The time has come, the bell is rung—where is the party? From the floor of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) convention this year, you would think there were several. With the regalia of DSA’s many internal factions on array, observers were baffled by the efflorescence. New delegates hastily consumed caucus guides that, even the best, contain only cryptic clues for interpreting signs and symbols. A sea of roses, keffiyehs, Labubus, and lanyards adorned with scores of pins. Shades of saturated red and green, pale blue, dark purple, cream with red and blue icing. A playing card with a snail inviting you to support internationalism. Literal party invitations indicating signs of collaboration on the floor: a shared Communist Caucus and Bread & Roses (B&R) party put out trays of loose cigarettes for their guests to sample.

One international journalist experienced these displays as a sign of stagnation,^[1] worried that they mark out DSA more as a fragmented political subculture than a party. That is silly, at first appraisal. Moving from disagreement to consensus is the entire work of a democratic convention. The DSA took a decisive step to the left this biennial. Deliberations showed, however, that no one caucus defined its direction. Each caucus was, at best, able to secure their priorities but faltered in fights outside those priorities. Bread & Roses got rank-and-file reform but not a co-chair seat; MUG and R&R got party principles but not a platform or industrial labor strategy; Groundwork and Socialist Majority Caucus got commitments to national electoral campaigns but not national-wide polling; Springs of Revolution, the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, and Red Star won their co-chair seat and red lines for anti-Zionism but not uniform electoral discipline.

I am simplifying, so to extend these examples, the brass tacks of what was done at convention and why. I argue that they demonstrate not just the expected level of required compromise for a convention but an organizational impasse related to the forms of the caucuses themselves.

Democracy by Bundle

One of the first resolutions passed by the convention, CB1, was an omnibus proposed by the Democracy Commission, comprising ten distinct planks. The 2023 convention appointed the twenty-one-member commission to research chapter bylaws, as well as union and international socialist parties’ democratic practice, to return with structural improvements for DSA as a whole (their report is available). The omnibus contained an archives policy; abolition of “constitutional” membership for members whose dues lapse (this created an enormous administrative and data nightmare); standards for national commissions; and a repeal to the ban on “democratic centralism”—a holdover from DSA’s anti-communist period and a ward against entryism by external groups.

Most controversial, however, was the Commission’s recommendation that its same members be reappointed for another two-year term and that the National Political Committee (NPC) be expanded from sixteen to twenty-five. Some caucuses, like Groundwork and Socialist Majority Caucus, had pushed for a massive increase in NPC size, from sixteen to fifty-one in 2023, and this was the compromise reached two years later.

The Red Star caucus, out of principle, attempted to “divide the question” to have CB1-6 “Changes to the National Political Committee” and CB1-9 “Reauthorizing the Democracy Commission” removed from the omnibus and deliberated separately. Arguments from the floor and a Red Star caucus statement claimed the Democracy Commission had become a secretive horse-trading body, with the expectation that the convention would pass the commission’s bundled recommendations: “The Omnibus doesn’t represent a groundbreaking achievement in overcoming DSA factionalism, as some of its proponents would suggest, but rather an entrenchment and formalization of the wheeling and dealing that National DSA politics already overly incentivizes.” Delegates also pointed out the irony of an elected Democracy Commission suggesting their own unelected reappointment and worried it set a bad precedent for future national commission work. And most of the arguments against dividing the omnibus centered on the waste of time this procedural maneuver took from the (already time-strapped) convention agenda and additional invalidation of the Democracy Commission’s process that would result—that is, they avoided the content of the proposal to instead critique its form.

Looking to the report itself, I can understand Red Star’s concerns—the report’s conclusions contain many commissioners’ personal reflections in bare bullet lists, while the recommendations never spell out a rationale for many of the resolutions actually contained in the omnibus, including CB1-6 and CB1-9. The sheer leap between the commission’s omnibus and its own documented work undermines the justification for the former via the latter. The omnibus passed, however. Delegates indicated that they trusted national bodies like the Democracy Commission, and so its use as a machine for the manufacturing of consent will continue unto the next convention, unless its course is adjusted.

One Member, One Vote?

Reform efforts in US labor unions like the UAW have focused on securing “one member, one vote” (1M1V) provisions for their national memberships, as a way of revitalizing anemic union democracy. Shawn Fain, famously, was elected after just such a successful reform. Inspired by those changes, Groundwork brought two superficially similar resolutions to convention—one member, one vote for NPC elections, and the same for federal election endorsements. Currently, the NPC are elected by the convention delegates (and so, only indirectly by membership at large), and federal endorsements exist in a gray area where candidates could seek national endorsement from the NPC or local endorsement from their relevant chapter. (A Springs of Revolution attempt to resolve that ambiguity by unifying national and local endorsements, CR05-A02: One DSA, Toward a Unified Endorsement Process, failed on the floor.)

While 1M1V would theoretically produce national DSA efforts that are more representative of the whole membership, in practice it would likely have moved national DSA towards representing the moderate wing. The left tendencies are smaller and more fragmented across caucuses, with less capacity for an internal national campaign, which is why they supported and passed a resolution mandating ranked-choice voting for future delegate elections. In contrast, neither of the 1M1V resolutions survived convention. For the federal endorsement resolution, members had been warned that the parliamentarian retained by the convention suggested it was out of order. He explained that DSA’s constitution contains an article for polls, Article XIII, which specifies that national polls of membership require a petition of “one-half (½) of the Chapters or one-third (⅓) of the members.” The federal resolution contained no provisions about a petition requirement and so violated that part of our constitution. To pass, the federal resolution would instead have to pass as a constitutional amendment, with a higher bar of passage of ⅔ instead of a majority, which its sponsors did not pursue.

So, when in the deliberation for the convention agenda, the chair ruled that resolution out of order and threw it out. An attempt to overturn the chair’s decision by Groundwork failed on the floor and set the tone for a contentious and cantankerous first day, as the moderate wing of DSA let its discontent be known by repeatedly calling for agenda amendments, votes to overturn the chair, or even in debate referring to delegates opposed to 1M1V as landed gentry comparable to the US’ founding slavers (which was received by a chorus of boos).

CB02: One Member, One Vote for National Leadership Elections was the second business item deliberated by the convention and was voted down by a supermajority, 736–487. Groundwork caucus members had argued that NPC elections encourage delegates to cast votes on national issues with little information about candidates. In addition, they claimed that DSA’s convention system prevents smaller chapters from being represented on the NPC. The moderate labor caucus, Bread & Roses, however, pointed to members’ experience in Detroit, where 1M1V methods actually prevented deliberation by pushing decision-making to inbox polls and favoring large-scale whipping operations (which, realistically, only significant caucuses are able to undertake). The delegates, also likely unwilling to reduce their own influence in DSA, agreed with B&R.

Memories of a Budget Crisis

The convention also attempted to set an institutional response to the DSA’s budget crisis, which had immediately set the results of the 2023 convention into disarray as the NPC cut resources, staff, and support in a desperate attempt to keep the lights on (as foretold by Metro DC members Gary Z and Shane K in the Washington Socialist). Two resolutions attempted to solidify the lessons learned from the political battle over whether DSA should prioritize preserving staff or member resources first: R27: “Staff Relationship to Members in a Democratic Organization” and R44: “Resolution on Staff, Contractors, and Budgeting.” R27 reaffirmed that DSA is a membership organization and that democratically elected members should always receive information and support from staff, who should not use their special position within the organization to push their political views. Debate for this straightforward proposal was entirely a proxy for political views on the budget crisis: R27 passed with a narrow but significant majority, 683–494.

The more toothsome R44 would have created explicit staff budget limits for national DSA and created a financial oversight function for the convention, which would have to pass a biennial budget. Delegates arguing for R44 emphasized fiscal responsibility and democratic oversight, while opponents claimed that R44 would force the NPC to freeze or fire staff or violate the DSA staff union’s collective bargaining agreement. Unfortunately, R44’s sole sponsor seems to have been disconnected from comrades working on national budgeting, who proposed a friendly amendment, R44-A01, that would slightly loosen the requirements and make the idea of convention passing a budget—a necessarily unruly and contentious document—more reasonable. Because R44-A01 wasn’t incorporated into R44 ahead of time, the vote for R44 took place after an extended period of deliberation on the frustrating first day, when OpenSlides broke often and the chairs were overwhelmed by their inability to roll-call for narrow votes.

In a vote that could easily have been reversed if any of the 21 abstentions had made a decision or the 114 delegates missing from the floor had been present, R44 failed by a mere eleven votes, 594–583. The next day, in response to a delegate’s request, the staff union released a statement that R44 would not, indeed, violate their collective bargaining agreement with DSA, contrary to the fearmongering on the floor. But it was too late. A potential motion to reconsider R44 loomed over the later deliberation sessions but never materialized. As a result, the 2025 DSA convention resolved to not learn much of anything from our budget crisis, and we are left open to another future budgeting crisis should membership experience a similar decline or the NPC incorrectly estimate future growth in its budgeting.

Directing the Rank-and-File Strategy

This divide over the role of staff is reflected in DSA’s labor organizing as well, spelled out in a recent debate between Henry De Groot, who’s criticized UAW’s crackdown on reform staff, and a Bread and Roses caucus member’s reply that staff do have an important role to play in the rank-and-file strategy. The substantial, but declining, influence of B&R as a labor-focused caucus was visible both in their failed bid for a national co-chair seat, but also the fact that the clearest labor strategy deliberated at convention, the Carnation Program, was loosely affiliated but not tied to the caucus. (A National Labor Commission consensus resolution, CR10, was above-all bland in its promotion of the rank-and-file strategy, encouraging further organizing, especially in Amazon shops and towards May 2028, and improving basic union democracy.)

DSA’s unthinking affection for the words “rank-and-file” was on full display in deliberation of Carnation’s R42: “Labor for an Arms Embargo.” As adopted, R42 commits DSA to a strategy “organizing as workers to put pressure on political targets along the military logistics supply chain like port authorities and city and state legislatures.” This is, I believe, foolish given the lack of influence the US labor movement has over both parties and its frequent complicity in imperial profit. Supporters for R42 wrote a “Labor for Arms Embargo” article for Democratic Left which did not mention a single instance of US workers successfully pressuring industry or politicians into upholding an arms embargo for the “Mask Off Maersk” campaign (all the examples are international). And the embargo will likely siphon capacity from DSA’s in-progress “No Appetite for Apartheid” campaigns, which can be pursued in all chapters instead of just those with military and logistics hubs in their jurisdiction. A debate in the St. Louis chapter in the following weeks over an IAM Boeing strike suggests interpretation of DSA’s new arms-embargo strategy is far from set.^[2]

For example, members of the International Committee and the Springs of Revolution slate had tried to amend the arms-embargo proposal so DSA members would directly organize in military and logistics industries to prepare for solidarity strikes in defense of Palestine and for an arms embargo. (Informally, I heard that at least one of R42’s authors ignored internationalist comrades in their own chapters while drafting their proposal.) The internationalists broadly achieved their aims with R26: “Fight Fascist State Repression & ICE”—establishing Abolish ICE campaigns and collective defense resources—passing on the consent agenda and their anti-Zionism resolution R22 (discussed later). Their success was stopped, however, by US labor’s national chauvinism, within DSA, and the broader convention’s myopic view of labor strategy.

Under the unamended resolution, DSA’s “main focus” to support Palestinian liberation now is to win “an arms embargo against Israel.” But that strategy is defined in practice by vague and mealy-mouthed words like the following: “DSA members will be tactically flexible but guided by the necessity to convince majorities of their coworkers to support an arms embargo.” That is the clause of misdirection. In reality, the content of the strategy in the unamended resolution entirely focuses DSA’s approach to the arms embargo on building candidates and endorsement criteria for federal elections and city or state legislatures. Carnation’s arms embargo proposal smuggled its electoral ambitions through the convention under the guise of a thoughtful international labor strategy. And the bluff was not called. Convention voted down R42-A01.

Similarly, a more ambitious proposal amending the National Labor Commission’s consensus resolution, CR10-A01: “A Partyist Labor Strategy,” also failed. Sponsored by the Marxist Unity Group (MUG) and Reform & Revolution (R&R) caucuses, CR10-A01 would have made cross-shop collaboration a key component of DSA’s labor strategy, with the aim of developing entire industrial sections. As the authors explained in their amendment text:

We are not only organizing against modern day robber barons like Jeff Bezos, but also against chauvinist, faux-militant, performative trends in the labor movement itself, as exemplified by Teamsters leader Sean O’Brien’s embrace of anti-migrant rhetoric and praise of right wing politicians—who attempt co-opt radical organizing efforts while failing to organize with the scale and intensity required to win. Sean O’Brien will not organize Amazon. Rather, the left will be the driving force.

This amendment also failed, 591–544, with an entire 40 abstentions.

How to Build a Party

MUG and R&R also had only moderate success in their effort to push DSA towards more explicit party-building commitments. Through a process of reconciliation, MUG and R&R unified their own programmatic desires into a single proposal. The resulting gem of their collaboration, R34-A01: “A Fighting Socialist Program for DSA,” would have skipped the program development process described by the base resolution, which aimed to build out the skeletal, but beloved, “Workers Deserve More” 2024 DSA platform. Earlier this year, Steve Bloom had warned MUG that their imposition of a program on a party by a faction (or even pair of factions) was a poor plan:

It’s a fool’s errand because it ignores the fact that our programmatic differences are based on fundamental disagreements about what elements of contemporary reality in a country like the US are primary and which ones are secondary, most prominently in this case whether or not the fight for a new constitution does indeed constitute a necessary programmatic keystone for US Marxists today. I have never seen an effort like this produce anything more than an attempt, usually fleeting, by the drafters of such a program to publicize their own specific ideas.

The convention, I assume without awareness, agreed with Bloom by voting down MUG and R&R’s amendment, 651–532, and overwhelmingly passing the base program development plan, 900–291.

In its stead and as conciliation, both caucuses easily passed their R7: “Principles for Party-Building,” 641–551. R7 is in many ways an aspirational resolution—it establishes 10 definitional clauses required for the makeup of an “independent mass socialist party.” It rehashes and, now, legislates endlessly debated issues in the DSA around the ballot line (by mandating agnosticism), the existing capitalist parties, and the internal behavior of the party. This resolution, however, is at risk of the same problems that Bloom points out above: the work to impose MUG’s Principles of Party Building on the entire organization will now start with the passage of that resolution and its effect will be entirely constrained to the efficacy of that effort. (This can be contrasted to the anti-Zionism resolution, which “rolled up” the passage of many local anti-Zionism resolutions from chapters to the convention itself.)

A small eight-fold zine design was released on the DSA forum website, to be spread at local meetings—the supporters of R7 would be best served by months of relentlessly distributing these party-building definitions across the entire organization. That success, however, will be mitigated by a Groundwork Caucus resolution and a Carnation Program plank that commit DSA to a 2028 presidential run and five campaigns for House representatives respectively, which will necessarily shape the internal structure of DSA. Will DSA electoral campaigns commit themselves to R7’s principle?:

[A] ballot line is not the primary goal or indication of political independence. What matters most is bringing our independent organization and program to races whether on a Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot line. When considering whether to create a ballot line of our own, losing control of our candidates to an open state-run process is a non-negotiable red line.

Or will the resolved need to develop cadre candidates and the comfortable ease of running in Democratic primaries overwhelm those considerations entirely?

Anti-Zionism In Principle and Practice

Another haunting produced by the 2023 convention was DSA’s then-refusal to cast redlines around anti-Zionism for endorsed electeds and members. In the light of the October 7th intensification of Israel’s genocide of Palestinians only a few months later, that decision of the 2023 convention and the resulting demobilization of Palestine solidarity work was clearly a mistake. Goaded by that failure and the imposed boycott of DSA collaborations by the Palestinian Youth Movement, many delegates left the DSA 2023 convention committed to return in 2025 in force. They were aided by the departure of labor Zionists from the organization, who were disturbed by even the mild rebukes that national DSA produced in the days following October 7th. Over the following two years, an influx of members radicalized by the experience fighting for the liberation of Palestine met the institutional wall of DSA’s history as a Zionist and then only tepidly anti-Zionist organization.

Leading up to the 2025 convention, those new members and former delegates gathered around a new platform and slate, the Springs of Revolution (SoR), that spanned several left caucuses and anti-imperialist uncaucused members. After passing local anti-Zionism resolutions (as the Metro DC chapter did), these delegates arrived at convention as a wave. An amendment to water-down their resolution—the same strategy that had defeated hardline commitments in 2023—was resoundingly defeated, 688–572, and the base resolution passed 675–524 to an uproar of cheers and applause. With that and their anti-ICE resolution passed by unanimous consent, SoR cemented a clear political role for internationalism in the convention’s mandate and National Political Committee leadership. While SoR maintains it is a “network,” not a caucus in DSA terminology, members of other left caucuses have responded with knowing winks—many “uncaucused caucuses” have solidified into their own internally consistent blocs.

Conclusion

One of the most prominent presuppositions in DSA discourse is that we can easily distinguish “internal” and “external” organizing. The moderate factions hold hegemony in that arena, by constantly intoning scolding screeds about “mass politics” as if over a rosary. But they don’t really mean it. On the one hand, they ignore the essential internal work upheld by the vanguardist Red Star caucus. The moderate factions want a hollow party. On the other, they ignore the antifascist strategy that Springs of Revolution passed via R26. That is, they opportunistically define “mass politics” not as having any inherent qualities, but merely as a description of their own strategy.

But in some ways, that internal/external division is held across DSA’s political factions. On the floor, literature coated the delegates’ tables in thin piles that grew day to day. Caucuses strained to churn out publications; their delegates chuckling by the elevators over digital copy turned into print for the next day—special editions of MUG’s Light and Air and Reform & Revolution bulletins. But where was the publication of the Democratic Socialists of America? DSA mustered no deliberate live reporting. I have found no minutes of convention, except those prepared by my own delegation and a thoughtful Rochester-chapter editor. The energy and skill to do that work was present at the convention but was almost entirely directed toward factional ends.

The DSA turns towards its decade of partybuilding with a great work still left to do. It is not possible to build a party of its size without factions, and the form of those factions also matters deeply to its overall health. Further, as a membership organization, DSA was and is silent on the unfolding of its own highest body of deliberation. Currently, DSA caucuses onboard and educate different leftist tendencies into DSA’s internal culture, but they do not necessarily bridge differences in that culture. Despite the caucuses’ internal concerns over publications and political education, they usually do not bring those concerns to the organization as a whole. Other than a resolution to allow print fees for national publications (CB3) and the political education committee’s consensus resolution (CR4), there were no fights over the strategic directions for publications and political education. There were resolutions with mandates for certain kinds of content in political education, but little about the form and structure of its delivery and the educational expectations that members should have of one another.

I am not arguing against factionalism, as the moderate wing does. But DSA’s caucuses cannot maintain their current shape if the organization is to grow. The caucuses’ hope—as Bloom described in his critique of the MUG program resolution—is that by building themselves they will outnumber the other tendencies, be able to dictate directions to others, and bind them from splitting. In this, they will not be successful. Their divided, but uniform, pursuit of that strategy has instead produced neglect. One heart of DSA’s social reproduction—planned political education and publication—has been given over to a crowd of caucuses, Twitter personalities, and the capitalist press. This is less a problem of public perception and more about allowing any large-enough media presence to define the significance of the convention for DSA.

According to Rolling Stone, DSA has had “a banner year” and its most important topic of deliberation was the censure of AOC and spreading the success of the Mamdani campaign. Mother Jones focused on Rashida Tlaib’s keynote and the mandate for a 2028 presidential candidate. The American Prospect wrote similarly; its discussion of the national anti-Zionism resolution ends with Groundwork’s NPC member Kareem Elrefrai opining about the lack of a DSA candidate in the 2024 presidential election. The details of the debates I described above are almost entirely absent. Instead, the framing mostly follows the media-seeking moderate wing and their hand-wringing. They do have their one-member, one-vote in a way—a hollow party rings like a fucking bell when you know how to pick out the journalists on the convention floor.

The authors of the Democracy Commission omnibus argued for their archives policy because it would “allow for all DSA members to understand how our organization functions, the decisions that dictate our operations, and the procedures we’re meant to follow and uphold as members.” This is also why we need active, current writing that—at the very least—gives readers a sense of all the bare facts.^[3] Position statements on blogs and substacks and hastily-circulated Google docs are not enough. Members should be asking themselves: where is the voice of our party? Why is it silent?

1. Max Böhnel, “Mass Socialist Politics vs. Vanguard Party,” Portside, August 16, https://portside.org/2025-08-16/mass-socialist-politics-vs-vanguard-party.

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2. That chapter’s debate is exemplified in two articles, a Liberation Caucus member’s “When The Overseers Strike: For A Truly Anti-Imperialist Labor Movement” and a Socialist Majority Caucus-aligned take, “Shame or Solidarity.”

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3. DSA’s Democratic Left has, since convention, published a handful of articles on convention, including one by this author. Most of those articles, however, are written from an individual perspective. And only one really provides an overview of convention activity, generously authored by the convention’s Brazilian international observers from PSOL. My intent is not to critique their work but to ask why more members do not contribute to it.

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