Embattled NYC DSA leader Gustavo Gordillo blasted by comrades for high-paying demand: ‘not working class’

A socialist group arguing over whether the boss's chair should pay ninety five grand a year is the kind of story you couldn't invent if you tried. Gustavo Gordillo, co-chair of the NYC DSA, comes from money by his own comrades' account, and now he wants the volunteer job of running the local socialist chapter turned into a six-figure salary. The people who showed up to vote against it did so on the grounds that a guy who doesn't need the money shouldn't be the one taking it. That's not a bad instinct. It's just funny that it took a $95,000 salary proposal for anyone in that room to notice.

This is the same tension that shows up every time the socialist left tries to run an organization instead of just critiquing one. Someone has to answer emails, book the venue, deal with the budget. That work costs money and time, and eventually somebody says the quiet part out loud: maybe we should pay the person doing it. Then the whole thing collapses into an argument about who actually qualifies as working class enough to deserve a paycheck, which is a question socialism has never had a clean answer for.

We'd normally leave internal DSA drama alone. It's their group, their bylaws, their business. But there's something worth sitting with here. An organization built entirely around denouncing wealth and privilege still had to hold a public reckoning over whether one of its own leaders was too comfortable to be trusted with a salary. If solidarity can't survive a compensation debate among true believers, it's hard to take seriously as a governing philosophy for the rest of us.

None of this means the underlying critique of wealth and access is wrong on its face. It means the people making that critique keep discovering, meeting after meeting, that class doesn't disappear just because you say the right words about it.