Co-Chair Candidate Profile: Uma Clemenceau
The Activist interviewed the candidates for national co-chair at the 2024 YDSA national convention. Uma Clemenceau discusses their run for co-chair.
YDSA’s National Convention is on the horizon. Though the event will be online this year, the key elements that make the 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, comprised of “co-chairs,” who sit on DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) and at-large members. This year, five candidates are running for the position.
The Activist sat down with Uma Clemenceau, from University of California Santa Barbara YDSA, and spoke about her decision to run.
The Bread & Roses statement on Uma’s candidacy can be found here.
The questions and responses in this interview have been edited for clarity.
Q: Could you talk briefly about why you joined the University of California Santa Barbara chapter, the campaigns your chapter has undertaken, and how those experiences have changed you, informed your understanding of organizing, and what it means to be an effective socialist organizer?
Uma: I came to Santa Barbara pretty hopeless; a lot of stuff in my personal life, tragic stuff, and moving to college during all of that. It was very alienating. YDSA was my first ever real experience with class politics, and it totally rocked my world. My first year, we were working on a campaign to get cops out of the Halloween celebration. I had to defer for part of that year because my mom passed away. So I was kind of involved, kind of not. But there was a leader, Taylor Clark, our old co-chair from years ago, who put a lot of trust in me as a leader, and it really helped me grow into the leader that I am today. Him putting that trust in me, and identifying me as a leader when I would have never done that myself, was what catapulted me into organizing.
Two years after that, we ran a campaign to save the Student Health building on campus. We successfully prevented the school from outsourcing health care that year. This past year, we found out that almost 50% of the student body at UC Santa Barbara is food insecure. We decided to launch a campaign [for] meal plan reform, and we were able to get 10% of the student body to sign a petition about that. Then, we were able to negotiate with Housing and Dining enterprises on our campus, negotiate for a pilot program to basically restore meal swipe donations and sharing, and then also do meal swipe rollover. We’ve also done two strike support campaigns now. The UAW 4011 strike for the ability to be a worker and protest for Palestine. But me and a few chapter members have also been working on union organizing, which has been really transformative for our chapter in learning those nitty gritty organizing skills.
Q: Why did you decide that you were going to run for co-chair?
Uma: I feel like I owe so much to YDSA. I see YDSA as the only campus organization in this country that is in the position to organize on such a large scale, to give young working class students the experience of directly confronting the capitalist class. That’s the most important thing ever. I wouldn’t have salted the dining hall. I would have gotten a campus job and been sad about it, but I would have never intentionally started organizing at my workplace if it weren’t for YDSA. Giving students that experience, that direct confrontation, that’s not something they’ll forget about soon, and that’s how we build a fighting socialist movement in this country. Being able to continue working on that on a national scale would be such a privilege.
Q: What exactly is your platform? I know you’ve posted about it on Discord, but could you expand on your policy proposals and how your vision differs from that of your predecessors and other people running for the same role?
Uma: Three priorities: [First,] one-to-one leadership and political development—especially in large public schools, because that’s how we grow our base in the multiracial working class. We organize these public schools, commuter schools, community colleges. Secondly, supporting chapters doing any kind of organizing the unorganized. Building labor unions is really important. I think supporting chapters in building student unions. Also, mass democratic movements for Palestine; any other sort of organizing that orients us towards organizing the masses. And then the third [priority] is fighting for budget autonomy and a healthy YDSA budget.
Q: I understand you want to make Palestine organizing a focal point for your platform. Could you expand on how your vision of Palestine organizing differs from others?
Uma: Our Palestine organizing has been good, especially in the encampments. There were definitely some wins, but there were a lot of structural problems in encampments that a lot of YDSA organizers have been very critical of. I think a lot of the time we, as YDSA, try to third party ourselves in the movement for Palestine, as if we’re not allowed to take ownership over. I think that’s wrong. I think that our role as YDSA should be to fight for democratic decision making in these spaces, always be unapologetically socialist, and always put forward our theory of change, which is organizing the masses in a democratic way for Palestinian Liberation and divestment on campuses.
[This strategy] differs a little bit from the current strategy of the traditional coalition building model. I am a little bit critical of the coalition building model. I think that coalition building, for the sake of coalition building, is sometimes unproductive,it doesn’t broaden our base in the working class, and it doesn’t create lasting organization. Although the leaders of the coalition may have a certain level of political consciousness, I’m not sure there is always buy-in for the idea that the project needs to be a democratic one. We should be involved in these coalitions. But, we should fight to orient them towards organizing the masses, and actually having a culture of democracy, with a bottom-up democracy, instead of a top-down structure where the leaders of each organization decide what the coalition is doing.
Q:There’s been a great deal of discussion, from YDSA and DSA, around endorsements or re-endorsements for candidates who some feel have not been sufficiently pro-Palestine. AOC is a specific example that’s been used. Could you talk about your opinion around endorsing candidates, and what DSA’s role should be in its relationships with electeds, and more than that, what YDSA’s role should be in the electoral space?
Uma: A lot of the problems that we’re seeing come from the fact that we’re trying to take shortcuts in our electoral organizing. As long as we’re not running people who come from our movement,trusted leaders in our movement, we will run into these issues where they do some (expletive). They’re not beholden to us, and they’re not accountable to us. We should put pressure on the politicians to [move] further to the left. But I think the real solution to this problem is to be more deliberate in who we are elevating to these positions of power.
As for YDSA in particular? With the election coming up, it is going to be important to do massive amounts of political education on what class struggle elections actually look like and the fact that any kind of electoral campaign is only as useful if it builds a movement around it and builds organizers who can go on and use those skills for other projects.
Q: You mentioned labor work, and I know that your chapter specifically has made some inroads in it. If elected co-chair, could you talk a little bit about your vision for labor strategy in YDSA?
Uma: It’s a really exciting time, but also a really scary time to be doing labor organizing. Of course, with the looming threat of Trump being elected and a Trump NLRB (that’s really scary!), but that lights a fire under our a***s, and it gets us to think of more creative ways to win big in labor. I was involved in the UAW 4811 strike this past spring. All of my prior instincts and knowledge flipped on its head, because we were talking to workers about something that was very inherently political. Having those kinds of conversations was really transformative for me. I think that we need to continue doing lots of political education around the rank and file strategy. YDSA intercepts people at the time in their lives when they’re trying to figure out what their career is going to be, and we have this really awesome—sometimes intimidating—idea that we can spring on them, which is, you can take a job in a very important part of the economy and organize to win really transformative things. Having one-to-one mentorship, like through the Youth Labor Committee, is going to be important. [Finally,] there’s a lot of chapters who are not really in a place to do unionization campaigns. I think for them, strike support campaigns, or labor advocacy campaigns, are really cool.
Q: You also mentioned the budget situation in both YDSA and DSA. I know there were substantial cuts made to the YDSA budget. Could you talk about what you would do to address the YDSA budget situation and how to recoup those funds? And how would you vote on and handle the wider issue of the deficit in DSA?
Uma: A big priority of any co chair must be fighting for a healthy YDSA budget. I think that question [of YDSA’s budget] gets to the core question of “Are students really strategic to organize? “ Usually, the turnover rate is 100% in four years. And as students, do we have that much leverage? Is it worth that funding? I argue that it is, and we’ve earned it through our transformative work, and the socialist movement needs YDSA to be well funded. The purpose of YDSA is to find students at this pivotal point in their lives and give them the experience to become lifelong socialist organizers. This is an intense project, but it’s also like a really strategic project for the socialist movement in this country. So, we are constantly having this fight be at the forefront, constantly pushing this to the NPC, and constantly arguing for the fact that we are strategic. Furthermore, I don’t think that fundraising is the solution to all of our budget problems. I think that a better answer is having really solid fall drives in many chapters that bring in a lot of new dues paying members. But, that can only happen through deep organizing. Finally, it’s okay to recognize that we contract and expand as an organization. So, our capacity to have staff will also contract and expand with our membership.
The last thing connected to this is how we build a diverse YDSA that overcomes self selection, which requires a lot of resources. We have to constantly remind our comrades in DSA that many national leaders wouldn’t be able to take those positions without stipends. Many chapters would never be able to start at large public universities without a lot of solid mentorship, and all of those things require resources.