MUG Members Aliyah VanPelt & Luke Pickrell reflect on the 2023 DSA Convention.
Marxist Unity Group members pose for a group photo in front of the hotel where the 2023 DSA convention took place.
In August, Marxist Unity Group (MUG) gathered in Chicago to participate in our first Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Convention. Half a year has passed and as we move forward into 2024, it is an ideal time to reflect on Convention and its consequences. This article will explore three topics. First, MUG’s goals, including the intention behind our resolutions and National Political Committee (NPC) candidates. Second, the Convention, including a last-minute agenda change and our reporting and media intervention. Finally, the impact of Convention on DSA going forward, including the organization’s response to the ongoing occupation of Palestine, our position heading into next year’s presidential election, and the significance of MUG’s centerpiece resolution, “Winning the Battle for Democracy.” We end on a high note. Despite failing to make the agenda, “Winning the Battle for Democracy” was MUG’s most important and unique contribution to Convention.
A Deliberation of Vision
Marxist Unity Group has its origins in a small slate of delegates and a few written proposals put forward at the 2021 DSA Convention. In many ways, strategizing for the 2023 Convention began as soon as the previous one ended. As we will explain in greater detail, the terrain of the 2021 Convention was wildly different from 2023 – not least of all because the previous Convention was hosted on Zoom rather than in-person. However, many of the questions discussed in 2021 were debated again on a higher level. Looking back at the results of the 2021 Convention allows us to paint a clearer picture of the intervention we made as a new caucus.1
Marxist Unity Slate
The DSA of years past was a constitutional loyalist organization that believed the United States was an imperfect but legitimate democracy. It was assumed that political and social change could and would pass through the Democratic Party and the channels of presidential, congressional, and judicial oversight. But the Democratic Party didn’t shift left, and the Constitution’s various minoritarian checks proved an incomprehensible maze. Neither the DSA nor the North American left could square what to do with the Constitution.
Within this context of repeated defeats, Marxist Unity Slate formed around a Points of Unity statement that explained the need for a mass party independent from the capitalist cartel parties. Programmatic unity, internal ideological diversity, and a revolutionary defeatist approach to internationalism were indispensable.
In the eyes of Marxist Unity Slate, DSA’s size and democratic structure made it the most viable candidate for the future party. DSA’s internal democracy is unique within the American left. Caucuses are allowed, and every two years chapters elect convention delegates who elect a new leadership body, the National Political Committee (NPC). As Mike Macnair points out in Revolutionary Strategy,2
To retain its character as an effective instrument of the proletariat as a class, a workers’ organization must have freedom to organize factions within its ranks. Indeed, the struggle of trends, platforms and factions is a normal and essential means by which its differences are collectivized and unity created out of them. It must be unity in diversity.
Marxist Unity Slate knew that for DSA to become a party capable of abolishing the Slaveholder’s Constitution and realizing a democratic republic, it would have to begin acting like one. DSA would need to democratically commit to this concrete plan of action, but the seeds of change needed to be planted and tended before a harvest could be reaped. Therefore, MUG’s eventual founders entered DSA as Marxist Unity Slate and brought their ideas into the sphere of debate. Their entry was felicitous; the 2021 Convention was defined by the conflict between liquidationist tendencies hoping to continue toeing the neoliberal Democratic Party line on one side, and the elements taking a principled stand for total class independence on the other. This same conflict defines the right and left of DSA today.
Testing the Waters : The 2021 Convention
Marxist Unity Slate put forward several proposals, including a platform amendment, a constitutional amendment, and two independent resolutions. All of the proposals were meant to move DSA toward political independence as a mass party formation: asserting a minimum/maximum program, cohering programmatic unity, and maintaining democratic discipline over the representatives of the party who were to act as Tribunes of the People.
Unfortunately, neither “Tribunes of the People and Democratic Discipline” nor “A Socialist Slate for the House” made it to the debate floor. The first resolution ensured all electoral candidates seeking endorsement were DSA members. If elected, those members would have been mandated to regularly meet with DSA leadership and vote in line with DSA’s platform. Elected members would have been subject to discipline, including suspension of membership or revocation of endorsement if they failed to support the platform (by voting to fund the imperialist military or expand the power of the police, for example). The second resolution would have established a socialist slate for the House. The failure of these two resolutions to get a hearing was a regrettable (if not unexpected) outcome. DSA continues to display a certain degree of ambivalence toward holding politicians accountable, and this uncertainty could have been clarified through a principled debate. Passing these two resolutions would have strengthened our electoral work.
The most significant outcome of the 2021 Convention was a vote to adopt a political platform.3 Marxist Unity Slate proposed an amendment to the platform, “Winning the Battle for Democracy,”4 to clarify and deepen the document’s impressive democratic bona fides. First, the title of the program’s political section, “Deepening and Strengthening Democracy,” contradicted a later statement that the United States is “no democracy at all.” However, by recognizing that fact, even if inconsistently, the DSA took an important step toward meaningfully challenging the US Constitution. Second, while the political section accurately dissected the undemocratic state and called for a second constitutional convention, it failed to identify a democratic republic as the alternative. Third, while naming the Supreme Court and lower judiciary as potent checks on popular expression, the platform missed an opportunity to denounce the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review. The amendment added language about holding elected officials accountable and called for dismantling the standing army and establishing a universal militia controlled by the people’s legislature. Unfortunately, this amendment did not make it to the Convention floor.
The only proposal deliberated over and voted on was the constitutional amendment, “Defining the Role of DSA’s National Political Platform” (CB8). The amendment asked that Article 3, Section 1 of the Platform (“Membership shall be open to every person who subscribes to the principles of the organization”) be amended to state:
Membership shall be open to every person who accepts the national political platform of the organization. Acceptance does not mean agreement with every point of the platform, and members are free to organize within DSA to make specific changes to the platform. Rather, it means committing to fight for the platform as the overall expression of the movement’s aims.
In response to critics, Marxist Unity Slate member Parker McQueeney explained that “by concretizing the vague and undefined ‘principles of the organization,’ CB8 helps to prevent groundless purges. Under the current language, anything can be pointed to as violating ‘DSA principles.” McQueeney’s support was published in Cosmonaut Magazine ahead of the DSA Convention.5 As he explained, the amendment sought to organize DSA around programmatic unity by making acceptance of the platform the basis for membership. While the amendment failed, it won a promising 35% of the vote and showed that DSA was fertile ground for the political ideas that MUG would later advance. With that, the seeds were planted.
What Was to be Done?
Flash forward, and Marxist Unity Group has emerged as an official caucus with a cadre organized around seven Points of Unity:6
- Political Independence: We want DSA to free itself from the Democratic Party and all other capitalist influences.
- Programmatic Unity: We want DSA’s platform to guide its political work.
- Electoral Discipline: We want socialist electoral candidates to represent the socialist movement.
- Nationwide Struggle: We want socialists to treat US politics as a nationwide struggle for power.
- Fight the Imperial Police State: We want socialists to challenge the repressive structures of the capitalist state.
- Fight the Constitution: We want socialists to fight to overthrow the Constitution.
- Demand a New Republic: We want to win a democratic socialist republic in North America.
Our immediate tasks include fighting for independence from the Democratic Party, organizing disciplined blocs of socialist representatives, creating a rich and nondogmatic intellectual culture, and merging socialist politics with the day-to-day struggles of the working class. Going into the 2023 DSA Convention, MUG wanted the DSA to embrace these points of unity and immediate tasks. We hoped to strengthen relationships with other partyist caucuses, engage in debate, and generally embody the organizational approach of unity in diversity. We hoped to build a polemical literary and journalistic culture and advance socialist class struggle. We aimed to bolster the democratic character of the organization, work in coalition with others who wanted class independence, and move DSA in a boldly revolutionary direction. Finally, we hoped to elect MUG members to the NPC (DSA’s highest leadership body) and lobby in favor of other NPC candidates who represented the rising tide of partyism.
DSA has been opaque to members and nonmembers alike, mainly due to problems of infrastructure and resource allocation. For an organization that defines itself by its commitment to democracy, this is a devastating concern, as democracy requires transparency. Without space in publications for member-submitted polemics, important debates happening within the organization take place in private group chats, through social media platforms with dubious algorithmic motives and flattening character limits, and the backrooms of online forums that are cliquish and underutilized. These platforms create a dissonance between, on the one hand, the standards of democracy, inclusivity and accessibility DSA prides itself on, and, on the other hand, the realities of bureaucratic gatekeeping and lowest common denominator discourse. This leads to under-informed discussion – chapters often lack a good sense of what is going on in other chapters, and many members feel shut out of DSA’s national politics due to a lack of time and energy. Heading into the 2023 convention, MUG hoped to establish a centralized, member-controlled Editorial Board with the ability to form subcommittees. This board would revitalize the Democratic Left and Socialist Forum publications. As MUG member Jack Lundquist pointed out in Stories Set Our Movement on Fire!, “all effective social movements utilized mass media in their struggle for a better world.”7 Toward this end, MUG members co-authored the resolution “For a Political, Prolific and Democratic DSA Editorial Board.”8
We also wanted to inspire convention delegates through on-the-ground reporting, analysis, and publicized polemics. To do this, we decided to publish a daily bulletin. This bulletin would be a mouthpiece for our caucus’ positions on convention business: it would report on relevant debates and their outcomes, advance comprehension on the floor, and document the Convention’s events for posterity. We would distribute these bulletins to everyone at the Convention and publish them online. The bulletins wouldn’t be the only literature we would distribute. Delegates affiliated with the production team at Cosmonaut would sell and distribute copies of MUG’s book Fight the Constitution: For a Democratic Socialist Republic.9 The book is a collection of member-written essays that deliberate on our Points of Unity and their theoretical foundation. It presents a range of our views on democracy and the state, the party and program, labor and unions, and electoral strategy. The book would introduce MUG to delegates and spread our central perspectives, facilitating discussion about our ideas.
To advance our politics at the national level and impact internal politics for the next two years, we would need to elect members to the NPC. MUG nominated two leading members: Rashad X, a black Marxist from Northeastern Illinois, and Amy Wilhelm, a trans Seattle-based Marxist. Rashad and Amy’s political and organizational experience made them the best fit for the role. Rashad served as co-chair of Lakefront DSA, the chair of the Poli-Ed Working Group of the Afrosocialist and Socialist of Color Caucus, and on the Steering Committee of the Growth and Development Committee. Amy has a background in tenant organization and base-building, and served as the co-chair of one of the largest DSA chapters in the country. Amy and Rashad would run for NPC on a three-point platform: to follow DSA’s anti-imperialist platform consistently and unapologetically, to center DSA’s platform commitment to winning the battle for democracy, and to transform DSA into an independent mass socialist party.
We would advance other resolutions to begin transforming DSA “into a principled, self-reliant, democratic membership party.”10 To this end, we worked closely with Reform and Revolution, another Marxist caucus in the DSA, to produce five additional resolutions and constitutional/bylaw amendments.11 “On the Votes of DSA Congressmembers to Fund the Israeli Military and Ban a Railway Workers Strike” sought censorship of Jamaal Bowman for supporting Iron Dome funding. It opposed Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Bowman’s vote to ban railroad workers from striking in November 2022, and would establish an expectation for how DSA members elected to public office should vote in the future. “Socialist Anti-Militarism and the War in Ukraine” called on local chapters to get involved in the International Commitee’s anti-imperialist activism and for DSA members to reject military funding. It voiced solidarity with the Russian anti-war movement, opposition to NATO, and called for self-determination of the people of Ukraine and the Russian speakers of the Donbas and Crimea. The resolution also set an expectation for the NPC to meet with congress members and insist that they adopt these positions. “Strengthening Democracy by Strengthening DSA’s Elected Leadership” guaranteed a stipend for each NPC member and the two YDSA members on the NPC, allowing members to spend more time doing DSA work. Without NPC membership being a paid position, only members with time and money are functionally eligible. “Strengthening Democracy by Increasing Member Input and Creating a National Delegates Council” would have held the NPC accountable to rank-and-file membership by creating a National Delegates Council (NDC). This council would convene a pseudo-convention once every six months and whenever locals called a special convention. The NDC would be an intermediary between locals and the national organization, making meta-operations more transparent to all members. Lastly, “Towards a Party-Like Electoral Strategy” reiterated the 2019 Convention’s struggle elections strategy12 and commitment to “building political organization independent of the Democratic Party and their capitalist donors.” The resolution sought to concretize prior electoral commitments by advancing a “party surrogate” framework for electoral work. It would also create mechanisms of accountability for candidates endorsed by DSA: if candidates broke with DSA’s principles in messaging or by vote, they would be subject to redress through local chapters or the NPC.
The last resolution we put forward was “Winning the Battle for Democracy.”13 Like its namesake proposition, it explained the undemocratic nature of the US Constitution including the unelected Supreme Court and the petty-monarchic presidency with the Electoral College that appoints it. The resolution committed DSA to finishing Reconstruction and establishing a democratic republic via a constitutional convention. With this bold and uncompromising proposal, we would concretize a vision for attaining a genuine revolution in the USA.
Salvaging the Convention
As Donald Parkinson pointed out in 2021:14
In the modern Left, conventions…tend to be places where organizations consolidate and confirm their internal political processes, rather than places where real political development occurs…This is especially true of the 2021 DSA Convention, held through a mix of Zoom video conferencing and Airtable voting forms, rather than actual face-to-face meetings among comrades. Little debate seemed to occur at all, with each resolution typically having three brief speakers for and against the proposal. Most of the actual deliberation and adjudication occurred online before the convention in the backroom channels of various caucuses, with the convention simply formalizing decisions already made.
We were excited to put debate at the forefront of our convention debut. MUG holds debate as a central democratic value, and debate was crucial in 2023. Many important strategic questions were unresolved, and most debate was happening online and without a democratic consensus.
Each resolution required 300 signatures to be considered for the floor, and many of our resolutions passed that threshold. In total, 30 amendments and resolutions were eligible for debate. There were many diverse proposals about the direction and actions the organization should take, and hundreds of delegates read through and engaged with the material.
Delegates voted to determine the agenda, and voters were given two criteria for each resolution: Do you support this resolution? Do you want to see it debated? After the vote was tallied, an agenda was determined based on which resolutions received the most YES votes on both criteria. This posed a serious problem for the Convention: the agenda consisted mainly of questions that already had resounding and near-universal support, while controversial questions were excluded. Many delegates were frustrated and decided something needed to be done.
We were determined to salvage the agenda and ensure that the convention floor would not be depoliticized. A new agenda had to be put together, and quickly – but there were a few points of contention that made this a difficult task.
Historically at DSA conventions, when an unpopular agenda was offered to delegates, attempts to amend them were fraught with difficulty. A procedural motion to amend the agenda must be called, and typically the delegation floor is hostile to such procedural motions, as they can suck up time and leave less opportunity to debate political resolutions. Further, in order to pass an agenda change, you have to build majority buy-in. When there are so many tendencies who all want to see their priorities considered, and so little time to whip voters to the cause, a majority is very difficult to achieve. However, we would not let the difficulty faze us. We would approach the problem strategically.
In a move that reflected our commitment to unity in diversity within the DSA, a coalition of the various “left” caucuses was assembled. Three DSA leaders (Annie of MUG, Sarah of Reform & Revolution, and Tom of Libertarian Socialist Caucus) came together to strategize on how to achieve a repoliticized agenda. Annie said of their approach:
The thinking was this: we need to bring everyone to the table. People who have a lot of intense personal conflict and wildly varying politics will have to work together on one agenda that they could all back.
The agenda change would pass or fail, but at least there wouldn’t be multiple agendas competing, which would waste valuable deliberation time and alienate the floor. They called together members from Bread and Roses, Communist Caucus, Red Star, Red Labor, and the BDS Working Group to discuss what each groups’ priorities were, and to decide on an agenda where everyone’s “must-haves” could have their time on the floor. Each representative then returned to their group and rallied them for the agenda change: if all went to plan, these representatives hoped they could achieve majority support. Not everyone was able to get all of their priorities onto the final agenda draft, but still, every representative came out of deliberation in support of the proposal. Annie said:
The most important thing for our members was having politically substantive debate and people seemed less strict about the specifics, which really helped us play that role of coordinating. We were flexible about what it might look like, but we just wanted a real convention.
On top of our advocacy for MUG-supported resolutions and NPC candidates, we spent the time leading up to the Convention rallying support for this agenda change and pulling members into our coalition – the agenda change would be the first item on the floor. Before long, the weekend of Convention had arrived. We were off to the races.
A Determinate Intervention
As soon as we arrived in Chicago, we set to work continuing to build buy-in for our agenda change proposal. Our plan did not proceed without pushback. MUG members began to hear that some members on the loosely-defined “right” of the DSA were of the opinion that our attempt was an undemocratic power-grab. We rejected this assertion. Our reasoning was that we were a multi-tendency organization, that it was important for delegates to debate what most mattered to them, and that we would be wasting our time only deliberating on the questions that already had majority support. Others had a different read: essentially, that by forwarding a procedural motion, we would be inviting a variety of other procedural motions, creating chaos on the floor. This nearly became the case – there was another alternative motion on the table, and our concern was that this would hamper our efforts, and that both motions would fail. According to Annie, “we persuaded those people that it wasn’t viable and we needed there to be only one motion. They were team players about it and withdrew their motion.” There was significant debate on the convention floor, and we weren’t sure what to expect, since the room seemed split on the issue. When the vote came in, we celebrated our first (and perhaps our greatest) success of the Convention: the motion to adopt our alternate agenda passed by 53%, winning 476 votes in favor and 415 opposed! Staff and delegation took a break to restructure around the new agenda, and we prepared for an exciting, and indeed, political Convention.
With many of our resolutions now up for consideration, we intended to use our bulletin production apparatus to maximum effect. Our production team was settled into their AirBnB, and after resolving some technical issues (the first rented printer broke, and they needed to rush to a print shop to print bulletins for Day 1), they got to work soliciting articles from MUG members and formatting them into a newspaper that became cheekily regarded as the “Daily MUG.” Some articles, those polemicizing in favor of our various resolutions, were drafted as early as two months ahead of time. Others were responding to events on the convention floor, and were written in the evening and formatted for the bulletin in the wee hours of the night.15 It was a grind, but the product was beautiful, and it no doubt reflected our commitment to literary polemic and principled debate.
Each day was filled with principled debate, and we saw impassioned speeches for and against each resolution. Each morning we would distribute about a thousand bulletins to delegates as they made their way in and out of the voting hall, and each evening we would gather in the lobby to deliberate and vote on how to proceed with regard to the events of the day before dispersing to attend various events to whip for our NPC candidates or return to our lodgings to write. The weekend was a whirlwind, with moments of drama and intrigue that we won’t elaborate on here (Cosmonaut is no gossip rag, after all), and at the end of the weekend, we all found ourselves exhausted. Our energy was not wasted – we saw huge successes even beyond our triumph in amending the agenda.
We were successfully able to vote down “Democratize DSA.”16 This resolution would have tripled the size of the NPC and led to chaos. Instead, “Launching a Democracy Commission for DSA” was passed. Per the resolution, the Democracy Commission will, among other duties, investigate the structures of other parties and political organizations from around the world which are organized on a democratic basis.
“For a Political, Prolific, and Democratic Editorial Board” was placed on the consent agenda and passed. As a result, Socialist Forum will be revitalized as an “in-depth party publication that is actively engaged with by DSA members and presents wide-ranging political discussion and debate by DSA members on important strategic questions Meanwhile, Democratic Left will serve as a agitational publication geared towards current and future members of the wider U.S. left. Members will have centralized and democratically-controlled organs of information and discourse, and play an active role in writing articles or volunteering to complete production tasks.
We also celebrated the passing of “A Fighting Campaign for Reproductive Rights and Trans Liberation.”17 This pertinent resolution commits the DSA to the struggle for bodily autonomy from all angles.The NPC will coordinate a national campaign with chapters and elected officials on “ballot initiatives, legislative bills, and public pressure to advance bodily autonomy.” It will create the structures necessary for this sort of campaign, potentially by establishing a national working group open to the whole of membership. With the passing of this resolution, all hands will be on deck in support of our trans comrades and all of those seeking bodily autonomy, especially related to the reproductive rights currently under vicious attack all over the country.
These are major victories, but we saw defeats as well. “Towards a Party-Like Electoral Strategy” failed, which disappointed all of us. However, it saw 40% support in 2023, a very substantial minority, where a similar resolution received only 35% support in 2021. We saw this through an optimistic lens: while the majority of DSA was not yet on board with this proposal, the idea of a party-like electoral strategy was continuing to gain steam within the organization and could realistically achieve organizational hegemony in the coming years.
This was only reinforced by the fact that a different amendment to CR#6, “Act Like An Independent Party,”16 passed with flying colors (with 704 in favor and 184 opposed). The resolution asserted that DSA
wants to build a party-like organization (a ‘proto-party’ or ‘surrogate party’) that unites all our candidates around a single strategy and platform. We also want to build a base of people who believe in our project, identify with it, and fight for it.
It continued:
It is not advisable for us to form an independent political party with its own ballot line at this moment. But there are intermediate steps we can take to assert our independence from the politics of the Democratic Party leadership and build a party-like structure.
While the resolution’s commitments to DSA were less substantial than “…Party-Like…” we were proud to support it on the floor, and its extreme popularity proves that the clear majority of DSA is committed to assuming a proto-party formation, and to a “dirty break” from both cartel parties. We saw this as a resounding success for our own political line, as well as for the socialist movement in the USA broadly.
By the final day of the Convention, we were flying high on these victories. We felt incredibly optimistic about the direction our organization was taking, further resolved in our ambitious vision for the organization, and proud of the coalition we were able to put together to ensure that the Convention was democratic, member-driven, and explicitly political. However, there was one last battle ahead: the NPC election.
We’d all placed our votes and woke anxiously anticipating the results. With little but vibes to inform us, we felt that our whipping efforts were successful, and in conversation with other delegates saw that our candidates were widely popular. However, we were still shocked (and frankly, overjoyed,) when we saw the election results come in: both of our candidates were elected to the NPC. This amounted to our caucus achieving 13% control of the NPC. Not only that, but the DSA-rightist hegemony over the NPC was no longer, with much of membership celebrating the newly cemented “left majority” on the NPC. Needless to say, when saying our goodbyes, toasting our MUG Mugs, and finally departing from Chicago, reality started to set in: our work in the DSA was truly just beginning.
Horizons Abstract and Concrete
Following the Convention, we wanted to utilize our momentum to ensure that the new positions established within DSA could be used to further our understanding of democracy and our vision for the socialist movement in the USA. We put up candidates for the Democracy Commission and the new Editorial Board and were pleased to see many of them elected.
MUG Members Connell Heady and Nicholas Woodfin have joined the Democracy Commission. They will prioritize membership control over unelected staff and protect DSA’s multi-tendency nature by mandating proportional voting and avoiding conflicts of interest on the convention committee. The authors’ hope is that they can successfully incorporate anti-Constitutional polemic into their work, furthering our specific revolutionary vision within the organization.
Two MUG members ran for the Editorial Board: Cliff Connolly and Donald Parkinson. It was an extremely tight election with many highly experienced candidates. Despite the fierce competition, we were proud to see Donald Parkinson elected to the board. As the editor-in-chief at Cosmonaut, he has facilitated years of multi-tendency polemic on the left while helping make Cosmonaut the preeminent publication for advancing the perspective of scientific socialism.. The Editorial Board is in excellent hands, and the revitalization of DSA’s publications will see the same open debate and diversity of opinion found in Cosmonaut.
These are facts to celebrate. However, there were some failures at the Convention that already have seen devastating effects, and it would be dishonest and foolish not to boldly assert these failures as such.
At Convention, DSA passed one resolution addressing the BDS movement and the organization’s stance on the ongoing struggle for Palestinian liberation. The resolution “BDS Working Group to International Committee” reaffirmed DSA’s “commitment to the BDS movement and organizing toward Palestinian liberation and political and social equality between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.” However, this resolution was overshadowed by moves made by the International Committee (IC) and NPC to fold the BDS Working Group into the IC – this decision precipitated the BDS Working Group’s decision to dissolve and leave DSA.
MUG’s anti-imperialist resolution, co-authored with Reform & Revolution, didn’t make it onto the convention agenda. The resolution called on DSA to “place itself at the forefront of the movement against war and imperialism and for members of DSA elected to public office to reject all budgets that fuel the US war machine as well as military aid to US proxy states such as Ukraine and the Zionist apartheid state of Israel.” After the events on October 7 escalated Israel’s attack on Gaza, DSA members sprang to action, but there wasn’t a clear consensus around how to relate to the question of Zionism; passing this resolution would have facilitated clarity. Now, at the end of the year, after seeing 5% of all Palestinians pronounced dead or missing under the rubble, with millions displaced from their homes and no less than 98% in Gaza experiencing life-threatening starvation, the majority of Americans support a ceasefire.18 On Christmas Eve, Bethlehem was ruthlessly bombed, shocking even some of the most reactionary sections of American Evangelicals who typically support Israel with perversely religious zeal. And yet, for this majoritarian support, we have little opportunity to keep our government from spending our own tax dollars on the ongoing genocide. Sure, we can protest, and we can call our representatives – indeed, we have, and we will. However, billions of US dollars continue to flow into Israel to aid in the slaughter.
The DSA and Beyond: Toward the Democratic Republic
The 2023 Convention lacked a conversation about the contradictions in DSA’s platform. For now, declarations that “undemocratic institutions like the Senate and the Electoral College” render it “impossible for the will of the majority to be expressed” sit alongside references to the “little democracy we have” and calls to pass bills through the Senate. Criticism of the Democratic Party and its steadfast refusal to address popular concerns is absent. This eclecticism reflects a split in the organization between three political positions: reformists, who think we live in a democracy; communists, who think it doesn’t matter; and democratic republicanism, which asserts that we don’t live in a democracy and that the US must become one for socialism to be possible. Different political strategies toward the presidential elections represent these three political positions: support Biden against Trump, call for an independent working class party based on “socialism,” or use every opportunity to criticize the slaveholder’s Constitution and both parties’ hatred of democracy.
The Democratic Party is attempting to ward off Donald Trump and maintain a grip on the imperial presidency by posing as defenders of democracy. Last year, Joe Biden warned an audience that “if the Democrats don’t own the presidency, we’re going to find ourselves in the position where democracy is… literally at stake.”19 While overseeing the transfer of responsibility of chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff (the highest-ranking member of the U.S. military), Biden remarked that the Constitution had been the departing chairman’s “North Star.”20 Alluding to Trump’s attempted coup, he reminded listeners that the military declares loyalty not to “one person or political party… but to the idea of America”21 as embodied in the Constitution.
The Democrats’ message is clear. Donald Trump and the MAGA movement want to destroy democracy. Trump is an aspiring dictator who demands that all officials, including the military high command, swear an oath to him alone. Only a vote for Biden and the Democratic Party will neutralize Trump and the MAGA movement because only Biden and the Democrats will respect the Constitution, maintain the division of powers between the branches of government, and ensure the sun keeps rising each morning.
But here’s the rub: the Democrats have done nothing to make themselves popular, and their most coherent “strategy” as November looms is to remove Trump from the ballot and continue fear-mongering. Americans’ views of politics and elected officials are “unrelentingly negative, with little hope of improvement on the horizon.” Most people hold both parties and all branches of government in low regard. Asked to describe the current state of politics, respondents to a recent Pew Poll answered with words like “divisive,” “corrupt,” and “messy.” 22
Trump’s MAGA movement has bolstered reaction and further distorted an already dishonest media establishment. But faith in the Constitution as a source of power against the far-right is misguided. Even liberal pundits are starting to doubt the wisdom of the Framers and the country’s founding document.23 The rules of the political playing field established by the Constitution cannot stop a minoritarian movement. In fact, the Constitution empowers political minorities.24
In the face of mass political apathy and growing discontent, a Democratic Party that continues to distort and manipulate the meaning of “democracy” for its own purposes, and an increasingly right-wing Republican Party, DSA must put forward its vision of a political alternative to the current constitutional regime. However, we’ve abdicated the responsibility of presenting an alternative in two ways: by supporting the Constitution through uncritical alliances with the democratic Party and by making abstract demands for a “socialist revolution” or “communism.”
We will defeat the far-right by denouncing our unpopular institutions and proposing real democracy, not by allying with the Democratic Party to defend our increasingly unpopular institutions. This position, based on the classical Marxist strategy,25 was affirmed in the Perspectives document passed at our annual congress: “Marxist Unity Group advocates for DSA to use the election to expose the anti-democratic nature of the two-party system, the Electoral College, and the presidency itself.”26
The question of political power drives everything else forward and gives us the following and the resources necessary to deal with every other issue coherently.27 Labor, ecology, health, education, housing, criminal justice, trans rights, international affairs — DSA members are active in many struggles, all of which come down to who has the power to make the laws in society. Though only one small step in a long march, a resolution like “Winning the Battle for Democracy” will remain relevant for the foreseeable future; so, here’s to a new Constitution and a more politically coherent and independent DSA, and here’s to the many years of struggle ahead.
- One of the slate’s delegates (and founding MUG member), Donald Parkinson, wrote a detailed overview of the results of the 2021 Convention, The Fight for a Marxist Program in the DSA, which offers more context than our brief summary here.
- Mike Macnair. Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity, 110. London: November Publications Ltd., 2008.
- DSA Political Platform
- DSA Platform Amendment
- Give the Platform Legs to Stand: The Case for CB8
- marxistunity
- Stories Set Our Movement on Fire!
- DSA Editorial Board Resolution
- The book is available for purchase on the Cosmonaut web shop: Fight the Constitution: Selected Writings from Marxist Unity Group
- For an Independent Socialist Movement: An Open Letter to the Democratic Socialists in Congress
- You can find all proposals for the 2023 DSA Convention here: https://s3.amazonaws.com/actionkit-dsausa/dsa/2023_DSA_Convention_Compendium_Updated.pdf
- Resolution #31 Class Struggle Elections
- Winning the Battle for Democracy
- Donald Parkinson, op. cit.
- You can read all of the Convention Bulletin articles on our website. Many of the articles are bulletin exclusives and contain written commentary on a wide range of topics expanding beyond convention business. https://www.marxistunity.com/convention-archive
- 2023 DSA Convention Compendium
- Stand Alone Resolution: A Fighting Campaign for Reproductive Rights and Trans Liberation
- Voters Want the U.S. to Call for a Permanent Ceasefire in Gaza
- Remarks by President Biden at a Campaign Reception.” The White House. Sept 28, 2023. https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2023/09/28/remarks-by-president-biden-at-a-campaign-reception-tempe-az/
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“U.S. Constitution at Center of Military Transfer of Responsibility Ceremony.” The Department of Defense. Sept 29, 2023.
https://www.defense.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/3543934/us-constitution-at-center-of-military-transfer-of-responsibility-ceremony/
- ibid
- “Americans’ Dismal Views of the Nation’s Politics.” Pew Research. Sept 19, 2023.
- Jamelle Bouie. “What if the Framers Got Something Wrong?” New York Times, Sept 29, 2023. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/29/opinion/minority-rule-countermajoritarianism.html
- The ways in which the Constitution empowers the Republican Party are described by Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt. Tyranny of the Minority: Why American Democracy Reached the Breaking Point. New York City: Crown, 2023. At one point, they ask the reader to “Imagine an American born in 1980 who first voted in 1998 or 2000. The Democrats would have won the popular vote in every six-year cycle in the U.S. Senate and all but one presidential election during her adult lifetime. And yet she would have lived most of her adult life under Republican presidents, a Republican-controlled Senate, and a Supreme Court dominated by Republican appointees. How much faith should she have in our democracy?” This anonymous American would also have spent twenty years of her life under the shadow of the War in Afghanistan, suffered through the 2007-08 financial crisis, watched the Supreme Court overturn abortion access and block a tepid plan for student loan forgiveness, and perhaps have read about Biden’s attempt to fund Israel’s genocide of Palestinians in secret. She’d have had no say in determining any of these events.
- Some representative statements of the classical Marxist strategy are the following. From The Principles of Communism:” What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat.” From The Communist Manifesto: “We have seen above, that the first step in the revolution by the working class is to raise the proletariat to the position of ruling class, to win the battle of democracy.” From Demands of the German Communist Party: “The whole of Germany shall be declared a single and indivisible republic,” and “Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and be elected….” From Critique of the Draft [German] Social-Democratic Program of 1891: “First, If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form of the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.” From Reply to Bovio: “Marx and I, for forty years, repeated ad nauseam that for us the democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalized and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.” From Programme of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party of 1903: “Therefore, the RSDLP takes as its most immediate political task the overthrow of the Tsarist autocracy and its replacement by a democratic republic, the constitution of which would ensure: Sovereignty of the people—that is, concentration of supreme state power wholly in the hands of a legislative assembly consisting of representatives of the people and forming a single chamber. Universal, equal and direct suffrage, in elections both to the legislative assembly and to all local organs of self-government…” Finally, from the American Socialist Party Platform of 1912: “The abolition of the Senate and the veto power of the President,” “The election of the President and Vice-President by direct vote of the people,” and “The abolition of the power usurped by the Supreme Court of the United States to pass upon the constitutionality of the legislation enacted by Congress.”
- Marxist Unity Perspectives 2023
- This is paraphrasing a statement made by Gil Shaeffer.