Shuvu Bhattarai of the Marxist Unity Group outlines an overview of the recent history of DSA and finds a demarcation between pro-party and anti-party tendencies, calling on those sympathetic to the former to join the fight for a mass socialist party in the United States of America. Reading: Aliyah

In an attempt to create a practical strategy for a United Front movement of the working class in the United States, I had drawn great inspiration from the Enough is Enough movement in the UK, writing an article explaining that a demand-based movement utilizing Chartist-style tactics, were it to be democratically run, would be a basis for creating an independent intervention of the working class during the 2024 Presidential election cycle. I pointed out the severe limitations of the Enough is Enough(EiE) campaign with its top-down structure and limited demands, advancing the idea that in the US, we must go much further, bringing together a militant minority of the worker movement in a General Assembly, creating a political platform called the Working People’s Bill of Rights which would be the basis for a mass political organizing campaign independent of the Democratic and Republican parties.  

This prompted a sharp response from comrade Daniel Lazare, who rightly concluded that the EiE campaign was not at all revolutionary but also went on to tie my admiration for the campaign with my membership to the Democratic Socialists of America(DSA), arguing that of course one who is a member of a “class-collaborationist” organization would support the “easy” EiE effort. I would like to thank comrade Lazare for his criticisms and use it as an opportunity to respond and clarify what I believe to be the dual tasks facing the worker and socialist movement in the United States as of 2023:

1. Unite the socialist movement and transform the DSA to a mass socialist party
2. Unite the worker movement and launch a mass political worker offensive

This article will focus on point 1. 

The Terrain of the US Socialist Movement 

It is no secret that even today, despite the rise of the DSA, socialists in the US are in a state of extreme disorganization and fragmentation. As of September 2022, according to the Pew Research Center, 6 percent of US adults had a “very positive” view of socialism. Assuming a total US adult population of roughly 258.3 million (based on 2020 census data) this would mean that roughly 15.4 million adults had a “very positive” view of socialism in the United States. 

Of course, this does not necessarily mean that there are 15.4 million self-identified socialists in the country, yet no such study exists to give us a more accurate number. Neither does it mean that the majority of the 15.4 million have a coherent view of what socialism is; what it does give us a sense of is the vast untapped layers that are already sympathetic to an alternative to the capitalist system. Keep in mind also that teenagers and the younger generation not accounted for here are more receptive to Socialism. 

Of this vast layer of millions of Socialists, a tiny minority has conducted work on an organized basis. 

The largest organized grouping of self-identified socialists is the DSA, a “big tent” organization composed of socialists from various ideologies, with most recent estimates at roughly 86 thousand members. The DSA is the only significant socialist organization in the country with enough of a democratic culture to regularly release its membership figures to the public. There is also the Green Party USA, which adopted an eco-socialist platform in 2016, and has 245 thousand registered voters but a much smaller activist base. For the rest of the socialist organizations, we have to make estimates based on outdated articles and conversations with members. Following the DSA, the largest organized socialist groupings are based on Leninist ideology and its offshoots, Trotskyism, Stalinism, and Maoism. These are more or less disciplined cadre parties and though much smaller, they do punch above their weight.   

The Communist Party USA(CPUSA), follows with roughly 15K members (according to members), with the youth section recently growing in particular. The organization’s current strategy for Socialism can be found here, with perhaps the most critical aspect of their practice being to unite with the Democratic Party to fight the “extreme right”. 

The Party for Socialism and Liberation(PSL) has roughly 2000-5000 members, with their strategy for socialism being to grow their membership into the “revolutionary workers’ party”. Socialist Alternative (SALT), a Trotskyist organization, has roughly 1000 members¹, whose strategy is to build a mass workers party and their own revolutionary organization. Other Trotskyist groupings such as Workers World, Socialist Workers Party (SWP), International Marxist Tendency (IMT), Socialist Equality Party (SEP), and a variety of splinter groups have no more than 50-500 members each, and have their strategy based on growing their own membership. The SEP in particular focuses virtually all of their cadre’s efforts into writing and disseminating articles on the World Socialist Website, which is focused on discrediting all socialist and worker organizations as the means for building their party and their worker-front groups. 

Also of note is the Trotskyist Left Voice, whose key is on providing news and ideological content, with their small but disciplined grouping of 40-60 members involved in a variety of labor and protest struggles. Last but not least, the US socialist movement also has the widespread presence of local anarchist and abolitionist groups alongside numerous revolutionary cells focused on community work and group study. 

In his criticism, Lazare asserts that there is an urgent need, of which I agree, for a revolutionary party that can develop “political theory”, “constitutional critiques”, “cultural criticism, or for any of those other measures leading to the ‘paralysis of analysis.” Let us investigate further as to how we can create the revolutionary party that will decisively resolve all of these questions.

With the exception of the DSA, all of the larger socialist organizations operate under varying degrees of bureaucratic centralism, which acts as a great brake on the development of political theory, or Scientific Socialism. The CPUSA for example is structured to prevent the formation of factions and organized oppositional views within the party. According to the 2019 article “How Does CPUSA elect its leaders”, the leadership of the organization is not selected by popular vote, but by the current National Committee, who after “input of district and club leaders”, select the new leadership and direction of the party. Power is centralized at the hands of the top leadership which prevents the development of principled criticism and new directions for the party, which would necessarily take place if the rank and file had the democratic ability to select their party leaders. 

The leadership selection procedure of the CPUSA is similar to that of the Trotskyist Socialist Equality Party, of which I was a member till my expulsion in 2021. Of the party’s leadership election I wrote “Per the SEP constitution, the election committee collates the nominees and produces their own slate, which the membership then votes up or down all at once. In preparing its slate, the election committee is not bound, even on paper, by the nominations of the membership, and no vote tally is ever released.” Furthermore, the SEP did not allow one to even share inner party criticism outside of the local branch, breaking down any effort to build organized debate within the party.

Socialist Alternative and IMT appear to have a healthier inner party culture, allowing for debate within their internal bulletin and development of factions (though IMT leadership has to approve the faction), but they are still severely limited by the defects of bureaucratic centralism, namely the election of their leadership via slate, which is also the modus operandi of all of the larger Leninist offshoot organizations in the US, with the exception of organized factions in the DSA. The slate system is a result of the disastrous 10th Congress of the Russian Communist Party in 1921, which also instituted the ban on factions. The brilliant article, “The Origins of the Slate System” goes into this in depth.

The essence of the slate system is that the existing leadership of the organization exercises their authority by fielding pre-selected candidates for leadership who are then voted up or down. This is in contrast to a leadership selection system in which factions within the membership can field their own candidates or decide to run themselves without the blessing of the party leadership. The latter results in genuine political debate and a heightening of the party’s conception of socialist strategy, the former leads to a self-perpetuating cycle of entrenched leadership which commands the membership to practice a generally stale and static party line, the opposite of a flexible revolutionary party which is able to adapt and attack the ruling class in an increasingly volatile and dangerous terrain of class war.²

Given this ecosystem of the US socialist movement, Lazare writes “The important thing about the DSA is that it is not a socialist organization that happened to fall victim to the sin of class collaborationism. Rather, it is a quasi-socialist group whose raison d’etre is to prove that leftists can find a place for themselves in the Democratic ‘big-tent”. Lazare goes on to cite the history of the DSA’s popular frontist strategy, with its endorsement of the imperialists Walter Mondale, John Kerry, and Barack Obama, asserting that the result was to “neutralize the left”. 

Comrade Lazare, what left and where would it go in absence of the DSA?

This one-sided method of analysis, analyzing only part of the outer form of the organization without delving deeper into its content and contradictions, unfortunately, follows that of the World Socialist Website (SEP’s party publication), with its recent article by the prolific writer (and liar) Eric London titled “Political crisis emerges within leadership of Democratic Socialist of America”. He labels the principled stand of the DSA leadership– the 9 out of the 16 National Political Committee members–to further democratize the DSA and distance it from the Democratic Party somehow as proof that “The DSA has functioned as a cog in the Democratic Party since it’s founding in 1982”. Mr. London, the political crisis of the DSA has emerged precisely because it has been moving towards a break from the Democratic Party. 

The fundamental contradiction of the DSA, an organization founded as the left-wing of the Democratic Party which has in the course of its development absorbed genuinely revolutionary layers of young people and refugees from bureaucratic centralist sects, has been expressing itself in a series of inner-organizational struggles, most recently on January 16th, 2023. On this date, the bulk of the National Political Committee (NPC) decided to abstain from voting on the Electoral Director, a staff position in the organization, on the basis that the NPC was not given the opportunity to view other candidates who might be best suited to fulfill the resolutions that the DSA committed to in 2019 and 2021, which were to break from the Democratic Party in the long term and build working class power independent of them. This stalemate will continue till its resolution in the August 2023 National Convention.

This development is the result of a generally growing and increasingly organized left opposition within the DSA that is conducting a battle against the organization’s remaining undemocratic and decentralized structures as well as its class collaborationist political orientation. 

The Development of the DSA

2011-2016

For most of the 2000s the DSA had remained a stagnant organization till the emergence of the Occupy Movement in September 2011 and the buildup to the Sanders campaign starting in late 2014. Occupy was the first major working-class offensive in the United States after the global breakdown of neo-liberal capitalism in 2007-2008. Taking inspiration from the Arab Spring and the Wisconsin Capitol Occupation, the Occupy movement created forms of independent working-class organization in the form of “horizontalist” mass general assemblies, and given its initial spark by anarchist influence, introduced anti-capitalist consciousness into the masses. Due to the immaturity of the workers’ movement, the immaturity of the organized socialist movement, and the lack of a cohesive strategy to power, the movement was easily crushed by state forces, but the essence of its socialist message, the goal of building a world of true majority democracy, lived on in the hearts of its participants and spectators.  

Occupy birthed the modern socialist movement in the United States, and some of the people transformed by it entered into the DSA. The fresh winds of revolution breathed life into a dusty and ossified organization. During the years of ebb from 2012-2014, differences crystallized with the formation of the Left Caucus. The caucus argued against DSA hegemonic “realignment strategy” inherited from its Harringtonite foundation. Realignment asserted that the path to Socialism could be won through the capture Democratic Party, and the Left Caucus fought against this by arguing that the DSA must become an independent mass socialist party.  

In late 2014, DSA would make the decision to proactively recruit Senator Bernie Sanders to run for President and centralize most of its activity towards supporting his campaign. The DSA has had deep ties with Sanders, fundraising for him in 2006 and with him speaking at the 2007 National DSA Convention. This decision would pay off bigtime, with an exponential growth in membership from 2014 to the Sanders campaign’s dissolution in 2016.

Sanders 2016, utilizing the rhetoric of the “1 Percent” and the “billionaire class” popularized by Occupy, was run as a “Democratic Socialist” campaign, running on a social reformist platform of increased minimum wage, free college and healthcare, Wall Street reform, increased union rights, immigrant rights, and climate change reform. Sanders positioned himself as a working-class champion outside of the “establishment”, a loosely defined term meaning the career politicians running the Republican-Democratic parties. 

The Sanders campaign was an example of mass political organizing that mobilized the working class. The demands of the campaign spoke to the immediate interests of working people and was able to attract tens of thousands of grassroots volunteers, many of whom went from apathy to active political participants overnight. It built a mass base of politicized organizers among young people stemming from working class and petty-bourgeois backgrounds. DSA, especially with its youth wing Young Democratic Socialist (YDS) based in college campuses, was able to attract into its ranks young people who supported Bernie 2016.   

Bernie Sanders, a political creature who drifted from being a Debsian socialist to a clear class collaborationist (especially in military-imperial matters) after tasting power at the federal level, would inevitably fold his campaign, despite fraud from the DNC, into the “establishment” Democratic Party, a role which would continue after Hillary Clinton’s defeat. However, the base which his campaign had politicized and developed would splinter on in different directions, with sections of the campaign leadership creating Brand New Congress and the Justice Democrats with the mission of remaking the Democratic party through the successful primaries of “progressive democrats”, other segments creating local legislative organizations, and tens of thousands joining the Democratic Socialist of America. 

The Sanders campaign revolutionized the DSA, forging the first mass socialist organization seen in the United States in decades. In a socialist movement where other organizations were limited by bureaucratic centralism, the DSA emerged, by comparison, as a highly democratic alternative. 

The 2016 election, while growing the forces of socialism, had also grown the forces of fascism with the campaign, victory, and election term of Donald Trump. Organized paramilitary groups such as the Proud Boys gained national prominence and were out on the streets, engaged in violent protest. Far-right groups began to unite and centralize their forces, with the Unite the Right rally in August 2017 as a pivotal moment. Simultaneous to the centralization of the far-right, the US Socialist movement has been in an ongoing period of intense debate and fighting as to the direction forward, which played itself out in the splits and implosions of socialist organizations as well as the emergence and transformations of factions within DSA.  

The primary strategic debate that has developed is around the question of whether the DSA should function as an independent socialist party or as the left-wing appendage of the Democratic Party. We will call these tendencies pro-party and anti-party. The conflict between these two tendencies continuously increased and has now reached a fever pitch, creating organizational and political deadlock on DSA’s national level.   

This dynamic can be analyzed through the 2017, 2019, 2021, and the current leadup to the 2023 National Convention. The National Conventions are held on odd years and are the highest authority of the DSA. The conventions are incredible exercises in mass democracy. Resolutions and constitutional amendments are submitted through the general membership, hundreds of delegates to the convention are elected proportionate to the total membership, and during the national convention the elected delegates have the ability to collectively transform the DSA.

Constitutional Amendments changing the organizational structure, resolutions dealing with the use of DSA funds for campaigns as well as political positions of the organizations are all deliberated and voted on. New working bodies are created with democratic mandate and the delegates also vote on the National Political Committee (NPC), a 16-person body that serves as national coordinators of the org. One vote on the NPC is reserved for YDSA co-chairs.  

2017 National Convention

The DSA is an “open tent” organization, guided by vague socialist values rather than a clear political program, though this has changed as a result of the 2021 National Convention which adopted a political platform. As the organization exploded in growth post-2016 its lack of an enforced political program attracted elements of the socialist movement from a variety of contradictory and often opposite traditions such as pragmatism, anarchism, Marxism and its offshoots. 

Ideological Formations in the Prelude to the Convention

August 2017 marked DSA’s first national convention as a mass organization. As new socialist elements entered into DSA, they brought with them ideas that ran counter to the organization’s founding goal of realigning the Democratic Party.   

Created by members of the defunct Left Caucus alongside newer DSA activists, the Momentum Slate formed. Momentum was the most theoretically developed slate, with its ultimate strategy based on Ralph Miliband’s conception of the “Democratic road to Socialism”, envisioning the state as something which could be democratized and seized. Momentum ran on six points:

1. Rank and File Strategy(RFS): Originally developed by the post-Trotskyist Kim Moody, Momentum’s take on the RFS was that DSA must mobilize its members to enter into “strategic” trade unions, build militancy, and spur on and help develop reform efforts. 
2. Building a “Party beyond the party”: DSA must develop a clear political program which “develops, runs, and disciplines candidates in select campaigns”. This point was an attempt for DSA to give up the realignment strategy and instead conceive of itself as a political party. 
3. Internationalism: Withdraw from the Socialist International(SI), form stronger relationships with left wing parties around the world, and explicitly support Palestinian liberation and BDS. 
4. Internal Democracy: Regular Strategy Discussions, opening up the Internal Bulletin, encouraging caucus formation, national grievance system, and a few other points. 
5. Political Education
6. Medicare for All Campaign: Mobilizing entire membership and locals behind Medicare for All and building Medicare for All committees in workplaces. 

Momentum was a pro-party tendency. 

Alongside Momentum emerged the Praxis Slate. Praxis did not have an alternative electoral strategy like Momentum but its emergence marked a force that was shifting away from realignment because its emphasis was on “base-building”. Their positions were in general alignment with that of Momentum. The slate argued for conducting national organizer training for members, building regional structures between locals, fighting for racial justice and socialist feminism, and supporting anti-imperialist and pro-immigrant movements. However, it did not explicitly call for a break with the realignment strategy. It had a neutral position on the party question.

There were two anti-party tendencies, both on the opposite ends of the socialist spectrum.  First was the Friends and Comrades slate, an anarchist grouping with members from the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, which argued for further decentralization and apoliticization of the DSA, calling for autonomy of the local chapters, transparency of leadership, an apolitical approach and “prioritization of doing the work”, and maintaining an apolitical NPC.

Finally, there was the Unity through Diversity Network, which was composed of the older forces of the DSA committed to the realignment strategy. Though little record of the network remains, its focus was on the Medicare for All campaign and it argued that DSA would be best served through a “combination of continuity and change”.

Results of the Convention 

The convention results shifted the balance of forces in the DSA to the pro-party wing spearheaded by Momentum but also created conditions for deadlock on the party question. This was the breakdown of the newly elected NPC members:

Momentum: 6

Praxis: 5

Friends and Comrades: 1

Unity through Diversity Network: 4

Pro-Party: 6

Neutral: 5

Total Anti-Party: 5

The key resolutions adopted at 2017 were:

• National Medicare for All Campaign
• Reviving the Democratic Socialist Labor Commission
• Electing Socialists, devoting resources to those who run as open socialists
• National Training Strategy
• Recognition of the Afro-Socialist and People of Color Caucus
• Full Support of the BDS Movement

Key resolutions which could not be passed but were left to the new NPC to decide on were: 

• The revival of an internal debate bulletin with Socialist Forum
• Withdrawal from the Socialist International 
• Building an Independent Socialist Party

As a result of 2017, the DSA expanded beyond electoral activity into the labor realm, began a culture of internal debate and criticism, encouraged the formation of factions, broke from capitalist political parties abroad, formalized racial justice work and fully supported the Palestinian struggle. New full-time staffers were hired and new coordinating bodies were created, increasing the level of bureaucracy in the DSA. 

However, it was not able to decide on the party-question. The resolution to build an Independent Socialist Party was later rejected by the NPC.  

2019 National Convention

Prelude to the 2019 Convention 

The time between August 2017 and August 2019 saw the sharpening of the pro-party and anti-party tendencies/ On the one hand were the splits, implosions, and calculated entry of various socialist groups, leading to an increase of pro-party elements in the DSA, and on the other hand was the growing electoral successes of DSA-backed Democratic Party candidates, with the most notable being the Justice Democrats and Brand New Congress led-coalition campaigns of Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib. 

In 2018, Brand New Congress and the Justice Democrats, formed by some of the leading staffers of the Sanders 2016 campaign, gained a major electoral victory with the election of AOC, who had essentially run on the social reformist platform of Sanders 2016 with the notable inclusion of the Green New Deal. Her election was a coalition effort “including BLM, Muslims for Progress, local resistance and indivisible type groups throughout Queens and the Bronx, existing educational justice organizations, and the Bernie infrastructure” who had door-knocked, phone banked, and hosted other events in support, according Susan Kang from NYC-DSA.³

AOC won an upset victory against a powerful machine Democrat, generating headlines as a DSA member who had won national office, though her political center was always the Justice Democrats/Brand New Congress which has as its ultimate mission a watered-down version of Harrington’s “realignment”, attempting to shift the Democratic Party to accept Sanders’ 2016 Platform. Her upset victory created another surge in DSA membership, and helped further with the victories of other Justice Democrats/DSA members Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, and Ayanna Presley. Their victories both boosted the national stature of DSA but also created a strong pressure for DSA to stick to the realignment strategy and further pulled the organization towards the Democratic Party.

This tendency was countered by the growing entry of pro-party elements from other socialist organizations. 

In September 2018, the Trotskyist Socialist Alternative had a split with the new formation Reform and Revolution quickly joining the DSA. While the reasons behind the split are beyond the scope of this article, I will note that the Reform and Revolution letter titled “A New Knot” reads like a breakup between former lovers:

We hope that with time and experience, it will be possible for SA and our organization to find a road back to building a common revolutionary organization…and that on the basis of bigger events which demand the maximum unity of revolutionary forces, our two organizations will be able to fuse together again on a higher political and organizational plane.  

Socialist Alternative had also released a post-split letter. The International Socialist Organization (ISO) would be next to experience a crisis, which in their case resulted in total collapse. ISO was pre-2016 the largest socialist organization in the country, and formed as a post-Trotskyist group loosely based on the ideas of Hal Draper. The ISO was critical in the formation of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators (CORE) which spearheaded the great Chicago Teachers Strike of 2012.

On April 2019, the combination of the election of a new leadership that favored entry into the DSA alongside revelations of sexual abuse kept secret due to the ISO’s bureaucratic centralist practices led to the leadership voting to dissolve the organization.⁴ Elements within it dispersed, with a significant portion entering into DSA.

Caucus formations and resolutions/amendments before the convention

Prior to the 2019 Convention, the ideological level of the DSA greatly increased with the development of caucuses and publications. Caucuses in the DSA function as a “party within a party”, with internal constitutions, an elected leadership, and shared principles. While most of the DSA is unaffiliated, the most active elements alongside most of the political leadership are caucused individuals. 

The Momentum Slate turned into the publication The Call in August 2018. After the launch of The Call, the Bread and Roses Caucus, based on The Call’s ideas, formed. The collapse of the ISO favored Bread and Roses, with notable figures such as Eric Blanc entering the caucus.  At this point, Bread and Roses was the largest caucus as well as the pro-party caucus. B&R went into the 2019 Convention with the following key resolutions:

• Class Struggle Elections: Candidates must openly identify as socialists, use their public profile to popularize class struggle, and commit to using their campaigns to help build and unite socialist, union, and other worker organizations independent of the Democratic Party.
• Labor Strategy and the DSLC: Furthering the rank and file strategy by creating educational tools encouraging socialists to take up “strategic” jobs such as in education, strike support education, and forming greater links with Labor Notes. 
• Invest in Political Education: National DSA will create Socialist Night School guides, create learning modules, sponsor series of recorded political talks for distribution to chapters  

However, B&R also showed signs of shifting towards the anti-party line when it failed to throw its full support behind the resolution Establishing candidate litmus tests. The resolution would have helped ensure that DSA was actually electing socialists, not opportunists using DSA endorsements for an army of free campaign workers. 

A more explicit pro-party caucus formed with the emergence of Red Star in February 2019. Red Star, an explicitly Marxist-Leninist caucus, was based in San Francisco and argued for a break from the Democratic Party while asserting the need for a mass workers’ party.                                                     

The most vocal defenders of the anti-party wing, with a fleshed-out ideological justification, emerged in April 2018 with the formation of the North Star Caucus, composed in part of figures from the earlier Unity through Diversity group. It argues that under the pressure of an emerging far-right, “DSA and the broader left must join forces”, with a necessity of a “center-left coalition to defend democracy from neo-fascism”. It maintains that DSA must continue down the path of a realignment strategy. While North Star is a small caucus, its ideas are widespread throughout the DSA and shared by members of larger caucus formations.

Forming a few months before the 2019 convention, the Socialist Majority (SM) Caucus emerged. Composed of local chapter leaders, experienced Democratic Party campaign staffers, and proficient technical organizers, the caucus defined itself as practically minded and structurally focused, seeking to reproduce past successes with large, targeted campaigns. Similar to the earlier Praxis, SM did not officially take a stance on the party question. SM proposed the following key resolutions:

• Ecosocialist Green New Deal Priority: A cross-caucus initiative, with BnR endorsement, to build a national alliance of “labor, social justice, progressive, leftist, youth, climate and environmental justice movements to win a green new deal”. Essentially an electoral tactic to build connections with the broader worker movement with the hope of passing the bill.
• National Electoral Priority Resolution: Expansion of National Electoral Committee in supporting chapters’ efforts to develop and run socialist candidates for office. 

At this stage, SM was neutral on the party question, it favored greater centralization and organizational efficiency but did not take an open stance on the realignment question.   

The anarchist tendencies seen through the Friends and Comrades slate in 2017 developed with the entrance of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC) who had gone into the 2019 convention with key constitutional amendments to introduce direct democracy, accountability measures and to replace the NPC with a more decentralized body:

• Binding National Referendum: Referendum may establish policy, and override decisions by the NPC. 
• Procedures for NPC Recall: Ensures that NPC members can be recalled by the general membership
• Assembly of Locals: Abolishes the NPC, creates a new body with representatives from each local chapter, vesting this body with the duties of the former NPC.

LSC introduced important measures to increase member democracy but went too far with their proposals, which if adopted would have created a DSA that would be unable to quickly organize national events and initiatives, instead getting stuck in a crisis of endless deliberation and debate and preventing the organization from responding in a disciplined manner to social upheavals. LSC was an anti-party tendency. However, it must be noted LSC was a strong supporter of building independent working-class organizations, spearheading the support for tenant organizing in DSA.  

There were also two non-caucus forces in the national convention, Build and the Collective Power Network (CPN). Build descended from some members of Praxis and was formed out of a magazine, with positions mostly aligned with the LSC, supporting decentralization measures and pushing forward base-building measures. Build was also an anti-party tendency. 

The CPN was partly composed of former DSA staff and had argued explicitly for a  more centralized DSA, calling for regional organization and an intermediary body between the NPC and the National Convention called the National Organizing Council and pushed for their flagship proposal: Towards 100,000 members by 2021. The resolution sought to establish a national commission to develop a plan to get DSA to 100K members by Jan 1, 2021, alongside shifting DSA national’s priority to growing its membership. CPN did not take a position on realignment; it was a neutral tendency on the party question. 

Finally, the buildup to the convention marked the deployment of the DSA Discussion Board, a forum open to DSA members where debates about resolutions took place prior to the convention. 

Results of the Convention

The excellent reporting by Andrew Sernatinger of the 2019 Convention shows clearly the new balance of forces of the elected NPC. 

Bread and Roses: 3

Red Star: 1

LSC/Build: 5

SMC: 4

CPN: 1

Independent: 2

Pro Party: 4

Anti Party: 5

“Neutral”: 7

Compared to the 2017 Convention, the 2019 Convention saw the balance of power shift towards the anti-party direction in the NPC. I have put quotation marks on the Neutral because after this convention SMC and CPN would cease to play a neutral role and became a roadblock towards the development of a mass independent socialist party. 

Despite this, the 2019 Convention saw the passage of B&R’s pro-party resolution “Class Struggle Elections”. The resolution had advanced an eventual “dirty break” from the Democratic Party and committed to the project of building the DSA as an independent mass party.  

However, the convention also saw the defeat of the “Candidate Litmus Test” resolution, which meant that DSA candidates could run as “socialists” while holding policy positions that run completely counter the socialist project. The B&R resolution to increase commitment for the “Rank and File Strategy” also passed as well as the “Invest in Political Education”. The SMC resolutions “Ecosocialist Green New Deal” and “National Electoral Policy Resolution” to further bolster DSA’s national legislative and electoral efforts also passed.  

A slate of resolutions supporting housing and tenant organizing passed, helping shift DSA’s on the ground work towards more base building projects. New working groups, including anti-fascist and direct action, and the housing working group were also created. The Assembly of Locals resolution failed and the proposal for an elected National Organizing Council was left to the NPC and also failed.⁵

The resolutions which passed can be viewed here. 

The sum result of the 2019 convention was a shift towards the pro-party line due to Class Struggle Elections. There was increased emphasis on base building projects, an increase of bureaucracy and paid staff, and a continued national orientation towards legislative and electoral campaigns which would necessitate deeper coordination with the Democratic Party. The pro-party line moved forward while laying the seeds for further growth of the anti-party tendency. 

2021 National Convention

Prelude to the Convention

DSA’s priority focus on the Green New Deal campaign followed in the footsteps of the Medicare for All campaign, as a legislative failure but an organizing success. The Green New Deal was spearheaded by Sanders 2020 into a transformative effort, but after his consolidation into the Biden campaign, the GND was severely cut into Build Back Better, and stayed in a negotiation limbo in Congress during the time of the convention. 

DSA members phone banked, door knocked, and organized support efforts for Sanders 2020 and the GND, which alongside the “DSA to 100K” plan, had further grown the organization by over 30 thousand members. Aiding in membership growth was also DSA’s innovative efforts in base building, significantly with the launch of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee(EWOC) in March 2020, a partnership initiative between United Electrical Workers(UE) and the DSA, providing free organizing support for workers.

However, despite these developments, the organization was growing at a slower and slower pace, with growth reaching a limit at the 2021 Convention. The realignment strategy had reached a dead end, shown clearly by the DSA’s absence in the largest protest wave, with insurrectionary dimensions, in US history.

As the report of the 2020 protests titled “Big Brick Energy” by the communist collective Unity and Struggle showed, an estimated 15-26 million people attended the protests, with spontaneous demonstrations taking place constantly. The working class was in direct conflict with police. Protests in Minneapolis, Seattle, and Atlanta, spurred on further by organized socialist and anarchist groupings, were able to push back police entirely and transform territory into autonomous zones. As police violence slowed down and contained the movement, NGO’s and Democratic Party politicians were able to dissipate the movement’s energy into concessionary reforms and token police firings.  

There was a moment of time, a few weeks, in which the protests had a vacuum of leadership where the DSA was uniquely equipped, by virtue of a national organization with mass active chapters in most major cities, to rally together labor and community groups and push forward a socialist program into the uprising. Such leadership could have helped to transform the disparate protests into general democratic assemblies that were united nationally, pushing demands which connected the fight against police brutality with the fight against capitalist brutality in all forms. 

DSA’s decentralized organizational structure and its hegemonic strategy that relied completely on legality were unable to comprehend and intervene effectively in the mass uprisings which directly challenged state and government authority. Instead, bureaucratic centralist groups that retained a state-oppositional ideology such as PSL were able to mobilize quickly and effectively. As a result, they gained and grew their forces through the movement. 

Absent from the protests, and after the failure of the GND campaign, DSA’s national priority was placed on the “Pass the Pro Act” campaign, which did not have a significant impact in the growth of the organization and ultimately also failed.  

Another point of tension that emerged were growing instances of the unaccountability of DSA politicians. The most prominent DSA members were supporting initiatives that ran opposite to the path of socialism. For example, in January 2021, DSA members AOC, Tlaib, Corey Bush, and Jamaal Bowman voted for Wall Street darling Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House, without an ounce of opposition. The DSA members in federal office had little coordination with DSA, nor were they particularly inclined to support the socialist line, as their political center was the Justice Democrats, not DSA. The most prominent members voting for Pelosi would be projected as DSA’s endorsement of her, putting the organization in a predicament that would grow more and more in the years to come. 

Due to COVID, the 2021 convention was to be held online.  

Caucus Formations and Resolutions/Amendments before the Convention

Anti-Party Formations

As the federal DSA electeds were getting more and more subordinated to the Democratic Party leadership, the anti-party wing of the DSA followed suit. 

The adoption of the Class Struggle Elections resolution in 2019 marked DSA’s shift towards political and organizational independence from the Democratic Party. The next pro-party transformational step would be the subordination of DSA electeds to the DSA, a step which SMC and CPN are fundamentally opposed to. DSA was at a halfway point, neither an independent political force nor an appendage of the Democratic Party. SMC and CPN would take the position of halting further political independence measures and push forward more centralized organizational measures, and would cease to be neutral tendencies and become powerful anti-party tendencies.

Here are the resolutions debated at the 2021 Convention, though keep in mind that this does not encompass all the resolutions that were in contention prior to the convention. 

The center point of debate in the 2021 Convention was over Resolution 8: Toward a Mass Party in the United States. It was essentially the same resolution as Class Struggle Elections while boosting DSA’s electoral organizing capacity and further centralizing this work. However, it also spelled out and justified the current practice of exclusively using the Democratic Party ballot line. 

Amendment 5 was introduced to the resolution by sections of B&R to explicitly reject the realignment strategy, adding that DSA rejects a strategy of capturing the Democratic Party or its clubs at the local or state level, maintains flexibility with regard to ballot lines running candidates as independents or non-Democratic party ballots, and prioritizes the creation of socialist caucuses in legislatures rather than liquidating into left Democratic caucuses.⁶ 

SMC and CPN had rejected Amendment 5, with CPN arguing “We reject the idea that third party ballot lines are a necessary precondition of a workers party or that pursuit of independent ballot lines as an end unto itself. Our goal is for strategic campaigns that grow the capacity and diversity of our organization, bring our ideas to a mass audience, and reshape the political terrain upon which the workers movement operates.”, suggesting that the Democratic Party was the only path to relevance.⁷ 

A new anti-party formation developed with the Green New Deal Slate. They were based on core organizers for the DSA Ecosocialist Working Group and the Green New Deal+PRO Act Campaign Steering Committees. While they had called for a “proto-party” formation, in practice they had supported the realignment strategy as will be clearly seen by the infamous BDS incident. They had pushed for stronger centralization of the DSA, with need for developing rapid response measures, and had pushed for the Green New Deal as a campaign priority yet again.⁸  

Pro-Party Formations

Growing internal tensions within the BnR caucus over the “dirty break” had shifted the caucus towards more of a neutral stance on the party question, though BnR remained a pro-party caucus. BnR had endorsed SMC’s “Towards a Mass Party” resolution, with no official stance on Amendment 5. But it had also spearheaded a major constitutional amendment for the 2021 convention, making DSA’s National Director an elected position, directly addressing a key problem in DSA’s organization, in which a growing bureaucracy was under the control of an unelected National Director, who has the power to hire and fire staff.⁹

A quick note regarding staff; a key problem in the DSA is that staff uniquely qualified to train chapters in electoral campaigns and help produce technical assistance to chapters are recruited from those with former Democratic party experience or from the NGO space. Because staff are not under the democratic check of the DSA members, they inherently strengthen the anti-party wing.    

The Marxist Unity Slate was a new pro-party tendency created by members of Cosmonaut Magazine, a publication that publishes a variety of socialist viewpoints, though its editorial board can be best described as having been greatly inspired by the British Marxist Mike Macnair’s, “Revolutionary Strategy”, Lars Lih’s “Lenin Rediscovered”, and August Nimtz’s “The Ballot, the Streets, or both”.It is a group that I am currently a part of, though I do maintain differences related to the United Front tactic with Marxist Unity’s dominant viewpoint. Marxist Unity’s dominant strategy for Socialism is summarized by Comrade Donald Parkinson’s From Workers Party to Workers Republic.

As a major step towards the transformation of DSA into an independent mass socialist party, the 2021 convention would vote on a national political platform for the first time in its history. In this context Marxist Unity released a three-point slate aimed towards “programmatic unity”:

1. Amendment to the national political platform that would make its acceptance the basis of membership
2. Tribunes of the People and Democratic Discipline: DSA’s national endorsement of candidates would be contingent on a series of conditions to make the candidates accountable to DSA. 
3. Socialist Slate: DSA shall run an organized team of candidates recruited by locals across the country to run for US House of Representatives

Other pro-party groups also gained prominence during this time. The Tempest Collective, a post-Trotskyist group composed of post-ISO elements, refugees from micro-sects, and socialists in the labor movement formed in August 2020. Among its prominent members is Kim Moody, author of B&R’s beloved rank-and-file strategy. Tempest had advanced the resolutions Socialist Horizon, which would add requirements for nationally endorsed candidates, National Referendum, which would allow rank and file members to directly propose changes between conventions, and also supported Marxist Unity’s “Tribunes of the People Resolution”. Finally, Tempest had also supported Amendment 5.¹⁰

Reform and Revolution(R&R), the Seattle-based split off group from Socialist Alternative(SALT), which now had gained members from the DSA, proposed a series of changes to the DSA political platform, notably adding that a revolutionary rupture was necessary for Socialism. R&R had also supported Marxist Unity’s “Socialist Slate Resolution” as well as Amendment 5.¹¹ 

In a strange twist of fate, SALT had also joined DSA as a pro-party caucus in December 2020. They sought to push for a clean break with the Democratic Party, and adopt a confrontational stance in labor struggle against the trade union bureaucracy.¹² They also pushed for a resolution calling on DSA Electeds to forgo and donate part of their salary, as shown by the example of Kshama Sawant.¹³ 

Now we will be moving on to the Neutral Formations. First was the caucus Emerge. Emerge is a NYC-based group based on Marxist and Abolitionist ideas. It stressed the need for, among others, independent working-class institutions, abolition of the carceral state, and communal self-defense.¹⁴ However, Emerge did not take a position on Amendment 5 and does not have a position on DSA’s relationship to the Democratic Party.  

Next was the Renewal Slate, its signature resolution being Reconvening a National Advisory Committee, an alternate body to support the DSA NPC and to create regional structures. The LSC had shifted from an anti-party stance due to their support for radical decentralization measures to neutral come 2021 convention, strongly pushing forward a resolution to expand the size of the NPC. 

Following was the Commie Caucus, initially an East-Bay California-based group, based in the left-communist tradition. The caucus does not have an official position on realignment, with its views summarized by the article “Our Moment: Proletarian Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time”, which argues that the primary task of socialists is to rebuild working-class institutions like trade unions and tenant unions. Their goal in the 2021 convention was to pass the Autonomous Tenant Union resolution.  

Results of the Convention

A strategic deadlock marked the 2021 Convention. There were signs of demoralization within the DSA, as there were only 20 candidates running for the 16 NPC positions. Furthermore, it was revealed that “membership growth has slowed to a trickle”. The composition of the NPC became the following¹⁵:

Bread and Roses: 3

Independent(former Red Star): 1

SMC: 2

SMC/North Star: 1

Green New Deal: 3

Renewal/LSC: 3

Emerge: 1

Independent: 2

Pro-Party: 4

Anti-Party: 6

Neutral: 6

The balance of forces at the NPC level had slightly shifted to the anti-party side by 1 member compared to 2019.

Accountability measures such as the NPC recall mechanism advanced by Tempest resoundingly failed by a vote of 235-799. Electing DSA’s National Director by BnR also failed in a similar range by 256-811 votes.¹⁶ Socialist Horizon also failed by 232-754. Tribunes of the People and a Socialist Slate did not make it to voting. 

Socialist Alternative’s resolutions also failed by large margins, their amendment to the Labor resolution calling to take over existing union leadership failed by 156-838 and an amendment to the Socialist Horizon resolution which would have directed electoral organizing to publicly run against the Democratic Party failed by 151-838.¹⁷  

Commie Caucus’ Autonomous Tenant Union Resolution was also defeated in a 430-570 vote. 

The primary resolution of the convention, Towards a Mass Party in the United States passed by 738-218. Amendment 5 was subject to intense debate and was defeated 442-577. A striking fact of this debate was B&R’s Eric Blanc, who had once said in an interview with the Daily Show that the DSA was not socialist because they were “a wing of the Democratic Party”, now arguing against Amendment 5 saying that DSA remain a wing of the Democratic Party till an indefinite future. The comrade’s justification was that the Democratic Party was where socialists could best gain an audience for their ideas within the working class: 

The main way to advance to a mass workers’ party is to build up independent working-class political organization and class struggle. And most workers who we should be aiming to politically organize — into DSA and into a broader proto-party — currently are Democratic voters who want to see the Democrats represent the interests of working people. Moreover, this working-class base is rightfully terrified of a racist and increasingly authoritarian Republican Party — for better or worse, the Democratic brand today largely means “not Republican.”

This of course completely ignores the fact that most of the working class identify as independents and indeed a significant portion are located within the Republican Party. Sticking to a strategy of solely running Democrats is inherently self-limiting and Blanc’s intervention was critical in tanking Amendment 5.

Finally, on a positive note, DSA’s first ever political platform was adopted in a 518-419 vote, though Marxist Unity’s amendment to tie acceptance of the platform to membership was defeated in a 340-640 vote.

As a result of this convention, despite the defeats of resolutions that would have decisively taken DSA into a path of political independence, the organization shifted further in a pro-party direction. The DSA came out of the convention with a greater level of centralization, and with the acceptance of the political platform. Though this platform is not yet tied to membership, its acceptance has opened up the path for DSA electeds to be held under the discipline of the organization, which has now become the primary point of debate. The DSA would again expand its paid staff and bureaucracy.    

Buildup to the August 2023 National Convention

The Green New Deal was not only defeated but transformed into the concessionary Inflation Reduction Act, which opened up millions of acres of land for auction to big business.¹⁸ DSA drastically grew its membership post-2016 but failed to pass any transformative legislation at the national level and was unable to halt the growth of fascism or the right-wing turn of the Democratic Party. The realignment strategy of the DSA has reached its limit, further shown by the continuing decline of total membership and membership activity post-2021.  A new orientation was and is necessary to break the organization’s impasse. 

The pro-party tendency and anti-party tendency have different visions of breaking past this limit, with one moving towards Democratic Centralism and the other Bureaucratic Centralism in order to achieve their aims of building either a Mass Socialist Party or a Left-Democrat Volunteer-Coordination Machine. 

The tension between these two tendencies has expressed itself in key flashpoints.  

Jamaal Bowman aligns with Zionists and DSA NPC censures BDS WG

The first flashpoint emerged almost immediately after the 2021 convention, when DSA member Jamaal Bowman voted to support Iron Dome funding for Israel in September 2021, then going on to take photo-ops with Israeli fascist Naftali Bennett. AOC had voted for a cowardly “present”. Bowman, like AOC, has his political center outside of the DSA, in his case with the Working Families Party which has a record of supporting Zionist politicians and no commitment to the anti-imperialist struggle. Bowman’s vote was a huge blow to Palestinian solidarity efforts spearheaded by DSA’s BDS Working Group(WG), which was able to bring together a coalition of Palestinian solidarity groups who then began to distance themselves from the DSA due to the vote.

Comrade Andy Sertinger of Tempest did a great job reporting on this incident.  

In protest of Bowman, the BDS WG(a creation of the 2017 National Convention) released a statement on November 17th, signed by numerous DSA and YDSA local chapters, LSC, Marxist Unity, Tempest, Afro Soc, and others, calling on DSA NPC to expel him if he did not meet the basic demands of¹⁹: 

1. Upholding Palestinian civil society’s call for BDS until Israel ends its illegal settlement expansion.
2. Provide protection to and support for Palestinians through legislation
3. Participate in the travel boycott for personal travel to Israel and Palestine

Two days later the BDS WG alongside the DSA NPC and Lower Hudson Valley DSA met with Bowman and his team. Bowman was not ready to accept their most significant demands, refusing to stop his relationship with the Zionist lobby. The BDS WG released a statement calling for his expulsion, elaborating that this was the culmination of months of pro-Zionist actions by Bowman.²⁰ 

The DSA NPC released a statement on December 2nd²¹, writing that they were disappointed by his votes but rejected the expulsion of Bowman, insisting that he was a Black Socialist who had undermined the Zionist lobby. They pointed out that utilizing expulsion on Bowman would mean extending this to other DSA-backed politicians and that DSA must be patient and allow the politicians the opportunity to change, writing:

Bowman did not claim to publicly support BDS during his primary, but DSA endorsed him nevertheless. Bernie Sanders, who DSA endorsed twice, has headlined high profile J Street conferences, and has not adopted DSA’s line on Palestine. Representatives Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib did not publicly support BDS during their primary elections — articles were written pressuring DSA to discipline them. When AOC’s position on Palestine was rightfully criticized, people worked with her, and she shifted. Was it a mistake then for the left to commit to helping Tlaib and Ocasio-Cortez to shift politically instead of splitting with them? Who would argue now that electing Rashida Tlaib to Congress did not build power for Palestine?²²

In February, Bowman withdrew his support for the Abraham Accords. The accords were a militaristic bill that would create a network of arms shipments between Israeli and Arab states. It is truly a wonder that Bowman had supported the bill for months knowing this. 

His action was quickly applauded on Twitter by anti-party NPC member Ashik S of the GND Slate on February 15th, as supposedly a sign that Bowman was coming around to the Palestinian cause. The BDS WG responded the next day, pointing out that this was a promise that he made to BDS months ago and did not fulfill, stressing that not voting for weapons to Israel did not come even close to the minimum points of solidarity that BDS had made. 

On March 18th, the DSA NPC by a vote of 9-8 disbanded the BDS working group, and clearly orchestrated a letter and petition with a few hundred signatures by DSA members in support of the measure.²³ Their justification was that BDS’s public statements and tweets “was publicly embarrassing DSA” and preventing real work from getting done. This was the critical point when the anti-party elements of the DSA decided to begin an ongoing civil war within the organization through a bureaucratic centralist maneuver. 

The decision passed in a 9-8 vote. 3 SMC members and the 3 GND members, alongside 1 Emerge, 1 BnR, and 1 Independent voting for. Voting against were 2 BnR members, 2 Renewal, 3 Independent, and 1 vote for YDSA co-chairs.

The pro-party elements responded on March 20th with the launch of the petition “For an Internationalist DSA” which pushed for 4 demands:

1. We demand the NPC reinstate BDS WG and lift the ban on national leadership
2. We demand the NPC affirm the right of lower bodies–including all chapters, working groups, standing committees and caucuses–to publicly criticize higher bodies, up to and including the NPC. 
3. We commit to the struggle for a liberated and democratic Palestine, and to the merger of socialism and anti-imperialist movements across the world
4. In the coming year leading to the 2023 DSA Convention, we will work toward building a unified opposition in DSA committed to a strategy of international working-class revolution and against collaboration with the ruling class.

This petition far surpassed the support of the anti-partyists, gaining over a thousand signatures and the support of 21 local chapters and several caucuses. The NPC had also gone over their constitutional power to dissolve the BDS WG. 

The NPC relented to this pressure, rescinding the suspension of the BDS WG’s social media on 3/19 and reinstating the BDS WG on 3/22. However, it was deadlocked in a vote to rescind the suspension of the BDS WG Steering Committee. Enormous credit must be given to Jen B of the DSA NPC for being incredibly transparent with the membership through this ordeal, releasing a vote count during the process of reinstatement. 

Of note were the resignations of 3 NPC members through this battle, the reversal of Justin C from Emerge’s position from voting to dissolve the BDS Working Group to fully reinstating its membership, and the division within B&R around the question of expulsion. 

DSA Congress-members Break the Rail Workers Strike, Pro-Party Tendency Responds

The second major flashpoint occurred several months later in December 2022, when DSA members AOC and Corey Bush voted to impose a tentative agreement that rail workers had voted against, essentially siding with the rail companies and Democratic Party leadership to break a strike via Congressional dictate. Bowman had also voted yes, but by then he had decided to leave the DSA.  

In sharp contrast to the anti-party tendency, the pro-party tendency responded to this incident through a clear example of democratic centralism. They, meaning we, used this as an opportunity not to sweep the issue under the rug but rather organize open discussion and debate made accessible to the entire membership in a town hall. As the Congressional strike-breaking was taking place, the Seattle DSA, supported by 21 other chapters, hundreds of individuals, as well as the caucuses Reform & Revolution and Marxist Unity Group(MUG), released a statement calling on the NPC to organize a mass call, and further stressed the absolute necessity of forming a national Socialists in Office committee for greater accountability and coordination between DSA and it’s electeds. In this instance, the democracy comes from clarifying the issue through open debate to the entire membership, the centralism comes from calling for a committee that holds DSA electeds in check to the will of the entire membership.  

The pro-party tendency was able to move the NPC to release a statement expressing the DSA’s opposition to the TA vote and to endorse a “mass call” on December 4th.²⁴ The pro-party tendency also went forward and organized their own town hall, with R&R, B&R, MUG, and Tempest hosting a call “DSA Adrift” on January 14th, 2023.²⁵ 

Prelude to the 2023 Convention: Case Study of the NYC-DSA 2022 Convention

As noted earlier in this article, the conflict between the pro-party and anti-party tendency culminated in DSA’s national gridlock on January 16th, 2023 when 9 NPC abstained from voting for the National Electoral Director due to a lack of transparency. What is the balance of forces now? Which tendency will win out under the current conditions? The NYC-DSA October 2022 Convention provides a glimpse of where we are at. 

Comrade Jack L from MUG provides an excellent report of the 2022 convention in his article Which way, NYC-DSA. NYC-DSA leans towards the anti-party tendency, being the center of  SMC and GND, however partly balanced by also being the center of the BnR caucus and a small but mighty MUG cell.

Both pro-party and anti-party tendencies supported the “base building” measures “Independent Working Class Organization” and “Union Power” which devoted significant resources and manpower to help DSA members and beyond organize their workplaces and their residence into tenant and labor unions, as well as broader community groups. 

The pro-party Town Halls Resolution, which would organize open town halls twice a year around pressing internal debates, was left to the NYC-DSA steering committee and passed. All other pro-party measures were defeated.

MUG’s resolution to make the NYC-DSA’s Socialists in Office (SIO) committee’s decisions binding with disciplinary measures for elected officials who violate it and to make information about decisions and structures of SIO committees more public was crushed. As a side note the NYC-DSA’s SIO committee was formed behind the backs of rank-and-file members. After announcing the consideration of the Socialist In Office Committee proposal in November 2020, details of the actual meetings between NYC DSA electeds and the committee were highly inconsistent and behind closed doors. The document Socialists in Office: Theory, Practice, and Collective Decision Making which formalized the actual powers of the committee was created and approved in July 2021 but never revealed to the membership. The activity of the Socialists In Office Committee was finally brought to the publication after the publication of a B&R article on February 2022.²⁶ MUG Comrade Issac had noted in his reflections on this revelation the following:

The secrecy behind the SIO shows some of the weaknesses built into the resulting body. The existence of the committee was kept a secret due to a fear that it could be weaponized as an electoral attack against DSA. Implicit in this idea is that discipline of any kind is an electoral liability. 

Of course secrets aren’t really secrets in DSA. The SIO’s existence was an open secret, to be shared through personal networks and gossipy groupchats. Political disagreements never happen in the open in NYC anymore. They happen in whisper campaigns doled out to trusted confidants in massive chains of telephones. This turns politics into cliquish, personal whinging. 

The anti-partyist inclination towards bureaucratic centralism deepened as a result of the NYC Convention. While the resolution disciplining electeds failed, a resolution that empowered DSA leadership to censor and suspend working groups(composed of rank-and-file members) for criticizing DSA’s electeds passed. BnR’s 1234 Plan, a highly tame measure that simply required DSA electeds to be part of a slate, to identify as Democratic Socialists, to run on common issues and to vote as a bloc with other DSA legislators failed with 40 percent voting yes and 60 percent voting no. 

Based on the NYC-DSA convention and assuming that DSA membership stays as is, it can be expected that come the 2023 National Convention, despite the heightened presence of pro-party chapters, DSA will continue on its stasis and under gridlock will have members continuing to fizzle out, ultimately handing over the organization to the anti-party elements who are most invested in DSA’s dominant realignment strategy. We are already seeing signs of this with the exit of the pro-party caucus Class Unity²⁷ and the move away from DSA by Tempest.     

What is to be done: Rally the Socialist Movement around the Pro-Party Program 

Both the anti-party and pro-party tendencies, alongside most of the socialist movement in the US, agree that the DSA is in crisis, however crisis is not necessarily a bad thing. A crisis is a period of extreme volatility in which revolutionary transformation can take place and I for one enthusiastically welcome it. 

The US socialist movement can be summarized as a collection of atomized individuals, bureaucratic-centralist sects, and a mass socialist organization, the DSA. Based on this article’s analysis of the DSA, it can be characterized as a bureaucratic autonomist organization transitioning into either bureaucratic centralism or democratic centralism. On the national level, DSA is organized by an unelected National Director and staff, while on the local level there is a high level of autonomy of strategy and tactics, alongside great freedom to criticize and air open debate without suppression and expulsion. There is little regional level coordination between nearby locals, though significant efforts have been made to bridge this gap.

Every national convention offers an opportunity for the rank and file of the DSA to radically transform the organization, but DSA’s composition, based on anti-party elements attracted to the dominant realignment strategy and drawn from Democratic Party coalition campaigns like the Green New Deal coexisting with pro-party elements drawn from revolutionary organizations, has created conditions of gridlock where tendencies with opposite strategies coexist in the same organization. Despite this, the pro-party wing has continued its difficult march forward.  

The most heightened period of pro-party transformation took place in 2017 with the rate of pro-party changes lessening over time in the 2019 and 2021 conventions. The expansion of the DSA outside of electoral work to “base building”, the passage of “Class Struggle Elections,” and the adoption of a Political Platform, have drastically moved the DSA closer to the form of a mass socialist party, though the pro-party elements to push forward this change to its full transformation have begun to pull away from the organization. 

In order for the pro-party wing of the DSA to seize the organization and complete its transformation into a mass socialist party, it must do two things:

1. Concretize pro-party unity into a cross-caucus pro-party program
2. Use the program to rally socialist elements inside and outside of the DSA

Point 1 is already in the process of formation with ongoing coordination between different pro-party DSA formations. The experiences of the DSA conventions has forged a pro-party cadre with a far clearer understanding of the political and organizational requirements of a mass socialist party. These are the general points which I believe the pro-party program must consist of:

1. Assert that DSA is an independent organization that seeks to break the two-party system and build a mass socialist party, utilizing any means at its disposal to do so, including tactically using any party line and always running as open socialists. 
2. Assert that our primary orientation is towards the working class, utilizing all means to grow membership among the working class, transforming them into socialist cadre able to push every instance of the struggle against oppression to its highest limit. 
3. Create democratic coordination bodies with the ability to subordinate DSA electeds to the collective will of the DSA. 
4. Create a central party publication with a robust editorial board and funding, which publishes points of strategic debate, is readily accessible and sent via direct communication and print to all members
5. Organize regular national town halls to discuss strategic issues and differences with all members. 
6. Make acceptance of the political platform a condition of membership
7. Bring DSA’s unelected bureaucracy under democratic control, including by shifting funds away from unelected staff to elected DSA leaders to be compensated as full-time staff.  
8. Create a proportionately elected central body between national convention and the NPC to serve as a liaison between the rank and file and the NPC, with the ability to initiate recalls and referendums, as well as organize rapid responses. 

The pro-party tendency must use its joint program to begin recruitment efforts of demoralized socialists in DSA and those currently outside of it. The program will be the rallying point to attract socialists currently in sects and in revolutionary cells. I am directly asking all pro-party comrades that are retreating, particularly Tempest, to reconsider their position, and step back into the DSA to fight for a pro-party program. Now is not the time to retreat, now is the time to go on the offense! This plea extends to all pro-party socialists, in whatever organization or group you may be in.

As of writing this there are about 97 days till voting for delegates closes on June 6th. Due to DSA’s gridlock, local chapters are experiencing a decrease in active participation. Furthermore, due to DSA’s open tent nature and lax requirements for joining, all it takes is about 2-3 minutes to become a member of the DSA. An organized effort by pro-partyists must be made to map out their locales and begin to conduct sustained outreach to socialist organizations, third parties, and individuals in their areas and to recruit them as active members of the DSA so that pro-partyists can stack delegates to advance their agenda. 

While the anti-party wing prides itself on being closer to political relevance and to the masses, the reality is that its options for increasing its manpower outside of the DSA are extremely limited. Who do they have? The WFP? Local Democratic Party Clubs? In a recruitment offensive, the playing field ultimately favors the pro-partyists, as there is a mass of unorganized and organized socialists, as well as socialists in third parties, who must be tapped into.

The stakes must be clear to all, a mass socialist party is about to arise!

Furthermore, pro-partyists must prepare a Plan B in case they are unable to transform the DSA. The unity formed out of the agreement to the pro-party program should be concretized into a formal organization, operating within and outside the DSA as a “party within a party”, constantly swimming against the stream and growing its forces till it is able to build the mass socialist party needed to lead the working class to Socialism.  

In this I greatly encourage comrade Lazare, author of the groundbreaking book The Frozen Republic, to join the DSA and help build this effort. Your knowledge and expertise will be of immense use in educating the younger comrades who are ready to take on the fight for Socialism. In NYC-DSA we have open Socialist night schools and the DSA National Political Committee hosts meetings for all members, you should be there giving speeches on burning the US Constitution! Comrade Lazare has so far rejected working within the DSA, instead writing that I am looking for an “easy” path or “shortcuts” to Socialism. The truth is the opposite. 

Under conditions of world war and internal turmoil, with the US bourgeoise moving towards more dictatorial forms of rule, with fascism staring us in the face, it is clear just how difficult the path towards Socialism will be. It will take risking death and learning to operate under conditions of illegality, continuous fights within the socialist movement to clarify the correct line, continuous development of new formations and factions, till we finally arrive at the building of a revolutionary party that is up to the task. The truth is that even with the development of an independent mass socialist party, the question of how to seize power will remain unresolved until an explicitly revolutionary wing develops and gains the support of the working class. 

We are far away from that time, but we cannot run away from our responsibility as socialists to get there, as such I encourage all socialists in the US, whoever you are and wherever you may be, to do the following:

Join the DSA, fight with the pro-party wing, and forge the mass socialist party!

Part 2 of my response to Lazare will deal with building a United Front Campaign of the Working Class in time for the 2024 US Presidential Elections. 

Special thanks to members and sympathizers of the Marxist Unity Group, Reform and Revolution, Tempest, and Socialist Alternative for helping compile some of the information here about the DSA and other socialist groups, as well as providing some resources to help build this article’s argument. 

Liked it? Take a second to support Cosmonaut on Patreon! At Cosmonaut Magazine we strive to create a culture of open debate and discussion. Please write to us at CosmonautMagazine@gmail.com if you have any criticism or commentary you would like to have published in our letters section.

1. https://www.socialistalternative.org/2020/02/14/whats-the-difference-between-socialist-alternative-and-dsa/
2. Reader, if you are in one of the bureaucratic centralist organizations that I have critiqued and feel that I am misrepresenting your organization, please clarify your party’s inner structure and democratic norms. The fact is that the constitutions of your organizations and inner party activity are kept secret so one has to reach out to individuals and scour through obscure articles to get an idea of your party’s inner workings.
3. https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/3909-the-impossible-election-of-alexandria-ocasio-cortez
4. https://socialistworker.org/2019/04/19/taking-our-final-steps
5. https://www.bostondsa.org/political_education/dsa-convention-2019-a-reportback/
6. https://convention2021.dsausa.org/secondary-amendments-to-resolutions/
7. https://web.archive.org/web/20210924234231/https://dsaorganizer.org/2021/07/26/collective-power-network-voter-guide-2021-dsa-national-convention/#res8
8. https://web.archive.org/web/20210703032025/http://dsagndslate.org/
9. https://web.archive.org/web/20211018154852/https://breadandrosesdsa.org/convention-2021-resolutions/#reparations
10. https://www.tempestmag.org/2021/07/tempests-dsa-convention-positions/
11. https://reformandrevolution.org/2021/07/17/the-ultimate-dsa-convention-voting-guide/
12. https://www.socialistalternative.org/2021/07/31/dsa-2021-convention-and-the-direction-of-the-socialist-movement/
13. https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/summer-2021/reflections-on-the-2021-dsa-national-convention/
14. https://dsaemerge.org/points-of-unity/
15. https://washingtonsocialist.mdcdsa.org/ws-articles/21-09-convention-roundup (Caucus identification based on search of candidates)
16. https://www.tempestmag.org/2021/08/2021-dsa-convention/
17. https://washingtonsocialist.mdcdsa.org/ws-articles/21-09-convention-roundup
18. https://news.climate.columbia.edu/2022/08/12/what-the-inflation-reduction-act-does-and-doesnt-do-for-climate/
19. https://medium.com/@dsapalestinesolidarity/bowmans-j-street-zionist-propaganda-trip-to-apartheid-israel-must-not-stand-d5287014e076
20. https://palestine.dsausa.org/dsa-bds-and-palestine-solidarity-working-group-formally-calls-for-the-expulsion-of-rep-jamaal-bowman/
21. https://www.dsausa.org/statements/on-the-question-of-expelling-rep-bowman/
22. o the writers of this section, I would like to say: Comrades, this is precisely the point. Of course, we must extend democratic discipline and accountability toall DSA politicians.
23. http://web.archive.org/web/20220321051133/https:/docs.google.com/document/u/1/d/e/2PACX-1vQxcoseb3g5iKbXxDgbIav0_gHgxUdUzmwFDR8ELl1Of_BWRraM1cv4Qa58c3HUnoEjie_M2YpXiRWR/pub
24. https://www.dsausa.org/statements/stand-with-railworkers-build-workers-power/
25. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lvaO7anen1w
26. https://socialistcall.com/2022/02/23/nyc-dsa-electoral-strategy-democracy/
27. https://classunity.org/2023/01/08/class-unity-is-now-independent-from-the-dsa/