Introduction

The DSA National Convention is an imposing scene. The profusion of red-shirts, the grave and impassioned speeches, the singing of “The Internationale” all give a sense—however accurate—of what it must have felt like to belong to one of the great twentieth century socialist parties. The convention brings together nearly 1500 delegates, empowered by their chapters to discuss the fate of the national organization. Comrades from faraway chapters compare notes and assimilate new ideas and tactics. Those new to the organization get to experience expansive debate. For more seasoned comrades, the convention can be a heartening expression of Left unity, binding disparate tendencies toward a common goal. For the authors of this article, previous DSA and YDSA National Conventions have been pivotal moments in our political development. At their most powerful, DSA conventions capture the excitement, unifying spirit, and boundless optimism that characterized the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign.

This “optimism of the will,” as Gramsci put it, is essential. Without these feelings, organizational work can be a dull drudge toward a distant future. Yet, we must balance DSA’s tendency toward optimism with sober criticism. Without a thoroughgoing self-critique, perpetual cheeriness can quickly descend into delusion. This danger is why the second half of Gramsci’s antinomy—pessimism of the intellect—is indispensable.

This pessimism is crucial right now. Left-wing delegates to the 2025 National Convention, by and large, were heartened by the passage of resolutions aimed at organizational reform, building a party structure apart from the Democratic Party, and adopting a firmer stance on the genocide in Gaza. Some commentators have gone so far as to call the convention a victory for the revolutionary wing of DSA. Yet, the prognosis for DSA itself is not as hopeful as they believe. The last few years have seen devastating changes in the United States’ economic and political landscape: rising inflation, skyrocketing costs of housing and healthcare, COVID, the genocide in Gaza, and the Trump administration’s escalating attacks on immigrants, LGBTQ people, and freedom of expression. These years have also witnessed fundamental crises within DSA. Some of its most prominent elected officials have openly flaunted the organization’s stated values, including Jamaal Bowman, who visited Israel on J Street’s dime, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who voted to crush the 2022 railroad workers’ strike. DSA also experienced a budget crisis, spurred by spending that was out of step with its declining growth, almost reaching the point of insolvency.

Organizationally, DSA was unable to respond in a timely and unified fashion to any of these events. As leaders of our chapter, we experienced this firsthand. We had to formulate positions, tactics, materials, and strategy from scratch for every significant event, on top of the routine administrative work of allocating tasks and resources. We had to explain to our membership national DSA’s slow and incoherent responses to its own internal crises. We had to convey to them that not only was there no thoroughgoing plan to alleviate the roots of these crises, but that they are mere pretexts for the factionalism of DSA’s national organization. Work under these conditions was discouraging and time-consuming. Like many DSA members, we began to suspect that the national organization was not capable of confronting its most pressing issues. Despite our work with many dedicated and intelligent comrades, we started to feel that the organization as a whole was more committed to preserving its traditional politics than adapting to the task of fighting intransigently for the interests of workers and their allies. There was, we felt, some strong force drawing the organization’s practical program toward reformism, often without its members realizing this fact.

Despite the hard work of many of its members and chapters, the organization as a whole has failed to effectively respond to the political crises that have emerged since 2016. This shortcoming has persisted even under an ostensibly majority-Marxist national leadership. Struggles between reformist and revolutionary perspectives, when they occur, are murky and typically end inconclusively, with a return to an unspoken status quo. An organization which responds so slowly and haphazardly to both its internal ideological battles and the political tasks of the day must either fundamentally change or fade into historical irrelevance. An analysis of DSA’s current conjuncture must begin from this observation and must carry a corresponding urgency. The 2025 National Convention showed some minor victories in combatting DSA’s organizational problems, but it failed to acknowledge the depth of the organization’s predicament.

The victory of revolutionary elements within DSA would be a major achievement for a fragmented and disorganized Left. There is no silver bullet, no panacea, and no external organization that could ensure this outcome. Any solutions must emerge from the practical activity of revolutionaries within DSA. We direct this article to this wing of DSA—those elements, individual and collective, who reject reformism and, like the authors, wish to organize for revolution. What we wish to offer is an analysis of DSA’s current conjuncture coming out of the 2025 National Convention, as well as some initial thoughts for concrete action.

In our first section, we begin by reviewing the stakes of the convention. Can we really say that the national convention or the National Political Committee (NPC) make “decisions”? We suggest that neither of these bodies can make meaningful political decisions. Rather, the most impactful direction in DSA comes from unelected staffers. We further show that this undemocratic situation serves to preserve DSA’s historically reformist direction without its members’ knowledge. Second, we analyze the twin issues of class independence and breaking from the Democratic Party: can revolutionary elements within DSA work to build class independent organizations while tacitly agreeing to support a capitalist party? We suggest that revolutionaries in DSA must take immediate steps to break from the bourgeois parties as a precondition for building their wing of the organization. Third, we analyze the question of internationalism. Revolutionaries in DSA know that their project benefits from (and in the long run, depends on) establishing meaningful ties with socialist organizations abroad. Without such ties, it risks a parochial and short-sighted relationship to the global project of revolutionary socialism. Yet, DSA’s “big tent” makes it impossible to establish principled and enduring ties with international parties.

What Are The Stakes Of The National Convention?

In order to evaluate the direction of DSA based on the decisions at convention, we need to take a step back and ask some basic questions: to what extent can DSA members set a direction for the national bodies and is the notion of “decisions” set at the National Convention an intelligible concept? Additionally, does the direction of the national bodies determine the direction of work in chapters? In short, DSA members do not directly set a direction for the national organization and the National Convention itself does not have the power to “decide” any question. Instead, political decisions are set bureaucratically from the top down by staffers, or arrived at haphazardly through faction fights at the chapter level. This organizational structure exists symbiotically with DSA’s bureaucratic and reformist wing, and its persistence poses a significant obstacle for revolutionaries.

For the first two questions, we must examine the actual functioning of the organization, rather than the idealized form outlined in DSA’s bylaws. The National Convention is supposedly the highest decision-making body in National DSA, with the nominal power to overrule essentially any decision made by a subordinate body. The convention elects a National Political Committee (NPC) to serve as the highest decision-making body between conventions. Their primary mandate is to implement the decisions made at the national convention. In practice, the NPC has considerable freedom in how it interprets resolutions. Therefore, the convention, in practice, serves as an advisory body that also elects the NPC, itself merely an advisory body to chapters.

A good case to illustrate this phenomenon is a resolution from the 2023 Convention: “A Fighting Campaign for Reproductive Rights and Trans Liberation.” For our purposes, the important thing to note about this campaign is that it committed DSA to a coordinated National Trans Day of Action, and that the resolution was brought forward by the Reform & Revolution (R&R) caucus. The resolution passed with an overwhelming majority. Now, given this clear mandate, how did the NPC implement it? According to Sarah M, who is now a member of the NPC:

Without any seats on the NPC, R&R had to lobby individual members to start the committee, and to not fold us and the For Our Rights campaign (a committee developed to respond to the 2024 election) into a single committee. With only one R&R member on the committee itself, it took until January to reach agreement with the other members on a strategy to open the committee and start organizing. This means that 11 months passed between the initial formulation of the plan, and the actual day of action.^[1]

This captures the purely advisory nature of the National Convention. Without any real oversight of the NPC by either delegates or rank-and-file members, observation of resolutions is ultimately at the whim of NPC members. It is difficult to call anything agreed on at the 2025 convention a “decision,” given that it may be permanently deprioritized without input from the rest of the organization. The NPC, in turn, has little connection with chapters. In practice, they have no means to coordinate chapter activities. And with no layer between the NPC and chapters, the NPC is largely unaware of the activity of most chapters, and vice versa. For instance, in the above case, only around 100 out of over 200 DSA chapters observed the National Trans Day of Action in any fashion. The NPC, for its part, has not addressed this dynamic. Their statements offer little direction or insight for chapters, often expressing a kind of generic compromise between its feuding factions.

In lieu of leadership from DSA’s elected bodies, direction comes first from the top down. That is, from DSA’s staffers. DSA allocates a large percentage of its national budget to fund full-time staffers. These staffers are not elected or subject to term limits. Although the NPC ostensibly retains the right to hire and dismiss staffers, the staffers are unionized, and their collective bargaining agreement requires the NPC to provide “economic justification” for any removals. In essence, this means that staff cannot be removed for ignoring or slow-rolling political decisions made by the convention or NPC.

This is not a hypothetical situation. A staffer wrote an article last year highlighting the inordinate power that staffers hold in DSA. In effect, there is a small unelected group of extremely influential and coordinated DSAers who receive large amounts of DSA’s funding, and who cannot be removed from their positions except under extreme financial circumstances. Staff are generally politically representative of DSA’s right wing. They are drawn from the world of NGOs, the labor bureaucracy, and the Democratic Party milieu. It is not the case that every staffer holds strictly to right-wing politics, but this is their overwhelming tendency. So in practice, these staffers form a strong, bureaucratic, right-wing caste in DSA. They view their role as establishing a political continuity as DSA has changed its political composition and, in a sense, this is precisely what they do. They direct work and funds towards projects they deem promising. As a result, Democratic campaigns will often receive funding and organizational support, while left-wing projects and chapters are left to fend for themselves. As the article referred to above notes, they have gone to the length of revoking funding, access to membership lists, and dues-funded organizing tools from chapters. This is a manifestly undemocratic system, and it redounds to the favor of DSA’s reformist wing, who zealously defend high levels of staffer funding.

The effect of this bureaucratic system is to isolate important political questions from serious democratic, national discussion. Not only does this perpetuate reformist control of the organization, but it impoverishes members’ understanding of DSA’s strategy. With the national organization bureaucratically controlled and its few democratic components largely ineffectual, the only reliable means for coordinating nationwide action in DSA are caucuses, which typically function as their own sects. Caucuses will decide on preferred policies privately and coordinate on how to implement them through interventions at the chapter level. Not only does this hide valuable deliberation from uncaucused members of DSA, who constitute a majority of the organization’s rank and file, but it also turns chapter decision making into a minefield of caucus factionalism. Occasionally, chapters will lack any strong caucus presence and they are then thrown into the undesirable situation of making ad-hoc decisions without a national perspective. The result is that the political direction of individual DSA chapters are often internally incoherent, changing radically as the caucus makeup of the chapter changes.

This dynamic creates an overall incoherent organization. For instance, Rhode Island DSA refuses to endorse any candidate running on the Democratic ballot line, while Connecticut DSA, less than an hours drive away, regularly supports Democratic candidates. This mishmash of decisions within and between chapters means that DSA’s practical program, as it emerges from the activity of its chapters, is inchoate. Lacking a coherent revolutionary program emerging from the bottom up, the reformist political program of the bureaucratic elements tends to predominate.

This manifestly bizarre mode of organization is intelligible only in the historical context of DSA. Before 2016, DSA was a small sect, barely exceeding 8,000 paper members, concentrated in New York City. Its membership was drawn primarily from labor bureaucrats and intellectuals from the Democratic Party milieu. The organization was ideologically unified, centered around a dogmatic application of Harrington’s realignment theory. It operated primarily as a pressure group within the Democratic Party. A political organization of this size, with such political homogeneity and such a narrow political focus, neither needed nor desired more party-like organizational forms.

However, as DSA has grown, its political composition has changed and, as its self-stated consensus has drifted away from realignment, its loose organizational structure has taken on a strong political purpose. DSA has a strong and cohesive right wing. This right-wing faction is led by cadres from the progressive NGO sphere, the union bureaucracy, centrist publications, and academia. These cadres are typically well-connected to powerful and well-funded institutions in the Democratic Party sphere. Additionally, realignment has been the traditional and pervasive ideology of DSA.

On the other hand, the revolutionary elements of DSA are younger, many having first become interested in politics in the wake of Bernie’s 2016 run. They face strong opposition from the DSA bureaucracy, are split among feuding caucuses, each with its own reformist wing, and are tasked with fighting against the heft of fifty years of inertia. The right wing of DSA can win simply by holding its ground and conserving the organization’s status quo. The revolutionary wing in DSA could only win by fundamentally changing the organization. And to do so, they would have to create the means to change the organization as well! A lack of any coherent organizational structure means that DSA’s “common sense,” i.e. realignment politics, can win out by default. The right wing benefits tremendously from DSA’s disarray. Any clear, centralized, and disciplined decision making process would be at best superfluous to them, and at worst a tool in the hands of their enemies. Indeed, these right-wing members, despite their rhetoric of “mass politics” are all too happy to use bureaucratic means to further their reformist, staff-led vision. Take for instance the rigging of convention delegate votes in LA or the disingenuous attempt to dissolve member democracy through the deceptively-named “one member one vote” resolution.

For what it is worth, the previous observations are not wholly novel to DSA members. Many caucuses, especially those with experience on the NPC, have identified these same issues. But they pose them as mere organizational problems. The DSA Democracy Commission was convened to address what appear to be organizational shortcomings. Yet, being composed of many conflicting tendencies, from reformist, to centrist, to revolutionary, its proposals amounted to ineffectual changes that were palatable to every faction. This was a Quixotic endeavor from its outset. There is no apolitical resolution to DSA’s structural problems, since they serve a political purpose. To turn DSA into a coherent revolutionary socialist party would require a massive regroupment of revolutionaries within the DSA, likely supported by an upsurge of militancy in the working class nationwide. The political character of the organization would have to fundamentally change, along with its structure. At such a point, the right wing would find that it had no use for the organization any more, and could happily dissolve into the better funded and organized civil society groups that share their politics. Without a sharp, politically clear-headed opposition to the bureaucratic and reformist wing of DSA, the likely outcome would be the sustained sidelining and co-optation of revolutionaries in DSA.

Class Independence

DSA’s traditional center of gravity has always been, and remains, the Democratic Party. The organization was long held together by the notion of realignment—of pushing the Democratic Party to the left. This was an absurd proposition when Harrington first raised it, and by now, practically no one in DSA would openly defend it. Yet, its basic principles, particularly the rejection of independent working class organization and focus on internal Democratic politics, form some of the guiding assumptions of the group. Some caucuses think this is the proper orientation. Other caucuses regard DSA’s current relationship to the Democratic Party as an unfortunate but necessary step on the way to an independent workers’ party. The first position has been debunked by the past sixty years of history. We have seen repeatedly that attempting to realign the Democrats is antithetical to mobilizing the working class for its own interests. The second position is more plausible. Yet, a sober evaluation of DSA’s concrete political program reveals that the development of a “party-within-a-party” has not taken place. Both the “dirty break” and the “party surrogate” strategies have been indistinguishable in practice from Harrington’s realignment strategy. The revolutionary elements of DSA have simply developed a complex and often incoherent justification for abandoning the principle of class independence. This does not represent a new theoretical perspective, but rather an accommodation to DSA’s close relationship to the Democrats.

We should lay out a definition: by class independence, we mean the organization of workers into political groups that are separate from and opposed to capitalist political organizations. Class independence is not simply a fetishization of an independent ballot line, nor does it require workers to pretend that bourgeois political parties do not exist. Class independent groups organize themselves not as junior partners of or factions within capitalist parties, but as the representatives of the interests of workers, understood as being opposed to the interests of the capitalist class.

The lines of argumentation on class independence have been traveled so many times, by such a multitude of DSA caucuses and factions, that the way has become muddy and unnavigable. The theoretical consensus, it seems, is close to a “party surrogate” strategy, whereby DSA runs and supports Democratic candidates while building a “party within a party.” DSA had previously advanced a “dirty break” hypothesis, which projected an eventual break from the Democratic Party. The party surrogate hypothesis does not even project a break, since, depending on who you ask, either “ballot lines are state institutions,” “political parties are illegal in the United States,” or, perhaps most puzzlingly, “the Democratic Party does not exist.” When discussing these theories with individual members, the distinctions between them often become somewhat blurred, and many hold an ambiguous position somewhere in between. We do not regard any of these perspectives as theoretically or practically sound.^[2]

In practice, DSA’s electoral strategy is a kind of Unhappy Consciousness, a “divided nature, a doubled and merely contradictory being.” The party surrogate strategy, however one understands it, depends on firm party structures. These are the structures that are supposed to elevate campaigning for Democrats above simple left-liberalism. As we have noted, these structures are weak in DSA, where they exist at all. So, DSA runs Democratic candidates, believing that such candidacies are meaningful only within the context of an organized socialist party. Yet, the concrete steps to build such a party remain permanently in limbo. So even by the standards of the party surrogate strategy, DSA has failed to make substantive progress. This sclerotic state is what David Duhalde, representative of the DSA right, calls “the dirty stay”—the uneasy combination of theory and resolutions around political independence, or even a break, with a practice that consists almost entirely of running and uncritically tailing left-liberal Democratic candidates.

The 2025 convention heightened this contradiction even more. Despite the preponderance of electoral resolutions, not a single resolution proposing a break from the Democrats reached the convention floor. In fact, this idea was not even broached during discussion. Comrades who would condemn the Democrats’ support of the Palestinian genocide, would in the same breath suggest that we run more Democratic candidates. There were many successful resolutions (notably R07) that put forward suggestions aimed supposedly at building political independence, but they lacked concrete steps in that direction, and stopped short of proposing a split from the Democrats. The electoral resolutions in this vein seemed like statements about how DSA would like to conceive of its electoral activity rather than actual proposals for action. Yet, on the other hand, there were many resolutions (R33) about expanding the scope of DSA’s electoral work, to the extent of running an (almost certainly Democratic) presidential candidate, even in lieu of the ability to enforce political independence. Some resolutions (e.g., CR05) contained these contradictory ideas simultaneously. Even if we take the party surrogate consensus at its word, then running so many candidates while the infrastructure to properly discipline and advise them is practically non-existent would simply be a blind alley.

This incoherence of DSA’s electoral strategy has recently been thrown into stark relief by the campaign of Zohran Mamdani. Though his candidacy was referenced throughout the convention, there was no debate or deliberation over his strategy. Even delegates who belonged to Marxist Unity Group (MUG)—perhaps DSA’s strongest champion of building a working-class party—refrained from raising any substantive questions about DSA’s full-throated support for Zohran Mamdani’s campaign. They, along with the rest of the convention, treated support for his campaign as an obvious position. Resolution after resolution referenced the pivotal issues of political independence, only to propose actions that would serve to enmesh the party even further in the Democratic Party sphere.

This silence on the topic of class independence is surprising, since its absence has resulted in disasters on the ground. A comrade from RI DSA has written about the chapter-level consequences of a close relationship with the Democrats, and we hold with his analysis. There is a constant cycle in DSA: chapters will run Democratic candidates and temporarily benefit from the organization of their campaigns. Sometimes, these candidates fail, and electoral committees are plunged into a crisis of disorganization and inaction. In other cases, candidates succeed, and chapters go through disorganizing crises when the pull of the Democratic Party inevitably proves stronger than DSA’s enthusiastic but underdeveloped organization. In each case, as a best-case scenario, chapters are neither stronger nor weaker than they were before. Perhaps they even gain membership. But in the long run, over years and years of this kind of practice, they do not build political coherence or long-term, disciplined party structures. Instead, experienced comrades become disillusioned and burnt out, and the chapter stagnates.

This cycle has repeated itself in a multitude of different races and locales. Never once has the outcome been a meaningful step towards class independence. Why, then, do so many factions in DSA still adhere to it? Because, it is a practical acceptance of reformism and dependence on the Democratic Party cloaked as revolutionary strategy. It offers revolutionary elements of DSA an excuse to accommodate themselves to the organization’s historical program of realignment. The party surrogate strategy, a supposedly pragmatic compromise, is nothing other than the acceptance of working within the Democratic Party. If it were anything else, then its dominance within DSA would have yielded fruit by now. The task of revolutionaries is to fight this program strenuously, to highlight its incoherence, and to reject the Democratic Party as a vehicle for working class organization. As with the issue of organization, the difference between the reformist wing of DSA and the revolutionary perspective is not one of degree, but of fundamental political content. There is no acceptable compromise between making the workers’ movement a junior partner in the Democratic Party and working to build independent working-class organizations.

Internationalism

DSA’s decision to leave the Socialist International (SI) in 2017 marked a turning point in its international orientation, as well as being a sign of certain internal developments. As far as the authors know, membership in the SI did not involve any major commitment of resources. Yet DSA’s decision to leave the SI signaled that DSA members were no longer willing to be associated with other member organizations’ regressive programs of austerity and deregulation. However, though DSA members may no longer be willing to be part of a social democratic international, it seems that the DSA is not yet prepared to form strong ties with revolutionary socialist organizations abroad. Since 2017, DSA has been slow to build international ties, leaving DSA rather isolated and inward-facing from the perspective of socialists in other countries. The nationwide wave of actions opposing the Palestinian genocide has changed this situation somewhat. Members have become far less content with a mainly national perspective. The 2025 Convention did show a sincere desire to establish deeper bonds between DSA and international revolutionary socialist groups, but it also revealed that such efforts will be, at best, superficial while DSA remains shackled to a reformist program.

The stronger, best-enforced resolutions to come out of the 2025 DSA Convention were in response to international events, particularly the genocide in Gaza. R22: For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA was unique in two regards: it established a firm pro-Palestinian stance and explicitly made it binding on members and endorsed officials. Under the provisions of R22, members of DSA who express strong, public, pro-Zionist statements may be expelled, and candidates may be de-endorsed for similar offenses. This, it must be said, is a rather weak standard, and it is dubious whether it will or can be applied, for reasons discussed above.

Nevertheless, such a resolution does illustrate some important lessons. First, and perhaps most obviously, this indicates that a majority of DSAers believe that Zionists should not belong to their organization. This is not an insignificant shift in opinion, given that the organization held an officially pro-Zionist stance for the majority of its existence. Perhaps more subtly though, the resolution reveals some preliminary steps for how revolutionary elements of DSA might be able to proceed. First, there was a major crisis: the genocide in Gaza, and the US’ complicity in it. Further, the situation clearly showed that to take any position except unconditional support for the Palestinian people and opposition to US’ policy would be utterly unacceptable. Supporters of this resolution highlighted this fact at every opportunity. There were fewer rhetorical concessions to “local organizing circumstances” or to the “big tent”—supporters of the resolution successfully highlighted the two sides of the issue: a weak opposition to Zionism which amounts to tacit support, and a principled and intransigent opposition. Further, it was a topic that united revolutionary elements of DSA across factional caucus lines. The shortcomings of this resolution—its lax definition of expellable Zionism and its dubious prospects of enforcement—were signs that this approach has not been carried out deeply enough. It is one thing to take this stance in the realm of anti-imperialism, but another to take it to the root of the issue: the question of an opportunist and reformist strategy or a revolutionary one. The success of this resolution—however qualified it may be—demonstrates that revolutionaries in DSA must make use of crises and corresponding mass activity to demonstrate and agitate around this fundamental political division in DSA.

Despite some of the more encouraging aspects of R22, the 2025 Convention showed that DSA’s international perspective and connections will remain stunted while revolutionaries in it accommodate themselves to the reformist wing. The post-2023 DSA internationalist landscape has been characterized by two primary tendencies: on one hand, there are third campists, who uniformly reject ruling socialist parties and tend toward an isolating, ultraleftist approach. This position was traditionally represented by Bread and Roses and Reform and Revolution caucuses. On the other hand, there are campists, who tend toward dividing the world into imperialist and anti-imperialist camps, leading to a generally uncritical acceptance of existing nominally socialist parties, which has been the habitual attitude of caucuses like Red Star. Both positions reflect the immaturity of DSA’s international perspective. The third campists’ sectarian critique of governing and non-governing socialist parties rings hollow. The DSA itself falls far short of their standards for international socialist organizations. Critique, for instance, of class collaborationism in the international context, however necessary, is hypocritical while DSA still adopts reformist and anti-class independence positions. In addition, with no regular lines of communication with revolutionaries in other countries, this type of critique runs strong risks of being misinformed and missing its mark entirely. On the other hand, the campist position in DSA runs the opposite risk: uncritical acceptance of the actions of ruling socialist or “anti-imperialist” groups. In effect, it reduces international socialist policy to support for countries who oppose US policy. This ignores that revolutionary socialists in countries like China, Brazil, or Palestine may have interests and positions that are very different from those of their governments.

Both positions are signs of DSA’s abdication of internationalism. The third campist position shows a degree of obliviousness in its double standard for socialist groups in the US and abroad, while the campist position abandons the complicated and multilateral task of coordinating international socialism. Both positions are ultimately expressions of DSA’s opportunist and reformist character, which makes forming principled international connections all but impossible. At the 2025 convention, this political dynamic was most evident in the deliberations on R01: DSA for One Palestinian State, as well as its amendment, R01-A01. In brief, R01 affirmed DSA’s support for both the unconditional right to Palestinian self-determination and its endorsement of a single, secular, and democratic Palestinian state. It made support for these two positions a precondition for DSA’s endorsement of any candidate for electoral office. The amendment R01-A01, among other changes, struck language advocating for a single, secular Palestinian state. In advocacy for this amendment, members of the campist Springs of Revolution group conducted a chapter-by-chapter outreach campaign. Their argument was that, while socialists in the US may advocate for secularism at home, it would be chauvinistic to advocate for a secular Palestinian state. Instead, they argue that DSA should adopt the Thawabit, a statement of national principles first drafted by the Palestinian National Council in 1977. Opponents of the amendment, unfortunately, failed to mount a coherent counter-argument, and seemed thrown off balance.

The debate was obviously centered around a central question: what is the position of socialists in the US with relation to national liberation movements abroad? Yet, the convention did not pose this question with the clarity it deserves. Instead, it became a debate over rather personal accusations of chauvinism. And indeed, with DSA’s level of international development, it is not clear that it could have resulted in a substantively different way. With no organizational connection to socialists in other countries, it is rather impossible to formulate a coherent internationalist position. In conditions of isolation, the international perspective of socialists in the US seems to reduce to simply supporting any force opposing our country’s imperialism. Domestic opposition to imperialism is, of course, an essential task for any revolutionary socialist group. Yet, political situations are complicated, and it is not always the case that ruling parties that oppose the US represent the most progressive forces in their own country. Making this assessment, however, takes a knowledge of the perspectives of socialists in other countries that is quite hard to come by in DSA. As a result, comrades did not raise that secularism and democracy have been central demands for revolutionary socialism in the Arab world, and that socialists in Palestine still raise these demands themselves. Nor was there meaningful discussion of what calls for a democratic, secular Palestinian state mean in a broader internationalist perspective. Anti-campists simply did not have the depth of international connections to argue these positions convincingly. And so the campist position won out, not so much out of principled support, but out of perceptual concerns that stemmed from an isolation on the world socialist stage.

This isolation was further highlighted by the paucity of international topics up for discussion. Delegates who wished to hear perspectives on the war in Ukraine, Lula’s reelection in Brazil, or Jolani’s ouster of Assad in Syria received no insight on these topics.

It is not the case that DSA’s international isolation is reducible to bad intentions or a lack of effort. As with the issues we’ve raised above, it ultimately stems from a reformist program that the organization refuses to recognize as such. DSA invited representatives from international socialist groups to observe the 2025 Convention and to provide speeches. As of writing, DSA has not yet published the list of groups that attended and so we cannot reproduce it here. These speakers presented informative and thoughtful perspectives on DSA’s current trajectory. Particularly, an argument presented repeatedly by a number of speakers was the need for class independence and a break from the Democratic party. They argued that this was not only essential for DSA’s own development, but that a large, class independent socialist movement could open new fronts for struggle in their own countries. The implication was that if DSA’s relationship with these groups was to be anything more than occasional exchanges of perspective, it would have to settle this question. This is a perfectly sensible position. Parties can only form meaningful and durable international relationships on the basis of a degree of political agreement. DSA’s present insistence on running candidates within the Democratic Party as a Marxist and revolutionary tactic isolates it from Marxist groups abroad, who would recognize this as an unacceptably reformist position. Unfortunately, there did not seem to be much discussion at all on the points the international speakers made. And as we’ve previously observed, after the convention, DSA seems even more organizationally wedded to the Democratic Party and reformism.

Yet, this does not have to be the end of the story for DSA’s internationalism. If revolutionaries in DSA are able to group together and begin elaborating the fundamental divide between the revolutionary and reformist wings of the organization, they have the simultaneous ability to begin building meaningful international relationships with international revolutionary organizations. The international comrades seemed to recognize this divide and the revolutionary wing of DSA would find no shortage of international support and guidance for their political struggle. Yet, without clarifying and formalizing the divide within DSA, these outside revolutionary socialists would have no practical way to offer their perspectives; they would be wandering into a swamp.

Conclusion

In the final analysis, despite some encouraging signs, DSA’s 2025 Convention did not mark a shift in the organizations’ policy. The primary factor in this outcome was the fact that the convention does not have the ability to steer the national DSA. However, even within this limitation the convention did not display signs of growing political clarity, with the exception of discussion around the genocide in Gaza. Discussion around class independence and internationalism was politically murky. Some resolutions gestured at a break from the Democrats and the establishment of international ties, but the convention ultimately expressed the opinion that these goals could be achieved through gradual organizational reforms, with no essential changes to DSA’s functioning.

Marxists in DSA have long held out hope that the organization could be reformed through such means. Yet, it has been almost a decade since DSA’s massive growth and the organization is not meaningfully closer to a revolutionary party. Since 2008, the United States has been caught in an accelerating series of crises, both domestic and international. DSA has not been able to facilitate mass, working-class responses to these crises—it remains caught in a compulsive repetition of Bernie Sander’s 2016 strategy. This orientation was excusable at the time, but to continue with a variation on it nine years later is not.

The truth of the matter is that it is not clear what prospects the revolutionary wing of DSA has, because their struggle has not really begun. DSA has not yet produced groups that adequately represent its internal political struggles. Caucuses exist in abundance, each with their own program. But far from clarifying DSA’s fundamental political differences, they muddy it further. Not one openly agitates against reformism in the organization. Yet, the fact remains in all its clarity: DSA was consciously founded as a reformist organization. Its organizational forms and strategy both grew with Harrington’s realignment politics in mind. If revolutionaries want to change DSA, they must organize not to simply reform the organization, but to fundamentally reshape it. Such a restructuring, at minimum, would require formal independence from the Democratic Party, the adoption of an explicitly revolutionary program, and measures to centralize the organization.

It would be immensely difficult to organize for these changes. But merely raising these political questions, regardless of the ultimate outcome within DSA, would be enormously useful. First, fighting for these changes could link the left wings of many caucuses, as well as revolutionaries who remain outside of caucuses. It would facilitate communication between disparate parts of DSA who are dissatisfied with its reformist trajectory. Second, it would clarify the actual political divisions within DSA, which the organization has failed to adequately articulate. Finally, it would give the revolutionary wing of DSA a sense of what their immediate possibilities are. It may be possible that vast swaths of the organization could be won over to a major overhaul, though the authors find this unlikely without major developments in the class struggle outside of DSA. It is more likely that such an organized group of revolutionaries would find that DSA is not capable of such change in the short term. But in such a case, at least such a group would have a clearer image of DSA in its mind and could choose its next move accordingly.

For the revolutionary wing of DSA, in whatever form it exists, to give up and accommodate itself to the reformist wing is a betrayal of socialism. Ultimately, a revolutionary in DSA must do what any revolutionary in the US must do: organize, attempt regroupment with other revolutionaries, sharpen their political perspective, and fight doggedly for the interests of the working class and oppressed groups.

1. Sarah Milner, “Leading The Fight For Trans Liberation,” Reform and Revolution, June 21, 2024, https://reformandrevolution.org/2024/06/21/leading-the-fight-for-trans-liberation/.

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2. For a thorough summary and critique of the failings of the party surrogate and dirty break theories, see: Andrew Sernatinger, “Strange Alchemy: The party surrogate and socialist politics in DSA,” Tempest, June 5, 2021, https://tempestmag.org/2021/06/strange-alchemy/.

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