and other areas of the budget that were reduced in terms of organizing to sustain the higher personnel costs. And I think to get past this era of DSA being in a deficit, personnel costs are inevitable. I believe it when folks said that the longer we dug into our [monetary] reserves, and the longer we put off this question of handling “the personnel question,” then the more staff that would be fired if we didn’t handle this issue. That was probably, I would say, the hardest decision that I had to make in my term. Because, when you’re elected  as a co-chair, you’re not really thinking about, “okay, how am I going to directly vote on people’s livelihoods?”  And that’s a horrible thing to internalize. But this is the largest socialist organization in the country, and I want it to continue to grow. I want to be able to rehire staff one day; we have to make it out of this deficit. And we do that by cutting across the board, by cutting everywhere we can as effectively we can. 

Q: Perhaps the biggest thing in the YDSA space this year has been Palestine. It’s an all-consuming subject on people’s minds. Could you talk about what it has been like to work on Palestine organizing as co-chair, what you think you’ve done well, what you think you’ve done poorly, and how you would want to improve on this work?

Aron: It’s been very challenging to have an issue as pervasive and culturally significant as Palestine. To act on that without a convention mandate is extraordinarily difficult—and from what I understand, it’s unprecedented. I don’t think we’ve ever had an issue this big pop up so early in a term that didn’t have a convention mandated course of action. If I’m speaking to personal self critiques here, that is one of the biggest things that we, as an NCC, screwed up on. After October 7, we were blindsided in the same way that DSA was, and we let their paralysis seep into YDSA. Their indecisiveness turned into our indecisiveness and it stifled us from taking a broad course of action that could have supported a lot of chapters a lot quicker than we did; this was a collective failure. And I was at the head of it, and I take accountability for that. 

That being said, we did end up redeeming ourselves around the encampments because we looked back critically, and we said, Okay, what went wrong here? Palestine work doesn’t have a place to go. [Palestine work] hot potato’ed from the Political Education Committee, to the NCC, to the Campaign Organizing Committee… And so we [the NCC] said, okay, let’s put it in the ICYLC (International Committee Youth Leadership Committee) and make a companion committee, the Palestinian Liberation Organizing Committee, to go alongside it. That’s where our work began to flourish, and where my political vision for how we handled Palestine work began to take off—not as one committee doing small work, but as all of our national committees working together. On this big project, we had our comms committee working on comms, we had PLOC working on different trainings. We had, you know, the labor comrades reaching out to unions and helping on that side of things.  I think where we saw indecisiveness and paralysis immediately following October 7th, we saw agility and decisiveness following the rise of the first encampments in a way that cemented YDSA as a national leader in the Palestine movement. 

Q: What has been your greatest accomplishment and your greatest failure while co-chair, and how have both experiences impacted your understanding of leadership?

Aron: I think the rise of the encampments is my greatest success, and the response to October 7 is my greatest failure. That dialectic of how we responded to the genocide in Palestine is telling of the maturation of leadership over the course of a term. It really provided me with a good space for reflection.  I think the number one thing that I’ve learned over my two years on the NCC is that you’ve just got to do stuff. As a NCC co chair, you have the power to transform this organization. I  want to take advantage of that in my next term to build a YDSA that will continue to be the most vibrant part of the socialist movement for many years and decades.