All Together Now!
What does party-building mean in the context of DSA’s labor strategy? In support of CR10-A01, “A Partyist Labor Strategy,” Lavender Ciao argues that DSA must become the center of gravity uniting sections of the working class behind a unified program for democratic socialism.
Lavender Ciao
Circles in a Circle, Wasili Kandinsky
I.
The long and infamous absence of a mass socialist party has cast a shadow over the labor movement in this country. And while we can say, accurately, that the working class is disorganized, we must also recognize that there can be no unified working class without the independent political organization necessary to democratically resolve workers’ particular differences and articulate our demands together as a class. Instead, we are faced with a broken chorus of workers with competing sets of demands, disunited and without the means to sing with one voice and strike with one fist.
How do we connect our struggles in the workplace to other theaters of the class war—to our fights for tenant power, for electing socialist tribunes to public office, and for building international solidarity against imperialism? And how do we organize ourselves to build a decisive majority for socialism in the labor movement without isolating ourselves? These are the burning questions at the heart of labor strategy debates within DSA—if we believe that our organization has a constructive role to play in the workers movement, then we must decisively resolve them.
It is in this spirit that members of the Marxist Unity Group and Reform & Revolution put forward “A Partyist Labor Strategy,” a significant amendment to the National Labor Commission’s consensus resolution for the 2025 DSA National Convention. We believe it is a necessary step towards resolving these questions in our movement. The theme for this year’s convention is “Rebirth and Beyond: Reflecting on a decade of DSA’s growth and preparing for a decade of party building.” But what does party-building mean in the context of our labor strategy? In other words, what is a partyist labor strategy? In short, it is a strategy to establish practical links between DSA members in and across workplaces, and to coordinate our labor work with our organizing in other areas, in order to fight for DSA’s program and build a majority for democratic socialism.
II.
Since DSA’s rebirth a decade ago, the US labor movement has experienced a new wave of dynamism, with insurgent unionization campaigns at Starbucks and Amazon inspiring hope that a new, fighting labor movement can be built to finally reverse decades of defeat and retreat. Additionally, union reform caucuses like Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) and Teamsters for a Democratic Union (TDU) have toppled entrenched leadership in the United Auto Workers and the Teamsters, respectively. DSA members have played a small but significant role in these efforts, guided by a strategy for organizing rank and file workers towards democratic reforms within their unions.
However, despite this encouraging rise in militancy, we have only just begun to build the kind of labor movement that can challenge the global domination of the capitalist class. For one, the percentage of workers who are unionized remains at just under 10% nationally—a historic low. And while strike waves in recent years have captured the imagination of the labor movement, the number of workers participating in those strikes remains very low compared to previous periods of increased labor militancy.
Moreover, despite a general rise in internationalist sentiment among the rank and file, the labor movement has failed to translate those sentiments into material solidarity with the targets of US imperialism, like an arms embargo. On the contrary, union bureaucrats have been more inclined to suppress even symbolic gestures from their own rank and file. Historically as well, national chauvinism and racism have been glaring weak points for US Labor, and have served to divide unions internally and turn them against workers internationally in the name of anti-communism.
This shameful state of affairs is closely linked with the fact that, since the legalization of labor unions through the National Labor Relations Act, most unions remain shackled to the parties of the capitalist class. Unions lobby both parties for favors and reforms in exchange for their loyalty, and at the cost of cross-sector and international solidarity. Perhaps the most egregious example of this type of opportunism in recent times has been Teamsters president Sean O’Brien and his open embrace of Trump and the Republican Party, including its racist terror campaign against immigrant workers. More typically, however, unions throw in their lot with the Democrats. UAW president Shawn Fain is a classic example with his enthusiastic endorsement of Kamala Harris for President last year, dismissing the genocide she helped to subsidize. By tying their fortunes to these parties and the crimes they perpetrate against working people domestically and internationally, unions not only discredit and disarm themselves politically, they splinter the working class.
It might be tempting to characterize Fain and O’Brien’s political opportunism as some kind of betrayal of the rank and file. However, that would presume that the reform caucuses that elected them had developed a coherent program for how union leadership can politically advance the class. Unfortunately, they did not. And it’s no coincidence that since those elections were won, serious fractures have been exposed within the reform movement over issues of accountability, international solidarity, and political independence, culminating most recently in the split and disputed dissolution of the UAWD.
The crisis in the reform movement, the lack of political independence among unions, and the lack of international solidarity at the highest levels of the labor movement—these are the morbid symptoms of working class disorganization. Atomized and divided, disorganization becomes misorganization as workers fall into the orbit of capitalist parties and are turned against each other with lies and bribes. Without an independent political organization, workers are unable to unite around a political program to advance the class as a whole. DSA can become the center of gravity that pulls together the fragments of our class and accelerates that organization outwards. But this can only happen if we arm our members with a labor strategy ready for that task. That strategy is a partyist labor strategy which, as we shall argue, is guided by the same principles of organization that underpin workplace organizing and the rank and file strategy.
III.
When we talk about the labor movement, what we’re really talking about is a particular section of the broader workers movement. Specifically, we are referring to that section which arises in response to direct exploitation at work. However, like any movement, it doesn’t arise all at once as a generalized phenomenon. It begins in waves, as different groups of workers unite around demands addressing their most urgently felt needs. Let’s examine this closer and tease out the strategic implications of this dynamic.
The union begins as an idea in the mind of a worker, or a small group of workers, who can connect their immediate, individual problems to an appropriate organizational solution. However, organizations are not built automatically. So, beginning from a minority, they must convince their fellow workers that a union can help solve their problems. First, by forming an organizing committee, and then, by building a majority. While this specifically describes the process of new shop organizing, the organizational process looks very similar when beginning from an existing union, only in that case, workers have an already-cohered body to organize from. In either case, this requires organizers to build the democratic structures that can allow workers to synthesize their experiences into a common program of action.
Building these structures is necessary because, even within the same workplace, workers can have very different ideas of what the most pressing issue is. Part of this is due to the different types of work they do. For example, a dishwasher and a server working in the same restaurant might face very different conditions, and naturally may come to different conclusions about what needs to change. The same principle more broadly applies between workplaces or between industries. To take an example from the UAW, an auto worker on an assembly line would likely have very different immediate demands compared to a page at a university library. To resolve these differences and to unite around longer-term strategies for collective action against their bosses, workers combine into democratic organizations, forming unions.
Despite the contradictions and difficulties that can arise in democratic organizations, few organizers today would deny the importance of organizing workers together across different trades and industries. However, for a long period in the US labor movement, the idea that workers should or even could build that level of organizational unity was highly controversial, particularly among entrenched union leadership. This idea was first challenged by the movement for industrial unionism at the turn of the last century, which sought to combine workers within and across entire industries. It’s no coincidence that some of the best industrial unionists were immigrants, as they had a direct interest in overcoming the chauvinism and racism that breeds among craft unions. And it’s also no coincidence that industrial unionism, which tried to raise American workers to new levels of organizational unity, also raised the class to new levels of consciousness and internationalism.
This is because organizational unity of the working class at broader levels tends towards higher levels of class consciousness, as the process for democratically resolving particular differences between sections of the class also reveals the general conditions of wage slavery which unite workers under capitalism. This holds true from the elemental level of the union shop to compound bodies like industrial unions. And by this same principle, we can aim to broaden the consciousness of the working class even further by building industrial sections and connecting workers organizationally through DSA.
But then, if this holds true, why don’t we see the same tendency towards class consciousness in union federations like the AFL-CIO, which have united very different sectors of workers within the same organization? The short answer is that the AFL-CIO has no central democracy. Consequently, it mainly represents the interests of the narrow class of workers who hold the levers of power, singing the thin and shrill chord of bureaucracy. Instead of raising the class to new levels of consciousness, this kind of undemocratic, federative structure has the effect of reducing consciousness to the lowest common denominator.
The power of a union is measured by the strength of its democracy. And democracy is the function through which individual interests achieve a greater collective unity, transforming workers into the working class. That’s why democratizing unions is a prerequisite to building a fighting labor movement, and why DSA’s focus on the rank and file strategy has helped bring the labor movement and socialist movement closer together. But the crisis in the reform movement which we are experiencing today strongly indicates that we are missing something critical in our application of that strategy.
IV.
There is a glaring omission in DSA’s current labor strategy: the lack of a political strategy to win a majority of workers to socialism. Most socialists recognize, rightly, that even in the most democratic unions, the majority of workers are still far from having socialist consciousness. But where they diverge is in the strategic conclusions they draw from this.
In one camp are those socialists who say that, because we are in a minority, we can’t advocate too openly or forcefully for our politics in unions, or we risk isolating ourselves. They are partially reacting to the strategic failures of socialists before them, largely from bureaucratic sects, who wage scorched-earth campaigns from outside without due regard for union democracy.
But although the socialists in the first tendency try to pose as anti-sectarian, they too reject democracy insofar as they have given up on the project of building a majority to their politics through open discussion and debate. In order to work effectively, democracy requires its participants to bring a willingness to change and to be changed, to fight for the truth as you understand it without closing your heart. To sing, and to listen too.
Socialists who understand this argue that we can build a majority of workers to our politics within our unions without retreating from democracy, without self-censoring or arrogantly proclaiming a monopoly on the truth. Although this is the right approach, there is a catch: socialists will only be able to win a majority to our politics if we work across the entire labor movement to unite the class into an independent democratic organization. The reverse side of this is that socialists will forever remain a minority in the labor movement unless we coordinate our interventions in a party. And this is the source of the frustration that drives sectarian attitudes among our partisans in the labor movement. As long as we fight in isolation from each other without a united strategy for winning a majority, we are punching sand.
The reason this majority can only be accomplished through a party, and not just one big union, is that the labor movement is not the only arena of struggle in the workers movement. There are the struggles that Black, indigenous, queer, trans, immigrant, and disabled workers face organizing for our political rights against state terror. And there are the battles waged by workers in our homes, for housing justice and for reproductive freedom. In other words, workers don’t clock out of the class struggle.
Unfortunately, fights that take place primarily outside the workplace are sometimes dismissed by unionists as “politics” with little relevance to their own organizing. This is called economism. And though some well-intentioned radicals have waged a struggle against it through approaches like bargaining for the common good, the only way to break down the artificial barriers that have been put up between these struggles is through the systematic organization of the entire working class into a party, in the workplace and beyond. A party is key because an organization like a union cannot effectively fight for people who have no democratic say in it. Solidarity is not altruism. That is why building unions alone will not build socialist consciousness, and why DSA must build practical links with the labor movement through a partyist labor strategy.
This strategy follows from the same fundamentals of organization outlined above. If you want to fight the boss, you need to unite the workplace through a union. If you want to fight a megacorporation, then you need to unite unions across the industry. And if you want to fight the capitalist state, then you need to unite the class through a party. The reason why this party must be a socialist party and not a labor party is the same reason why the AFL-CIO is a bureaucratic stronghold: federative models of affiliation give a veto to union bureaucrats and violate the principle of universal and equal suffrage that is so essential for democracy.
As a final addendum, which could merit its own article, this logic can be extended even further. After all, why stop at the borders of a national state when capitalists have long organized internationally? No, if we truly seek to unite the class, then we must eventually face the task of building a new International along the same democratic principles.
Coda.
The working class must be democratically organized at every level of our society, from workplaces and neighborhoods to cities and states. Necessarily, these democratic formations begin in miniature. But starting from a minority, we build a majority by organizing outwards and democratically resolving our differences to create a greater unity, from the union to the party. The party itself is a model in miniature of the democratic socialist society we want to build. So, in laying down the foundations of that party, we must weave into it all of the organizations of our class, so that no voice is lost in the chorus.
A partyist labor strategy gives us the tools to begin this work. Although DSA currently represents only a small fraction of our potential class, by uniting our members in the labor movement into industrial sections, we give socialist workers the ability to determine the best ways to fight for DSA’s democratic priorities, to bring more workers into our organization, and to build the unity of the working class. Only then can we begin to build a socialist party worthy of that name.
But it is not enough simply to build the party or any of these other structures. We must continuously renew them through our own creative political efforts. Democracy is not some dead thing, but a living organism—a group performance in which we all have a part to play, if only we hear the call. A partyist labor strategy embodies this philosophy of democracy, combining strategic unity with tactical flexibility, in much the same way that the most moving performances combine rehearsal with improvisation.
This weekend, delegates to DSA’s convention have the opportunity to usher in a new era for our organization’s labor work, leading us closer to becoming a true party of the working class. What part will you play?
