Ashik Siddique

Ashik Siddique is Research Analyst National Priorities Project Institute for Policy Studies.

He is a member of Metro DC DSA, and serves on DSA’s Ecosocialist Working Group Steering Committee and Green New Deal Campaign Committee.^[1]

Siddique was elected to the National Political Committee of DSA in 2021, and currently serves on the Steering Committee as Secretary/Treasurer. In the past term he has also served as cochair of the Budget & Finance Committee and chair of the Personnel Committee, as well as involved in the Multiracial Organizing Committee, Communications Committee, and Development Committee.

Ashik was born and raised in Brooklyn, NYC, in a Bangladeshi immigrant family. He was politicized as a Muslim teenager after 9/11, when family members were surveilled and profiled by police, and then through Occupy Wall Street in 2011, while working at a veterans hospital in the Bronx with combat veterans of Iraq & Afghanistan with PTSD. He got involved in climate organizing, and joined DSA in early 2017 as he came to understand how nonprofit-led activism has been unable to meet the scale of the ecological crisis by challenging its root cause — capitalism — and that our best hope for collective survival is a mass socialist organization that is deeply intertwined with a resurgent labor movement in the U.S.

Before being elected to the NPC, he served on the Metro DC chapter’s Steering Committee from 2018-2019, helped run a slate of DSA candidates for DC’s hyperlocal Advisory Neighborhood Commissions in 2018, and helped set up what became We Power DC, a campaign for energy democracy in the nation’s capital. At the national level, Ashik helped build up the Ecosocialist Working Group as a member of its Steering Committee, creating national organizing infrastructure to support chapter work around the Green New Deal campaign, and coordinating with other national priorities, including serving on the DSA for Bernie steering committee during the 2020 primary, and organizing DSA’s campaign to pass the PRO Act to expand labor rights in 2021.

For work, Ashik is a research analyst at the Institute for Policy Studies, analyzing militarized spending in the US federal budget — and all the nice things that would be possible if we simply defund the Pentagon. He and coworkers organized a union with the support and solidarity of DSA labor organizers, and are proud members of the Washington-Baltimore News Guild.^[2]

DSA at Socialism Conference 2024

Sessions featuring DSA members:

A New Red Scare?

Sunday September 1, 2024 12:00pm – 1:30pm CDT

Our comrades protesting the genocide in Gaza are being arrested on campus and in the streets. Liberals abandon liberalism; conservatives celebrate brutality. We feel on the edge of something like McCarthyism, if not fascism. What can we learn from past red scares? How do socialists recognize and resist repression now? What should we do that we didn’t, or couldn’t, before?

Featuring Alderman Byron Sigcho Lopez (Chicago DSA, Chicago City Council), Jerry Harris (Chicago DSA, DSA National Political Education Committee), Renee Paradis (East Bay DSA, DSA National Political Committee), Andrew Basta (Lower Hudson Valley DSA, DSA International Committee), Ashik Siddique .^[3]

2023/25 NPC

Ahmed Husain, Alex Pellitteri, Amy Wilhelm, Ashik Siddique, Cara Tobe, Colleen Johnston, Frances Gill, John Lewis, Kristin Schall, Laura Wadlin, Luisa Martinez, Megan Romer, Rashad X, Renee Paradis, Rose DuBois, Sam Heft-Luthy.

DSA Brazil trip

From April 29 – May 4 2020, Kristian Hernandez, Ashik Siddique, and Sofia Guimaraes Cutler (NPC), Jana Silverman (International Committee), James Ehresman-Tsagong (NCC-YDSA), and Gabriel Acevero, (Maryland State Delegate) went to Brazil as part of an exchange hosted by the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT), Central Unica dos Trabalhadores (CUT), and Foro de Sao Paulo.

During the week they spent in São Paulo, they heard first-hand about the attacks against workers spearheaded by Jair Bolsonaro’s neo-fascist government, and the tragic consequences of the 1964-1985 US-sponsored military dictatorship. But they also learned how unions, social movements and socialist activists are resisting neo-fascism and neoliberalism, and building the campaign to elect Lula in this October’s Presidential elections.^[4]

YDSA conference

Roberto Clack, Sean Estelle, Ashik Siddique, Arcadia Schmid spoke at the Young Democratic Socialists of America 2020 winter conference.

Steering Committee

Eleven members comprise the new Steering Committee (SC) of DSA’s Green New Deal Campaign Commission (GNDCC). The 2021 GND Priority Resolution, passed at this year’s convention, tasks the SC with coordinating DSA’s national Green New Deal campaign work — designing external campaign strategy, recruiting and cultivating organizers, establishing internal campaign infrastructure and acting as national representatives of DSA in climate and labor coalitions, with the ultimate goal of winning an ecosocialist Green New Deal consistent with DSA’s GND Principles.

This year’s PRO Act and GND for Public Schools Campaigns were only the beginning of our work. For the next two years, SC plans on building on that work of mass, labor-oriented campaigns to make DSA a major influence on national — and international — climate policy.

New members are Nafis Hasan (Philly); Sarah Arkebauer (St. Louis); Jeff Glass (Austin); Fares Abdullah (at large, CA); Daniel Goulden (NYC); Poornima Tata (West Suburban IL); Devin Collins (Jacksonville); Marc Krause (Los Angeles); Johnathan Guy (East Bay); Nadia Schwartz Tykulsker (NYC); Abhiyant Singh (NYC); and our co-chairs are NPC members Gustavo Gordillo and Ashik Siddique.

DSA Green New Deal Slate

Gustavo Gordillo, Sydney Ghazarian, Ashik Siddique.

Green New Deal Campaign Committee

In 2021 Democratic Socialists of America’s Green New Deal Campaign Committee included Ashik Siddique, Gustavo Gordillo, Sydney Ghazarian, and Thea Riofrancos.^[5]

Comrades

400p

DC Neighborhood politics

In 2018, the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America focused their efforts on the Advisory Neighborhood Commission races. The 11 members they have running are: Caleb-Michael Files for single member district 1B02; Dan Orlaskey for 1B02; Stuart Karaffa for 1D05; Matthew Sampson for 2B01; John Grill for 3C01; Beau Finley for 3C04; Ashik Siddique for 4C03; Luke Cieslewicz for 5C07; Ryan Linehan for 5D01; Mysiki Valentine for 7D04, and Jewel Stroman for 7B07. The group is also endorsing Emily Gasoi for the Ward 1 seat of the DC State Board of Education.^[6]

Metro DC DSA Public Facbook group

Members of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America, public Facebook group, as of March 12, 2017 included Ashik Siddique.^[7]

DSA National Climate & Environmental Justice Working Group

Members of the DSA National Climate & Environmental Justice Working Group closed FB page, as of August 30, 2017 included Ashik Siddique.

MFR at the People's Summit

Ryan Skolnick June 11, 2017:

Millennials For Revolution has some big plans in the works. Expanding our network and bringing other politically engaged basement dwelling river rats into the process is the first step. Let's #SeizeTheMemes!!!

PPLSummit — with Ethan B. Fox, Noemi Aidee Tungui, Ashik Siddique, Tania Singh, Zackary Reinhardt, Carla Borderies, David Ian Robin, Shawnee Badger and Logan Smith.

Millennials for Revolution Dank Meme Commune

Millennials For Revolution closed Facebook page. Moderators

South Brooklyn DSA Official Closed Group

Members of the South Brooklyn Democratic Socialists of America Official Closed Facebook Group, as of June 17, 2018 included Ashik Siddique.^[9]

Left Forum 2015

The Pledge to Mobilize: A Denial-Fighting Tool to Organize Against Climate Change

References

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[6] City Paper D.C. Democratic Socialists Are Going Hyperlocal for the Upcoming General Election MATT COHEN OCT 11, 2018 5 AM

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