The US needs a militant workers’ party. Such a party would not only help build the labor movement by mobilizing the public to mass pickets during strikes, but would also run electoral campaigns that popularize the concept of a workers’ government as an alternative to the capitalist state and help forge a truly international workers’ movement by coordinating strikes, union drives, and other forms of solidarity across borders. By mobilizing new sections of the working class into struggle, it could create new possibilities for the growth of communist politics.

There are steps that can be taken now to help build the foundations for a party like this in the US, and one of these steps is for communists to fight for a clean break from the Democrats in DSA. The purpose of this article is to explain how this fight could be waged, why it matters, and why all communists in the US should get involved.

I begin my argument in Section 1 with some points about what it would mean to build the foundations for a militant workers’ party in the heart of a global empire. Then, in Section 2, I discuss the current approach of DSA, why it matters, and what DSA members should support instead. In Section 3, I make my case for why communists outside DSA should join it and fight for a clean break from the Democrats. Section 4 concludes with a proposal for joint work by communists in the US.

1) Imperialism, Class Politics and DSA

At present, the US government has military bases in over eighty countries, and over a hundred and fifty countries are recipients of US military “aid”. At the same time, because it controls the international reserve currency, the US is able to threaten foreign adversaries with economic strangulation and financial collapse. All this forms the basis for a massive empire through which the US ruling class is able to dominate and oppress most of the world.

As a result of all this, US imperialism is among the biggest barriers to progress on earth. As William Blum wrote, summarizing points from a book about the history of US military interventions:

… every socialist experiment of any significance in the twentieth century—without exception—has either been crushed, overthrown, or invaded, or corrupted, perverted, subverted, or destabilized, or otherwise had life made impossible for it, by the United States. Not one socialist government or movement—from the Russian Revolution to the Sandinistas in Nicaragua, from Communist China to the FMLN in Salvador—not one was permitted to rise or fall solely on its own merits; not one was left secure enough to drop its guard against the all-powerful enemy abroad and freely and fully relax control at home.

It's as if the Wright brothers' first experiments with flying machines all failed because the automobile interests sabotaged each test flight. And then the good and god-fearing folk of the world looked upon this, took notice of the consequences, nodded their collective heads wisely, and intoned solemnly: Man shall never fly.^[1]

Thus, US imperialism stands as the greatest obstacle to everything that communists want to achieve, and it is urgently important for communists in the US to build an anti-imperialist opposition.

During recent years in the US, there were openings to organize sections of the public against the imperialists, but these openings were squandered when the left instead chose to mobilize people back into the Democratic Party. For example, in 2008, at the height of the Global War on Terror, much of the left lined up behind Obama, who was elected partly on the basis of public anger against the Iraq war. Yet US imperialism continued its reign of terror after he took office. Even as the Obama administration publicly praised the Arab Spring revolts, US drones massacred rebels in Yemen, the US-armed Saudi monarchy invaded Bahrain to crush the pro-democracy uprising, and Egypt’s US-funded military launched a coup against elected president Mohamed Morsi.^[2]
A similar pattern took place during the Gaza genocide. As Biden provided the 2000-pound bombs used by Israel in the genocide, significant opposition developed in the US, with polls showing that a majority wanted Biden to stop supplying arms. But AOC – the most prominent member of the largest socialist organization in the US – endorsed Biden’s re-election campaign anyway, and later made the infamous claim that Kamala Harris was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza”. Examples like this highlight the fact that, by convincing the public to support pro-imperialist politicians, AOC and other misleaders help keep the left trapped within the Democratic Party, and thus undermine the development of a real opposition.

It is also important to emphasize that US imperialism is not some abstract issue that would only become relevant during a period of international revolution. Consider the task of rebuilding the labor movement today, when production is distributed across complex global supply chains, and workers are forced to compete with each other in an international race to the bottom. US imperialism and its military interventions play a decisive role in this process when it overthrows governments, such as the Aristide government in Haiti, that try to improve domestic living standards or raise the minimum wage.

Moreover, as the decline of US imperialism continues, these issues will only become more pressing. To maintain their project, the imperialists are taking an increasingly aggressive posture abroad, while trying to impose many of the costs of imperial decline on the working class at home. Thus, to the extent that the US left ties itself to the imperialists, it alienates itself from the working class domestically and discredits itself internationally. The other option – the only real option for anyone who wants to advance the objective interests of the working class – is to build a genuine opposition to the imperialists, and help hasten the destruction of the main barrier to global progress.

This is why a militant workers’ party in the US will necessarily be an anti-imperialist one. Among other things, this means that it will be an independent party, not just in the organizational sense of being distinct from the Democrats and Republicans, but also in the political sense of being implacably opposed to any form of collaboration with the imperialist parties. This must include total opposition to all pro-imperialist politicians, whether they are open reactionaries like Donald Trump, or “woke” imperialists like Kamala Harris.

Because working-class internationalism will need to be so central to this party’s politics, communists will have a natural role to play in laying its foundations. This raises some important, and intertwined, questions: How can we reach the people who would undertake this project? How can we cohere a large enough number of these people to make the project viable? And what kind of program, or points of unity, should these people be organized around? Although the answers to these questions will have to involve work on multiple fronts, part of this work will need to happen in DSA.

Polls indicate that, in recent years, a significant number of Americans have warmed to communist ideas, and it appears that many of these people have become DSA members.^[3] To be clear, DSA, in practice, takes an approach that is neither communist nor anti-imperialist. But the majority of DSA’s national leadership call themselves communists, the organization’s official platform includes a demand to “end all foreign wars and close overseas military bases”, and Fox News recently aired a screeching, hysterical warning about DSA caucuses that “EXPLICITLY PUSH COMMUNISM”.^[4] These things, together with the fact that no real communist party exists in the US today, make it easy to see why substantial numbers of people with a sincere interest in communist politics are joining DSA. If we are serious about cohering a real communist left in the US, and building the foundations for a party, then we cannot simply ignore DSA.

Of course there are aspects of DSA – such as the current spectacle of self-described “Marxists” trying to build support for an AOC presidential run – that are off-putting, to say the least. But this is a reflection of the deeper challenges and absurdities we inevitably face as communists living in the heart of the US empire. And precisely because we live in the heart of the empire, it is all the more urgent to cohere the genuine communists into an anti-imperialist opposition, and work to win over those who are persuadable.

For these reasons, communists in the US need to understand the rationalizations for DSA’s present course, formulate clear political arguments against those rationalizations, and propose an alternative direction for the organization. With this in mind, the next section gives an overview of DSA’s approach and some thoughts on what members should support instead.

2) DSA Members: Support Independent Socialists, Not Coalitions with Imperialists!

Many members in DSA argue that, by campaigning for Democrats like Zohran Mamdani or AOC, they are already building a workers’ party. They say that DSA’s elected representatives are merely “using the Democratic Party ballot line”. This is a delusion.

When a politician campaigns as a Democrat, this creates a strong expectation among voters, campaign volunteers, and donors that the politician will behave like a Democrat in office – which means working in coalition with other Democrats, building a career in the Democratic Party, and staying within the political red lines set by the Democratic Party leadership. Once a politician gets into office with a mandate like this, there isn’t much incentive for them to behave in any other way. After all, who is going to hold AOC accountable for her “betrayals” in office if she is already behaving in the way that most of her donors, voters, and campaign volunteers expected?

Thus, in practice, there is no substantive difference between simply being a Democrat and “using the Democratic Party ballot line”. Moreover, the Democratic Party has shown itself to be very capable of enforcing discipline on elected members when it wants to do so. As a result, when DSA members are elected as Democrats, they tend to work within the parameters set by the Democratic leadership and the party’s capitalist donors, instead of fighting for the positions decided by DSA. This is why, rather than co-endorsing the candidates endorsed by DSA, Mamdani and AOC support pro-imperialist politicians such as Hakeem Jeffries. Mamdani and AOC sometimes mouth anti-war opinions, but by campaigning for a party that is determined to keep the war machine going, they help the US empire perpetuate itself.

Some DSAers will counter that, although they are not perfect, DSA’s elected officials nevertheless practice a form of “harm reduction” by supporting pro-worker policies, and that this helps build public support for socialism. But in reality, there has been a visible tendency for DSA’s politicians to take anti-worker positions. We saw this most clearly in the squad’s infamous rail strike vote in 2022, as well as Mamdani’s recent opposition to the “No More 24” bill; all stances that seriously hurt the credibility of the socialist project among the working class.

But there is also a deeper issue. Suppose that upon taking office in 2019, AOC had actually passed bills in Congress that substantially improved workers’ standard of living in the US, and suppose she built a large base of working-class support in the process. This would have made it even more damaging when, in 2024, AOC called on her supporters to fall in line behind the Democrats who were making the Gaza genocide possible, because it would have meant mobilizing even more public support behind the imperialist meat grinder! Again, the fundamental point is that DSA’s politicians are undermining the cause of working-class internationalism, and thus undermining the fight against capitalism, when they present themselves as socialists while failing to draw a clear line of opposition against the imperialists. To break this coalition with imperialists, DSA must break with the Democratic Party. There is no other option.

Instead of campaigning for Democrats, DSA should look to the multiple independent socialist campaigns that merit critical support. The Party for Socialism and Liberation, which got 165,000 votes when it ran a communist candidate in the last presidential election, is running candidates for elected office this year in New York and elsewhere. The Working Class Party is running a candidate for Congress in Illinois, who got ten thousand votes the last time he ran for the same seat. DSA itself is already running an independent socialist campaign in Rhode Island. Despite their different affiliations, these campaigns aim to mobilize the public behind working-class demands and draw a political line against the ruling class. As groups like United Front for a Workers’ Party and DSA’s Just Break Already Caucus have argued, the US left as a whole, not simply DSA, should support these campaigns.

This doesn’t mean I agree with these campaigns about everything. In fact, I disagree with PSL and the Working Class Party about quite a lot. But by helping to build their electoral campaigns on a united-front basis – which means working together with other supporters, while being open about points of political disagreement, and trying to forge unity through constructive debate – Marxists can create the foundation for bigger and more politically cohesive electoral work in the future. And as a matter of principle, just as we should support a strike even when we have important disagreements with the union leadership, and would not cross the picket line at a struck facility, we should take a similar approach when supporting independent working-class campaigns, and not cross the class line by voting for Democrats (or Republicans!).

Some DSAers will respond by arguing that it’s easier to win elections by running as Democrats. Fine. But comrades, let us tell no lies, and claim no easy victories! The truth is that, in the US, the level of independent working-class political organization is low; we will change that by building up from where we actually are, not by acting as a junior partner to an imperialist party. This means immediately ceasing all support for Democrats, and telling DSAers in elected office that they have to pick a side: either break with the Democratic Party completely, or be expelled from the largest socialist organization in the US.

Today, most of DSA’s left wing does not support the clean break position. Although their arguments against the clean break can take a variety of forms, this one by the Marxist Unity Group (MUG) is fairly representative of the genre:

The “clean break” tendency argues for a legal ballot line as the minimum condition for running a candidate on behalf of DSA. While recognizing the importance of identifying ourselves outwardly as independent and distinct from the Democratic and Republican parties, the clean break places primacy in the ballot line, not program or party organization, as the key distinction. Much like the example of the Green Party, this deemphasizes the role of the Marxist program and its role in uniting economic and local political movements into a nationwide party-movement of the class.^[5]

I of course agree that it makes no sense to emphasize the ballot line in place of more fundamental political questions. This is why I advocate a political and organizational break from capitalist politics. But the key point is that, as long as DSA delays the organizational break, and members continue to campaign for elected office as Democrats, the political break with capitalist politics will be impossible. To the extent that they fail to engage with this reality, DSA’s left wing provides cover for the DSA right’s continued work with the Democratic Party.

Fortunately, it appears that some members in DSA’s left wing, particularly in MUG, have moved toward a clean break position.^[6] This is an excellent development, and I would be more than happy to work with these comrades on the areas where we agree.

Still, I should note that I am advocating a conception of the clean break that may differ from what others have put forward, precisely because I do insist on a political break, and not merely an organizational break, with the capitalists. So, for example, I would not be in favor of endorsing candidates who run for office as Greens. As the Spartacists and others have pointed out, the Green Party is an organization of middle-class liberals, not a workers’ party. The Greens’ national platform advocates ideas like “socially responsible business”, and says the party wants to “empower shareholders to stop abuses”; that is a program for class collaboration, not independent socialist politics.^[7]

Comrades in DSA’s left wing must come to grips with the fact that, in an organization where sincere communists coexist with representatives from an imperialist party, progress will only happen if there is some genuine struggle and conflict. It would be utopian to deny this. Rather than maintaining peace with DSA’s right wing, the DSA left needs to wage an open fight against the right’s class-collaborationist politics.

3) US communists: Join the fight for a clean break!

It is useful now to connect the points above with some more general thoughts about how a new party might emerge in the US. Of course, the process of party formation could play out in various ways, but it is helpful to contrast two potential scenarios.

The first potential scenario is similar to the one that created the Labour Party in the UK: the Marxist left remains too weak and divided to play a substantial role in national politics, but a mass strike wave pushes the labor bureaucracy to the left, and this produces a party of militant workers that is led by liberals. Through a process like this, a broad-based, class-collaborationist “labor party” could emerge in the US.

In contrast, a second potential scenario resembles the process that made the Bolshevik Party possible in Russia: after a period of open ideological struggle and joint political work among different groups, a critical mass of Marxists reach agreement on a shared program.^[8] In the process, they create the initial scaffolding for a new party, and, during a subsequent period of intense social crisis, the party is able to develop a mass or semi-mass base of support in the working class, ultimately creating the basis for a genuine communist party to emerge.

Of course, future developments in the US will not unfold in a way that completely resembles either of these simplified scenarios. For example, unlike in pre-revolutionary Russia, the struggle for Black liberation will likely play a central role in future periods of revolutionary upsurge in the US, and this will have profound importance for the development of any new workers’ party. But there is still a basic lesson from the UK and Russian experiences that is particularly relevant for Marxists in the US today: if we want a militant workers’ party, rather than a class-collaborationist party run by liberals, then we need to put ourselves in a position where we will be able to influence future political developments in a significant way, and to make this possible, we need to work now to unify a critical mass of communists around a compelling program.

What would it take to accomplish this?

Right now, many communists in the US are separated into small groups, and because none of these groups are even close to the point of containing socially decisive sections of the working class, they can do little more than talk about their ideas. Meanwhile, other self-identified communists are in DSA, where, in many cases, they either support or conciliate DSA’s work within the Democratic Party.

To begin unifying a critical mass of communists on a sound programmatic basis, there will have to be a process of regroupment, debate, and political clarification among the various tendencies on the Marxist left. Some of this will involve high-level discussion, but it will also be important to engage in shared political struggles that clarify, in practice, where the real political differences lie, how much these differences matter, and who is ready to put their money where their mouth is. Just as the early roots of Bolshevism can be found in the struggle against economism in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, I think that today, it will be necessary to forge communist unity by waging a struggle against class collaborationism.

This brings me back to the fight for a clean break in DSA. If communists across the US joined DSA to fight for a clean break from the Democratic Party, this would be a positive thing in itself because it could serve as a battering ram to break through the obfuscation and nonsense that currently surrounds the US left’s relationship to the Democrats. But it would also serve as a shared struggle that could help to bring greater political clarity and unity among communists themselves.

I suspect that certain “Leninist” keyboard warriors will respond to all this with cries of “liquidationism”. But such sentiments actually reflect a profound misunderstanding of Leninist politics. In the process of fighting for a party, communists sometimes have to affiliate with wider forces on the left – including organizations with a mixed class composition – and argue openly for their positions. This is why, in 1920, Lenin argued that, even though UK Labour was a “thoroughly bourgeois party”, it was necessary for communists to join it.^[9]

Today, DSA has over a hundred and twenty thousand dues-paying members, and the majority of its national leadership call themselves communists. Under these conditions, it won’t be possible to clarify the real meaning of communist politics in the US without waging an open political struggle against class collaborationism in DSA. All communists in the US should join this fight.

As part of this fight for a clean break from the Democratic Party, Marxist groups should also help build independent socialist campaigns that oppose the US empire. They should all endorse and help build Ed Hershey’s campaign in Illinois, Andre Easton’s campaign in New York, and Brittany Kubicek’s campaign in Rhode Island.

Again, building these campaigns should not mean shutting up about the issues where we disagree. For example, consider Andre Easton’s campaign platform, which calls on the US Congress to hold police officers accountable, and says Congress should pass a card-check bill to make it easier for workers to unionize.^[10] These demands, while not wrong in themselves, are in keeping with a reformist approach visible throughout Easton’s platform, in which the capitalist state, rather than the working class, is the agent that solves problems. Thus, while I am proud to support his campaign, I also think his platform could be improved.

Easton could strengthen his platform by adding Bolshevik demands that point toward the creation of a worker-run society. More specifically, his platform could call for the replacement of the standing army and police with a workers’ militia, and could oppose government restrictions on the right to strike.^[11] The right to strike demand, in particular, is something that all independent socialist campaigns should put in their platforms and openly fight for, because it is an excellent way to demonstrate support for militant workers against their capitalist oppressors. Of course, some campaigns might disagree. But to the extent that the disagreement is about how loudly to promote this specific demand (and not a disagreement over the principle that we oppose strikebreaking by the capitalist state), this disagreement should not be a barrier to joint work.

It is also worth mentioning that there are some nominally independent socialist electoral campaigns that we should not support. One example is Margaret Trowe of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP), who ran in California’s gubernatorial election this year. Trowe’s platform says she “Defends Israel’s right to exist and defend itself”. A quick look at SWP’s paper makes clear what this means: “Support Israel’s fight against Tehran, Hamas, Hezbollah”.^[12] Communists (and everyone else!) should oppose candidates like Trowe because the whole concept of “working class political independence” becomes fraudulent and nonsensical if it’s based on unity with imperialists.

So, we should not support every candidate who claims to be a socialist and is not a Democrat. But if we can agree on some basic points of principle, there is significant scope for US Marxists to engage in productive and interesting joint work. Therefore, I will conclude this essay with a brief proposal for what those points of principle should be.

4) A proposal for joint work in the US

Communists across the US should fight for a clean break from the Democrats in DSA, and build independent socialist electoral campaigns that oppose the US empire. Through this work, it will be possible for us to cohere a stronger communist left in the US, and take concrete steps toward the creation of a party. Below is a draft program, consisting of four “points of unity”, for this project. Of course, feedback, criticisms, and proposals for alternate programs would be welcome.

Note that, in the points of unity below, the aim is to focus on a handful of core issues where clarity is particularly needed. Therefore, this draft program does not take a position on every important political question. For example, the program does not say anything about climate change. Climate change is obviously important, but whatever differences might exist among communists on this issue, these differences do not represent a meaningful obstacle to the joint work that is being proposed here.

It is also worth emphasizing that there are urgently important political questions that would require further political discussion among those who participate in this project. For example, it is essential for US communists to have a compelling program for Black liberation. On the far left, there does not seem to be much disagreement about this (there do not appear to be communist groups in the US that oppose black liberation). But there is disagreement on what the program for Black liberation should actually be. So, for now, it is necessary to organize joint work that intentionally leaves room for some range of tactical disagreement, but with the understanding that it will be essential to find deeper political unity through discussion and debate.

Here are the four points of unity I am proposing:

1. Fight for a clean break from the Democrats. No endorsements, donations, or communications (e.g., voter guides) in support of Democratic Party politicians. DSA must present its elected officials with a choice: either completely break with the Democratic Party, or be expelled.
2. Reject sectarian abstentionism. Join DSA to support the fight for a clean break. Build socialist caucuses in the unions to connect the political and economic struggle, fight to break the control of the union bureaucracy, and oppose labor’s support for the Democratic Party.
3. Build independent socialist campaigns against the US empire. Support independent socialist electoral campaigns that fight for working-class demands, oppose backroom dealmaking/caucusing with the Democrats/Republicans, and oppose the main oppressor of the international working class: US imperialism. No support for pro-imperialist politicians, no selling out of any oppressed and exploited groups, and no strikebreaking.
4. Work toward programmatic unity. Openly discuss and debate areas of disagreement, with the aim of finding unity on a shared program for a party that fights for the liberation of all oppressed and exploited people.

The points of unity above were developed through discussions between the members of International Socialist Alternative (Revolutionary), Labor Militant, and the Just Break Already caucus in DSA. These points are based on the current thinking in ISA(R)’s elected leadership (which I am a member of), but also overlap significantly with what the other groups have put forward, and fit well within the united-front project that our three groups just launched. I encourage other Marxists in the US to join one of these formations, create their own caucuses in DSA to join the fight for a clean break, or fight for the clean break perspective in their own caucuses if they are already in one, and share their own proposals for a program for us to unify around.^[13]

1. William Blum, Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions since World War II, (Zed Books, 2003), 19.

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2. Julian Assange, et al., The WikiLeaks files: the world according to US empire, (Verso Books, 2015), chapter 1.

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3. For polling on public attitudes toward communism in the US, see Emily Ekins and Hunter Johnson, “81 Percent Say They Can’t Afford to Pay Higher Taxes Next Year,” Cato Institute, April 14, 2025, https://www.cato.org/blog/81-say-they-cant-afford-pay-higher-taxes-next-year. The poll found that a third of adults under the age of 30, and 14% of all adults, have a favorable view of communism. Also see “Fifth Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes Toward Socialism, Communism and Collectivism,” https://victimsofcommunism.org/annual-poll/2020-annual-poll/.

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4. https://fb.watch/IvwYYXjICu/?

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5. Marxist Unity Group, “2026 Tasks and Perspectives”, https://www.marxistunity.com/2026-tasks-perspectives/.

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6. See Omar Hegazy, “The Ballot Line is the Discipline”, Cosmonaut Magazine, July 23, 2026.

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7. “Green Party Platform”, https://www.gp.org/platform.

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8. This is an allusion to the history of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), the organization from which the Bolshevik Party later emerged. As Lenin pointed out in One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, to construct the RSDLP, Marxists in Russia had to “slaughter” the dozens of small organizations which they had previously been divided into. For more discussion, see Stephen Thompson, “Artisanal Politics, Bolshevism, and the Path to a Marxist Proto-Party”, Cosmonaut Magazine, August 13, 2025. For more on how this contrasts with the process that created the UK Labour Party, see: Stephen Thompson, “Instead of ‘campaigning’ for a broad-based labor party, let’s build a party of advanced workers”, February 2025, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1I6PVsM5cl6j2X5AB2d0K91PL2WSqWgidhjLVmH2er4U.

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9. V.I. Lenin, “Speech On Affiliation To The British Labour Party”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/jul/x03.htm#fw6.

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10. “Our Platform”, https://www.andreforthebronx.nyc/platform.

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11. Yes, these are Bolshevik demands. See the program of the RSDLP, which became the program of the Bolshevik Party when it was formed in 1912: “Programme of the Social-Democratic Workers’ Party”, https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm. Also see the revised, and somewhat more radical, version of this program that Lenin proposed in 1917: V.I. Lenin, “Draft of Revised Programme”, https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/reviprog/ch04.htm.

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12. For Trowe’s candidate statement, see “Candidate Statements”, 13, https://vig.cdn.sos.ca.gov/2026/primary/pdf/candidate-statements.pdf. Also see Seth Galinsky, “Support Israel’s fight against Tehran, Hamas, Hezbollah”, The Militant, May 18, 2026.

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13. To discuss this project with ISA(R) directly, feel free to contact us at: revleadership.socalt@proton.me.

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