While Partisan is a publication put on by members of the DSA’s Emerge Caucus in New York, and Red Caucus in Portland, Communist Caucus, we are happy to receive and review piece submissions from organizers across the DSA. If you are interested in submitting a piece for publication, please review the below guidelines.
Formal Guidelines:
Submitted articles should meet the following guideline:
- Between 500 and 2000 words (~2-8 double spaced pages) in length
- Exist as a complete and edited piece of writing.
- Be submitted as a Word document or Google Doc.
- Include, if necessary, citations and a bibliography in Chicago style (see here for a guide to Chicago style citations)
Content Guidelines:
We aim for this publication to offer resources to organizers within and outside the DSA to develop, build, and carry out successful organizing projects, as well as to mark out fresh debates at the point of engagement with the DSA as an organization and with struggles and projects going on around us. With that in mind, we welcome a range of writing but would emphasize that the article submissions we will be most interested in are those grounded in organizing work that you and those you’re collaborating with are actively engaged in. Pieces may include reflections on and analyses of a particular organizing project, analyses of extant organizing structures in your DSA chapter and their successes and/or limitations, editorials on organizing strategy and goals for ongoing and future work, or worker’s pamphlet-style handbooks. We also welcome interviews with comrades (and are especially interested in interviews with international comrades) about the work they’re doing, book reviews that draw out useful insights for present organizing practices, and the like. And while we welcome as well pieces that take a polemical stance or engage with radical theory, what ties our publication’s interests together is an investment in the on-the-ground work that people are doing. That’s to say, we are much more likely to publish a sharp analysis of a local organizing campaign with no reference to Marx, Lenin, etc. than we are an exegesis of Hegel (however brilliant it may be).
Note on Process Timeline:
Typically, we will publish articles collectively in periodic issues to be released quarterly. In exceptional circumstances, we may be interested in publishing a more timely piece between issues, but these pieces will still be subjected to our internal editorial and artwork collaboration processes. Partisan is a project powered by the part-time volunteer labor of its constituent members, so these processes will require no less than 7 days from the date of submission of a given piece, sometimes more. This inherently lends itself to more analytical pieces not intended to keep pace with the news cycle.
What to Do If You’re Interested:
If you have a piece you’d like us to consider for submission, please send it to the following email: partisan.dsa@gmail.com. We are regularly moving pieces through our review process. We’ll notify you to confirm when we receive your submission, and get back to you within two weeks about moving forward.
We will work with writers to provide and work through feedback and revision requests for pieces that we are interested in publishing.
Do you have feedback?
We welcome comradely feedback on the contents of Partisan. If you have thoughts on particular pieces that you were excited about or have critiques of any pieces, please reach out at partisan.dsa@gmail.com. Let us know what sorts of pieces we should run more of, who we should reach out to for insight, and what struggles we can highlight.