In May, Sid C.W., a member of Marxist Unity Group (MUG) and DSA’s NPC, wrote an article, Sailing Into the Storm, on how DSA should handle Mamdani and his compromises with the ruling class. This is grounded in the 1899 pamphlet No Compromise - No Political Trading, written by Wilhelm Liebknecht to explain how a socialist party could navigate potential alliances and coalitions with bourgeois parties without succumbing either to opportunism or an ultraleft blanket refusal to compromise with the ruling class.

This is a fine text to reference when considering the types of deals Mamdani has made to avoid austerity. But Sid’s mischaracterization and misapplication of Liebknecht’s theory leads him to propose solutions unable to address how DSA’s underlying political strategy undermines class struggle.

Liebknecht Never Said That

The problem starts with Sid summarizing Liebknecht’s warnings on compromise as:

“In short, compromises with liberal and bourgeois parties become dangerous only when they obscure the class struggle basis of the party.”

This immediately reduces the problem down to a matter of obscuring the class struggle basis of the party. Sid doesn’t really contend with the danger of the party itself ending up on the wrong side of the struggle by working in coalition with the bourgeoisie against the working class, or the danger of compromise replacing the class struggle entirely. This quickly leads to damaging conclusions. For example, Sid states:

A DSA legislator can choose to vote for a mediocre state budget and get funding for a pet project, or speak out against it and risk losing that funding. These two choices are, Liebknecht would say, morally neutral. The problem arises when the motivations guiding these decisions remain obscured. We rarely learn what kind of pressure is placed on legislators to vote for pro-cop, anti-worker budgets, or the political price tag for our own policy goals. The urgency of “delivering the goods” results in our elected officials making inscrutable decisions.

It is baffling to assert that Liebknecht, who gave a speech on the Reichstag floor ending with “Not a man and not a penny for this system! And I add, no new taxes! Neither good ones nor bad ones!” would ever classify a vote for a pro-cop, anti-worker budget as a morally neutral decision. Especially given that in his pamphlet, Liebknecht never characterizes choices as “morally neutral”. In the chapter “Bluecher’s Motto” Liebknecht stresses the importance of taking a stand on every question, and when it is unclear which side the party should take, Liebknecht says socialists ought to take the side that appears the most against capitalist interests. When the question is whether to support a capitalist budget, there are no morally neutral decisions.

The problem at hand isn’t that the motivations guiding our DSA legislator are unknown. In fact, Sid has clearly laid out the "obscured motivations" behind voting for a mediocre state budget - there’s a "political price tag for our own policy goals". The issue is that our DSA legislator is not merely compromising in the way Liebknecht accepts as a necessity: where socialists and a section of the bourgeoisie happen to want the same thing on a given issue. Here the DSA legislator is doing political horse-trading: where a supposed socialist votes for a capitalist budget in order to curry enough favor with the ruling class to fund what Sid admits to be a "pet project". The role of the working class is nonexistent, and class struggle takes a backseat. This is why Liebknecht, and even MUG in theory, are against this type of political horse-trading across the board. Yet Sid calls this trade “morally neutral”.

The larger issue is that the DSA legislator must depend on horse-trading to win any reform at all, and how that dependence compels them to vote against the objective interests of the working class. Sid himself admits this:

The electoral strategy passed at NYC-DSA’s 2024 Convention argues that our representatives’ main responsibility is to serve their constituents “through passing legislation and budgets that meaningfully improve the lives of working class New Yorkers while weakening the influence of the capitalist ruling class.” In this view, compromise for the sake of policy goals is the name of the game.

NYC-DSA’s strategy accepts that the main goal of socialists is to pass reforms through the ruling class’s own legislative institutions and on its terms, and all it asks in return is an abstract measure of “weakening the influence of the ruling class”. Sid accepts horse-trading as a potentially legitimate compromise, as long as motivations are communicated - never mind the role of class struggle! And the key to this strategy, which opens the door to the negotiation table, is the Democratic Party. Nowhere are the consequences clearer than in the case of Mamdani, who ran on DSA’s “Good Governance Through the Democratic Party” strategy and now embodies its logical conclusions.

Mamdani

Mamdani is no revolutionary. His professed goal is to turn the Democrats back into the party of FDR, the savior of US capitalism, not the conquest of political power by the working class. For Marxists, class struggle is indispensable because it organizes the working class into a force strong enough to take power. For a deliverist whose goal is only to pass reforms, class collaboration is as good a tactic as any, and a safer one for a reformist’s political career.

Sid waves off any link between Mamdani’s actions and the Democratic Party, claiming his missteps have nothing to do with “some ineffable quality of the Democratic Party ballot line.” Sid treats the party as a means of ballot access and nothing more. But it offers far more than that: name recognition, a primary electorate, and above all, a seat at the negotiating table with those who control the funding of the capitalist state. Once Mamdani has that seat, the path of least resistance to passing reforms and budgets is not class struggle, but class collaboration and political horse-trading, which quickly becomes the name of the game.

Mamdani’s campaign mobilized tens of thousands of volunteers around class-struggle adjacent messaging, but it was built for one purpose: winning him his seat. Any attempt to turn that army into an independent organization capable of challenging for political power would have cost him his cozy relationship with the Democratic Party leadership overnight, thus torpedoing Mamdani’s whole strategy of collaboration with figures like Kathy Hochul.

But the path of least resistance leads to a dead end. Mamdani’s class-collaborationist approach means that his only source of political power is the ruling class itself. A deliverist strategy that requires passing reforms at any cost from inside the Democratic Party can end only in subsumption to the ruling class. Each deal ties him closer to the ruling class, and each demand he makes must be watered down until they find it acceptable. Mamdani is not a socialist bargaining with the ruling class from outside; he has become part of how the ruling class governs New York.

We can see this play out in the deal that funded Mamdani’s budget. While Hochul was fighting to break a nurses’ strike, Mamdani endorsed her for re-election, and with her support he went on to announce a budget that largely avoided austerity. Four days after that announcement, Long Island Rail Road (LIRR) workers struck against Hochul and the state of New York. The class line could not have been clearer, yet instead of rallying support for the strikers, Mamdani coordinated alternative bus routes for commuters, weakening the workers’ leverage and, in effect, scabbing on the strike.

By ignoring the role of the Democratic Party, Sid misses how Mamdani’s wins and his betrayals are connected. He writes that some of Mamdani’s decisions will be good for our political project and others will not, as if they could be judged separately. But they are part of the same strategic compromise. The funding for Mamdani’s budget came from the same governor the LIRR workers were striking against, and keeping that funding meant he would have to act against them.

Liebknecht’s theory of compromise is ultimately unequipped to deal with Mamdani because it wasn’t meant to! It's meant to guide a socialist party compromising with the bourgeois parties without crossing the class line. Mamdani is not on our side of the class line anymore. The compromise in question is DSA’s. Is DSA’s compromise to support class collaborationists inside the Democratic Party one that strengthens the socialist movement, or does it end in giving up class struggle altogether?

Liebknecht’s Lessons

Liebknecht wrote his pamphlet in response to the growing opportunism inside the SPD, particularly Bernstein’s, which can be summed up in his phrase: “The movement is everything, the final aim is nothing.”

This is the essence of opportunism: The elevation of immediate success above the long term goal of revolution. Its logical conclusion is the erasure of revolution altogether and thus the need for a class-struggle approach, ultimately ending in class collaboration. Liebknecht saw some of his comrades starting down this path. He states in his pamphlet:

From the fact that our assistance is sought by other parties, some of our comrades draw the strange conclusion that we should reverse the party tactics, and in place of the old policy of the class struggle against all other parties, substitute the commercial politics of log rolling, wire pulling and compromise. Such persons forget that the power which makes our alliance sought for, even by our bitterest enemies, would have had absolutely no existence were it not for the old class struggle tactics. If Marx, Engels and Lassalle had accepted from Bernstein and his modest or not modest fellow thinkers the tactics of compromise and dependence upon bourgeois parties, then there never would have been any Social Democracy; we would have been simply the tail of the Progressive party.

Liebknecht’s warning fits DSA at the current moment. The Democratic establishment courts DSA because of the energy it has mobilized: tens of thousands of volunteers disillusioned with the status quo. The Democrats see the benefit of dragging that energy back into its fold at a time where the political field favors populists like Trump. DSA’s current strategy is unable to stop this co-option from happening. Horse-trading and strike-breaking ties DSA closer to the Democrats, not the working class. DSA risks becoming exactly what Liebknecht warned of: the tail of the Democratic Party.

Drowning in Procedure

Sid, in a way, sees this risk too:

We have walked (some would say sleepwalked) into the executive office with an incomplete set of tools for managing and communicating the contradictions of power. We have subordinated our political vision to the inner workings of Albany and City Hall.

For DSA, which seeks to be the party of the working class, becoming politically subordinated to the ruling class is a massive political failure! It cannot simply be a result of incomplete tool sets; it's a result of a flawed political strategy. Yet Sid glosses over this to propose simple procedural, and ineffective, solutions.

In their ideal form, socialist-in-office committees can serve as a conduit between electeds and members by democratizing knowledge about the legislative terrain. With that knowledge, members and the leaders elected to represent them can make decisions about what types of compromises we expect DSA’s legislative group to make.

These committees would let members judge each compromise as it comes, which permanently repeats Sid’s mistake. They avoid a critical discussion of the strategy that produces these compromises in the first place. Nor does Sid attempt to concretize how these could make any difference to Mamdani’s actions. Mamdani knew that resuming homeless sweeps would anger the DSA membership, but his reliance on class collaboration means he had to play ball with the ruling class.

Say an SIOC effectively communicates Mamdani's motivations for resuming homeless sweeps to the DSA membership. What does this accomplish? If the membership is convinced and endorses Mamdani’s homeless sweep, this enormously damages DSA’s credibility as a socialist organization. Or the membership opposes the sweeps, and Mamdani does it anyway. Sid himself admits DSA has no leverage over its officials, and the reason should be clear: Mamdani’s political power does not come from the working class or DSA. To believe that better communication can overcome the material pressures of class collaboration is idealism!

Sid’s second solution to avoid becoming the tail of the Democratic Party is as follows:

The working class needs a party—a space where members can develop a collective political vision which transcends the narrow confines of elected office….the next four years will be defined by whether DSA… is able to exert political authority and decision-making power independently, outside of the influence of Zohran Mamdani or any other celebrity politician

But if DSA can only build a workers’ party by becoming independent of DSA’s own elected officials, then the whole strategy that got us here needs to be seriously rethought. As long as DSA keeps electing delivery-focused candidates who seek to “build power” by building careers in the Democratic Party, we will stay tied to the ruling class, and the class line will remain blurred and obscured. Committees, review boards, and political programs detached from DSA’s actual practice cannot change that.

Sid laments that DSA's leadership have allowed Mamdani to call the shots and handed Mamdani a blank check. But this is simply a basic result of abandoning class struggle and building a whole strategy on alliances in the Democratic Party. Sid criticizes the leadership for their “secretive” tendencies, but he never challenges their reliance on class-collaborationist politics. By substituting a political critique for a procedural one, Sid has given DSA's leadership a blank check of his own.

For a Class Struggle DSA

MUG’s 4th point of unity names the bankruptcy of horse-trading as a strategy but MUG fails to put forward a political fight to end the practice. MUG states:

Horse-trading, neutralism, and spineless compromise have failed to truly advance socialist politics. We will always embrace the struggle for political reforms and economic improvements, but we want socialists to conduct that struggle out in the open and win by acting as an intransigent opposition to the ruling class. Instead of cutting backroom deals as a junior coalition partner, socialists can use their platforms to raise the expectations of the working class and mobilize it to force concessions from the capitalists.

If MUG actually wants DSA to become a party of class struggle, it must put forward a political fight to change DSA's strategy from passing legislation and budgets to building a working class organized enough to force reforms from the ruling class.

MUG must recognize that there are immediate obstacles to doing so: The Democratic Party, which offers a tempting way around class struggle, and being tied to politicians who scab on strikes, which obscures DSA’s basis in class struggle. To overcome these obstacles we must break from the Democratic Party, now, before we are drawn closer and closer and end as their progressive tail, and we must fight to expel all strike-breakers, including Mamdani, from DSA.

Nestor D.

ISA-R

NYC-DSA