Splits and purges are no solution to the problem of disagreement in the socialist movement. Marisa Miale calls for unity in diversity in the context of the DSA. Read By: LC

The lamb knows how to read the feeling of the form of each other all together, the fears and pleasures and neutralities of each other, what is expressed in a bleat or twitch when the lamb is with the next one and there is never one lamb alone.  

–Anne Boyer, When the Lambs Rise up Against the Bird of Prey

Introduction

The Democratic Socialists of America is reaching a new stage of maturity, and with it comes an era of growing pains. As we enter the 2023 convention without any unifying national strategy akin to the Bernie Sanders campaign, the political lines between the left and right wings of the organization are the clearest they have ever been. 

Between 2021 and the present, DSA’s current National Political Committee has increasingly broken down. For a time, its right bloc held a mandate with which it: 

• Suspended the entire leadership of the national Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions and Palestine Solidarity Working Group.
• Approved a massive expenditure on renewing our Harassment and Grievance Officer contract.
• Attempted to hire an electoral director without allowing the rest of the NPC to review all of the applicants.
  

However, an incidental resignation created a 50-50 split, blocking the final of the three votes listed above and preventing either bloc from executing decisions. In wake of the right’s temporary ascendance, communication on the full NPC collapsed into two competing group chats.

Now, complex negotiations between caucuses and political blocs leading up to the 2023 convention are shaping the direction of DSA. The current spectrum ranges from caucuses like Marxist Unity Group and Reform & Revolution on one end to Socialist Majority and Uniting to Win on the other. For the purpose of rhetorical simplicity, we will use left and right as shorthand for the two general blocs, with the cost that this glosses over nuanced differences between particular factions, and in some places points of overlap between factions generally on opposing ends. For instance, Red Labor caucus’s support for a clean break from the Democratic Party ballot line, which sets it apart from its peers on the left; or the shared commitment among the vast majority of the organization, with the exception of Uniting to Win, toward some level of autonomous working-class activity outside of DSA-led pressure campaigns.

This raises difficult questions for us on our path through the next two years. While ultimately the left’s task is to support the independent political activity and self-organization of the international working-class, it is unlikely outside of a constitutional crisis or a catastrophic split that DSA will cease to have a liquidationist wing. If the latter were to occur, our ability to fight for the basic demands of the working class would rapidly become nonexistent, without any gain toward the political ends of democracy and socialism. This means we need a framework for unity.

In Revolutionary Strategy, Mike Macnair calls this framework unity in diversity, where the different tendencies of the socialist movement coordinate around shared aims, while openly broadcasting our differences to the working class: 

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.¹

Or, as put by Marxist Unity Group, for whom unity in diversity is a foundational concept: “[We are] an organization committed to political struggle within the Democratic Socialists of America. This makes us a DSA faction, and we aim to be a constructive one.”²

How does this concept apply within DSA? Answering this first requires understanding DSA’s organizational model, which is that of a mass socialist party, as opposed to a militarized party that can maintain strict tactical and political unity from the center out. It also means understanding the division of labor between the most and least active members and the class basis it’s rooted in. Finally, we will look at the forms of disunity currently plaguing the organization and begin to chart a path out of them, toward unity in diversity.

The Mass Party

DSA members often act under the illusion that we are structured as a cadre party, where a democratic—or top-down—mandate means members can be ordered to join this or that campaign. This was a structure developed by the Bolsheviks during the Russian Civil War, when the necessity of fighting the reactionary White Army and the breakdown of Soviet governance caused the full-time cadre of the Communist Party to absorb the culture and structure of the military, expecting tightly coordinated action, high time-commitment and rank-and-file obedience to the center. Over time, as the Third International solidified, its member parties developed similar forms. Most sects on the US left still follow this model, which was designed for imminent civil war, not running for office or organizing tenants.

In practice, however, DSA is a mass party. Activity emerges from the bottom-up and seeks official sanction and resources, but remains less reliant on the faith of elected leaders and more on its ability to persuade members to take part. Even when a campaign receives a democratic mandate through convention or a chapter meeting, it can easily become a stagnant husk where a well-organized and popular unofficial project thrives.

Both of these frames are abstractions—in practice, there are hundreds of variations between different parties that can’t be mapped universally. No party has ever actually copied any incarnation of the Bolsheviks because cultural and logistical differences, misinterpretations of history, and levels of legality shape party forms as much as the intentions of their founders. But both provide maps for how members conceive and interact with DSA, making them useful as frameworks for us to understand the organization and how best to engage with it.

This misconception about DSA leads our members to make proposals that would make sense within a militarized structure, but are unworkable in our structure. These proposals “voluntell” leadership to form committees or wage campaigns. In a militarized party, leadership are able to order cadre from one site of struggle to another; for instance, moving a dozen organizers from chapter work in Chicago to organize a warehouse in Tennessee. 

This can take several forms, two largely negative and one largely positive. 

In the first negative form, projects silo into interest groups with minimal communication, turning DSA into a loose umbrella for multiple low-energy organizing projects. Often these take the form of fiefdoms for different tendencies who refuse to work together—for example, leftists join political education while rightists join electoral, or, worse, leftists form one electoral program while rightists form another.

In the second negative form, leadership attempts to act like a militarized party, or, more specifically, like a top-down NGO, stamping out unauthorized activity, corralling members into a handful of sanctioned campaigns and driving out organizers with no interest in participating in them. This bleeds out the organization because members have no space to build buy-in through open discussion, leaving when they become frustrated with the organization’s path and have no means of changing its course.

In its positive form, members from different tendencies unite in well-organized projects which use their buy-in to seek official sanction, competing for their political visions while still collaborating on shared work. Members are able to learn about the goals of different tendencies within the big tent and decide between them. Projects are then able to access both the skilled labor of specialist-organizers and the mass power of unskilled workers.

Whether it should be or not, DSA is a mass party. It unites tendencies from across the left under a single banner, forcing us to work together despite our differences. This gives the left a vehicle to hash out disagreements and come to a higher level of unity, even if the process is publicly messier than sects that maintain ideological purity at the cost of mass membership.

A Party of Specialists

Zoomed out, the political divide within DSA is a conflict over whether the movement should be steered by political specialists who operate as a kind of mostly-volunteer bureaucracy, or if the specialists should be subordinated to a wider class perspective. Specialists in social movement spaces are trained that there is a right way and a wrong way to organize campaigns, often by NGOs governed through appointed boards. Frequently, the methods they’re trained in follow the model of Alinskyite community organizing, which centers the will of professional organizers, rather than the protagonism of the working-class. Specialists can be DSA staff, staffers in NGOs who moonlight in DSA, or rank-and-file members working in non-political industries who become experts through practice and training. Most active cadre, through the process of participating in DSA, achieve this state, though there will likely never be enough jobs open as professional organizers and apparatchiks for all of them to become career political specialists.

This translates unevenly into DSA. On the one hand, specialists bring expertise necessary to run a complex organization, including knowledge of meeting facilitation, organizing conversations, software management, compliance law, writing, editing, listwork and budgeting. On the other hand, while we can try to diffuse responsibility as much as possible, only a minority of members will ever become experts in one or more skillsets, creating a power imbalance between those who the organization relies on most for its administration, who often live not just off their labor-power but off their expertise, and the majority of membership.

For many members, their participation in DSA begins as broad supporters of our politics, often moved to participate because of a single issue or campaign, who in some order begin attending meetings or actions, paying dues and building relationships with members at the chapter level. As time goes on and they begin taking on higher levels of responsibility, they realize they need to acquire more specialized skills to complete their work, and since many chapters don’t offer consistent training, mentoring and political study, they have to look elsewhere.

For the most part, joining a caucus is the next logical conclusion. Caucuses are more tightly organized, have more particular political lines, and monopolize skills by bringing together specialists and passing their skills on primarily to their own members. Caucuses that base themselves among professional organizers in the non-profit industrial complex hold an organic advantage in drawing in new members who need access to their skills, but most build a core of skilled cadre over time, or cease to exist.

This means that in addition to bodies pushing for one or another political vision within DSA, caucuses become a necessary means of upskilling, filling a vacuum left by chapter and national leadership. This exacerbates the tendency for factions to begin conducting practical work on their own, with their caucus-mates who use a shared lexicon and set of tactics, rather than with political rivals or the uncaucused. This exacerbates the negative forms of diversity described in the previous section, leading to the creation of fiefs.

A Kingdom of Fiefs

One of the fundamentally mistaken forms of unity in diversity described in the first section is operating as a sect within DSA, nominally being part of the same organization but refusing to collaborate on shared work, running political rivals out of projects or chapters you control and sometimes even allowing members of one’s caucus to choose whether or not to be part of DSA, calling in to question whether the organization is one part of a greater organization or a practically independent force.³

Being comrades under the umbrella of a single organization, however big tent, requires a shared sense of responsibility to each other and to the working class. This is a practical necessity, not just a question of feelings. This is true for two primary reasons.

First, sectarianism dissolves the democratic nature of the organization. Because activity in DSA is voluntary, the success of campaigns depends on building buy-in from membership, the majority of whom are not active in caucuses. When factions refuse to share the same space in campaigns, they begin to retreat into themselves, making decisions as factions, rather than intervening in the decisions of the entire organization.

This cuts members who are not part of organized caucuses or informal cliques out of the decision-making process, which is the same process that builds the buy-in necessary to actually execute a decision. Factions that are already conducting projects without each others’ labor slowly repel the rest of our membership, creating increasingly diminishing returns on the number of members they can turn out to canvass or hold down a picket line, and therefore on the number of new leaders they will be able to build to take on more specialized work.

Second, the expertise offered by the specialists, while not a replacement for the class power they lack, is necessary for an organization on the scale of DSA to function. Organization is a tool not just for the working-class to take political power directly, but for it to learn how to govern. How do you make and then execute a democratic decision? How do you run an efficient meeting, while ensuring the voices of all present are heard? How do you write a budget, or make a speech, or support a survivor of violence? These are questions the courts and bosses deny workers answers to, ensuring only bureaucrats under the discipline of the capitalist class are versed in them. Voluntary organization is one of the only spaces where unskilled workers are able to learn these skills, and where specialists are able to share them.

Pushing full-time organizers out ultimately denies the working class the right to choose between political tendencies, creating a false and short-lived unity, and denies it the ability to weaken the division of labor by spreading the expertise necessary to run a mass organization, and, ultimately, to govern.

If tomorrow DSA split between its right and left, most of the practical work undergirding the organization would collapse overnight. Campaigns for office would find themselves starved of canvassers. Chapters would suddenly lose the dues necessary to pay for meeting space. Shopfloor leaders would stop fighting the boss to focus on each other, as Official Communists and Trotskyists did during the Red Scare. 

Unity in Diversity

DSA is not able to function without the practical collaboration of its left and right. A purge or split would result in the total demobilization of the organization. The most common objection from the left (and, unspoken but clear through their actions, the right) is the urgent necessity of independent action on one or another terrain of struggle—that when a majority of our comrades drag their feet on participation in street protests or fight with rank-and-file workers against the labor bureaucracy—which we might call revolutionary impatience.

As we’ve seen above, however morally grounded, achieving independence through impatience weakens both DSA as a whole, and the left’s ability to execute our politics, ceding ground for the right to organize in official channels with an audience of potential converts, while the left marginalizes itself in the pursuit of immediate action. Intervening in mass struggles requires bringing DSA to our vision, even if it means acting for some time as a vocal but disciplined minority.

On the other hand, even if working within DSA is necessary to achieve our goals within the workers movement, we can’t always put DSA above the movement as a whole. While vanishingly small compared to the number of fruitless and destructive partisan splits, occasionally a moment comes like the Bolshevik-led break from the Second International in the struggle against World War I, where unity with the militarist right prevented the united action of the working-class. There are two criteria we can use to judge whether independent action is necessary.

The first is repression, or barriers to our ability to carry out the strategy of unity in diversity. Without every faction retaining freedom to vocalize ideas and criticism through debate, writing, one-on-ones, etc, the membership has no ability to make an informed choice between campaigns, and following the right’s line is tantamount to shutting up and going with the flow. Similarly, if there is no democratic oversight of a campaign, debate is limited to hypothetical criticism, forcing us to set up separate structures for the membership to choose between. Either way, we cannot give up on either the right of members to choose between political visions, or on our ability to build mass buy-in from rank-and-file members.

The second is crisis, when the legitimacy of the constitutional order fully breaks down and the sovereignty of the capitalist class comes into question. Under these circumstances, the right is forced to choose between following the revolutionary path of the left, or remaining loyal to the capitalist class in hope of having some say over how the crisis is triaged. Even then, the actual practicality of splitting depends on the left’s ability to win over a significant portion of the workers movement and act as more than a banner in the crowd, not just its moral rectitude. This is distinct from the minor challenges to capitalist domination that happen through direct actions and demand negotiations every day, but fail to threaten the ability of the ruling class as a whole to govern—as the proverb goes, Marxists have predicted nine out of the last five recessions.

Absent these criteria, independent action becomes a question of pure morality—are we angry enough to split? Are we willing to gamble that a silent majority of the working-class will flock to us and replace the labor contributed by the right? In the end, we are only left with the satisfaction that we were correct, not a path toward a purified mass party. Our tasks remain:

• Breaking down the division of labor between trained cadre and rank-and-file members. 
• Putting forward an independent political vision and winning members toward it. 
• Establishing a basis for practical unity with the right.

Accomplishing this is our responsibility to each other as comrades. Two years ago, I was a member of another socialist organization, Marxist Center. MC collapsed in part due to the intense political divides between its affiliates, but more immediately because of their inability to handle political conflict—inevitably confronted with disagreement, the only option seemed to be, for lack of a technical term, losing their shit and storming out.⁴

Secondly, it is our responsibility to the working class. There is no other mass, democratic political weapon in the hands of the entire workers’ movement. Before us, no one organization has played this role for generations, and there is no reason to believe that if DSA collapses, we will be left with anything but a return to the political devastation of the 1980s-2000s. Our movement is worth fighting for, and that holds true for both its left and right.

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1. Macnair, Mike. Revolutionary Strategy: Marxism and the Challenge of Left Unity, 110. London: November Publications Ltd., 2008.
2. “Points of Unity and Immediate Tasks.” Marxist Unity Group. Accessed May 25, 2023. https://www.marxistunity.com/points-of-unity-and-immediate-tasks.
3. This refers to the policy of groups like Socialist Alternative and Class Unity, not Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus, who hold it because of national oppression specific to people of color, not political sectarianism.
4. Miale, Marisa. “Dissolving the People and Electing Another: On Base-Building and Revolutionary Culture.” Cosmonaut, April 14, 2022. https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/01/dissolving-the-people-and-electing-another-on-base-building-and-revolutionary-culture/.