Tasks & Perspectives 2026
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Marxist Unity Group
Circles of Awareness, Aspen H
INTRODUCTION
Our task is to merge socialism and the workers’ movement.
This is the merger formula, as essential today as when it was identified by the first mass socialist movements in the 19th century. We seek to end the terrible reign of capitalism and the horror it inflicts daily on people and the planet. This is the historical mission of the working class.
Capitalism plants the seeds of its own destruction, but this does not mean that we simply wait for it to decay on its own. This system is built on exploitation and will always oppress people. No matter how the working class is exploited and brutalized, people will resist. Within the working class, there will be people fighting back. This is the workers’ movement, the fighting working class in action against the bosses and capitalists. Within the workers’ movement itself, some are aware of socialism as their ultimate goal. In order to mold the working class into the force that can fulfill its great calling, we must continually organize to expand this awareness outwards.
The foundation of Marxist strategy is to merge the day-to-day interests that inspire the fighting working class with a final goal of socialism. It is essential, but not enough, to organize only for the economic demands of the working class, such as higher wages or better working conditions. Our organizing must connect economic demands with political demands. We must continually make the connection between the undemocratic workplace and the undemocratic state.
In every struggle–whether at the workplace, for racial justice, reproductive freedom, trans rights, against imperialist bloodshed, and so on–our role is to tie injustices to the lack of political power held by the working masses. As long as the ruling class can simply ignore or overturn anything we win, fighting only for reforms to the existing system is at best treading water until those wins are rolled back. In our organizing, we must make it clear that the only way to achieve lasting victories for the working class is to end the minority rule of the capitalists established in the slaveholder’s constitution.
At each MUG congress, members write and debate a tasks and perspectives document to assess where we stand and what we must do in order to achieve this overarching goal. In 2026, Marxist Unity Group is issuing our first directives. We ask all our members and sympathizers to prioritize two tasks in every space we organize to help push forward the goal of a truly democratic republic in the USA:
Agitate at all levels for the necessity of a Program which can unite the workers movement and the current movements against imperialism & state oppression
Support all organizing towards DSA electing a coherent bloc in Congress, as a way of voicing the increasing majority against militarism.
US POLITICAL SYSTEM
1. In its first year, the Trump administration has brought ruin to nearly every strata of the US working class. It hollowed out the civil service, weakening and dismantling all but the most repressive agencies of the state. It enacted tariffs seemingly designed to send the economy into a recession. It has drastically eroded the semblances of political freedom, freedom of the press, the freedom to organize, and engaged in a constant offensive against migrant and queer workers. Our political moment is defined by an openly reactionary state, both at home and abroad, with no pretenses otherwise. Even the supposed nativist-populist appeals to cheaper groceries have long been dispensed with in favor of turning the state into a giveaway machine for the coffers of the capitalist class, particularly in big tech, real estate, finance, cryptocurrency and the security & arms industries. Though the GOP’s popularity is rapidly shrinking, tyranny will remain on the order of the day until the bipartisan ratcheting towards authoritarianism is definitively halted.
2. Two dynamics have emerged which pressure the left into broad coalitions—a sort of “popular front from below.” On the one hand, the Trump administration’s attacks have ruined and destroyed countless lives, creating a mass urgency to build an opposition. This is pushing previously unengaged sections of the working class onto the political stage, creating new organizations and transforming old ones. At the same time, Democratic Party leadership perceived the 2024 election as a sign of organic support for Trumpism, which created a rift between the party bosses and their increasingly alienated base. These factors are partially responsible for Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the NYC mayoral election, which demonstrated socialists can act as a unifying force against dictatorship in a way that Democrats have failed to.
3. While this popular front appears to be an opportunity for DSA to expand its constituency, it is split by a fundamental disagreement: whether Trump represents an aberration from a whiggish impression of an imperfect but fundamentally progressive US political order, or a manifestation of the inherently autocratic nature of an anti-democratic, slaveholder-designed political system. Progressive “mass membership” NGOs, from newer ones under the monikers of No Kings and 50501 and stalwarts Indivisible dating from Trump’s first term have adopted patriotic liberalism, mobilizing imagery and language from the American Revolution against the Trump administration. The jockeying between defense of the constitutional order and the fight for a new republic will be the defining conflict of this new movement for democracy.
4. DSA’s Workers Deserve More program states that our goal is to “put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution that establishes civil, political and democratic rights for all.” At the same time, our practical electoral work focuses on electing politicians, attempting to pass transformative reforms, and “taking power” within the existing system. For the revolutionary left, American oligarchy has historically served as a justification for total abstention from political struggle; while the progressive movement nurtures delusions that the 99% can legislate its way to a kinder world.
5. Since its foundation, the United States has been a colonial oligarchy, not a democracy. Its legislative body is split between a disempowered and unproportional lower house and an even less representative upper house, designed to represent the interests of rural elites. Its executive has vast despotic powers that have accumulated over centuries, and appoints the heads of the judiciary for life. Checks are placed at every level on the ability for the people to rule society through its elected representatives. And these structures are replicated at the state and local levels, severely limiting our ability to take political control at even the smallest scale.These powers, combined with the land-based nature of the Senate, give the legislative process a reactionary skew that reflects the politics of the white petty bourgeoisie, inheritors of the yeoman settler. If a bill can make it through both Houses, it must face further “checks” from the other branches of government. The President may further veto a bill, requiring a 2/3rds vote of both Houses to override. Following the precedent of Marbury v. Madison (1803), the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, may practice its so-called right of judicial review to declare “unconstitutional” any law within the United States. The judiciary is, ultimately, a powerless body. It does not have the ability to administer a country on its own, and so periods of apparent ‘judicial rule’ are always in reality the rule of their enforcement mechanism. Since the 1930s regardless of whether the courts were considered liberal or conservative, each court has consistently strengthened the Executive Branch.
6. The Great Depression destroyed the political system which existed throughout the Gilded Age. The Second New Deal, fought for by the radical sections of the labor movement and administered by a front of the Roosevelt administration and the leaders of industries, resolved the economic crisis through the creation of a larger and larger administrative state located within the executive branch. As economic recovery turned to military expansion, the Executive Branch became stronger and stronger, until on the Sixteenth of July, 1945, the Presidency gained the greatest destructive power yet available to man, a power the United States used on the people of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since the 1950s, the United States Presidency has had the power to destroy all life on earth, and could be called nothing but imperial.
7. The presidency gradually expanded its powers throughout the cold war, building out a national intelligence state. The Global War on Terror strengthened that intelligence state further and cemented executive orders as effective policymaking. Since the rise of the Tea Party, the legislature has been so deadlocked that the majority of policymaking since 2010 has been done by executive branch regulatory agencies over legislation by elected bodies of the US government. Even this has been under attack under the new Trump administration and later Roberts Court, as the Republican party seeks to dismantle all administrative aspects of the Federal Government, leaving us with the paradoxical goal of a ‘minimal’ nightwatchman state with a trillion dollar military and vast paramilitary force.
8. The right to a universal and equal vote is denied by the existing constitutional system, both through illegal methods—such as violation of the Voting Rights Act—and through more entrenched mechanisms, including felon disenfranchisement, the malapportioned Senate, the Electoral Colleges, and the unelected federal judiciary. So long as the constitutional system denies universal and equal suffrage, all other rights, including freedom of assembly and speech, remain vulnerable. The working class needs a democratic political system to solidify its victories and secure further reforms, including reduced military spending, higher wages, and universal healthcare. Democracy is also the pathway toward the socialization of the economy and more substantial steps toward communism.
9. The lack of democracy is made even more apparent within the various territories and semi-colonial polities under the jurisdiction of the US. Washington, DC is the nation’s capital and provides for greater democratic rights than most of the US, as incarcerated & noncitizen residents alike possess the franchise, yet the Constitution excludes DC from statehood, and the limited autonomy provided by the Home Rule Act is under threat from the Federal government. The facade of DC’s autonomy is made apparent by the direct federal occupation of National Guard troops, which has taken place for nearly six months, alongside a less visible but more insidious repression conducted throughout the entire country by ICE and federal agencies. US Territories, which are all but colonies, are in an even worse situation: Puerto Rico faces blackouts on the one hand and is a staging ground for US imperialism in the Caribbean and Latin America on the other.
10. Victories at the state level are no substitute for a democratic federal constitution. All so-called “Sewer Socialist” projects ultimately confront the hard limits imposed by state and federal power. In Jackson, Mississippi, the patient struggle by generations of organizers culminating in Cooperation Jackson led to the victory of Chokwe Lumumba in 2013 and his son in 2017, with the goals of higher wages and improved municipal services. Yet the State of Mississippi disempowered Jackson from being able to raise its minimum wage. Even New York City depends on state and national funding to run. While Zohran Mamdani’s reform agenda is inspiring, it will face obstacles at the state and federal levels that cannot be overcome within the existing constitutional order. Nationwide political power cannot be won piecemeal. This is why we need a nationally organized socialist party that fights to win national power through a democratic socialist republic.
BUILDING THE PARTY
11. Revolutionary strategy revolves around the workers’ political party, the engine of working class political action. The party must guarantee to all members equal right of participation in the democratic process, regular congresses of the sovereign membership, open leadership elections at congresses, local party organizations organized around a sovereign membership body, and the free organization of factions. These votes and the structural obligation of administrative and leadership bodies to the general membership are how the socialist movement practically educates itself.
12. The foundation of party democracy is freedom of information, association, and discussion. An organization where decision-making is in the hands only of leadership or cliques may involve rubber stamping by members to give the appearance of democracy, but is only a façade. At all levels of our organization, members must be given the opportunity to debate and make decisions on the most vital and controversial questions of our movement. The path to an organization that maintains healthy political diversity while remaining united around programmatic goals is not to paper over the major questions that divide us or suppress dissent in order to appear unified. We must be honest and clear about our disagreements within the organization, and it is equally our responsibility as individuals and as a faction to practice comradely disagreement and critique.
13. Building the party necessarily requires struggling for the value of deliberative and democratic governance against rule by experts or informal rule by clique. While advocates of “digital democracy” in DSA like Groundwork have justified themselves with the phrase “one member, one vote,” a move to polling as the method of party decision-making sidelines deliberation and the membership entirely, turning the agents of our democracy from meetings where members come together to strategize, debate, and synthesize positions to the whip lists of individuals. Digital democracy offers alluring promises of horizontal openness and a way to divine some true will of the membership. They recreate the same issue with direct democracy in general, and removing deliberation and debate in favor of online referenda simply hands control to those who determine the nature and wording of the polls. Instead of giving members the experience of collective decision making, this path offers members an alienated binary choice, a fig leaf for ratifying the will of entrenched leadership.
14. Because working-class associations consist largely of members devoting their limited time outside of wage labor, we require both a subset of members that can dedicate themselves full-time to practical work on behalf of the whole membership, and developing infrastructure that alleviates the demands of social reproduction for the working class under capitalism. The demands required for DSA participation has hitherto made it much easier for younger, childless professionals to build our organization, limiting the party’s ability to merge with a wider portion of the working class. We prioritize fighting for paid political leadership alongside staff, not in replacement of them, to ensure the democratically elected representatives of members are among those able to devote their full time to the party. Additionally, developing infrastructure such as childcare at meetings allows the party to better retain members and lay the seeds for a multigenerational democratic socialist working-class culture.
15. Party congresses must be the site of incisive and clarifying political discussion, where members can settle positions on the party’s tasks, strategy, and tactics. DSA Conventions, the “party congresses” of our organization, have historically been a site of petty procedural squabbling, but over the course of four years members in a variety of factions, or caucuses, have gradually worked to make it a more deliberative body.
16. This effort points to a broader trend within DSA: the development of a “caucus system” based around an ever-evolving collection of political factions. The relationship between the party and its factions is an important feature of mass socialist politics. The party may unite around tasks, but these tasks will always entail different strategies for fulfilling them, given that at any scale there will be differences across regions and timescales. Beyond that, different orientations will always emerge in the course of shared work owing to the different beliefs and experiences of those who do that work. All of these trends and positions represent real tendencies in the workers’ movement that must be deliberated through party democracy, acting and perceiving themselves as factions. Factions practice their strategies and tactics while participating in the internal debate and polemic between the tendencies that they represent. This democratic process informs the decisions of the movement and the class. Fighting for working class self-government must mean creating a mass membership that has the tools and experience to practice this democratic process. Discussions of trends and tendencies within the party must therefore be public and facilitated by various party and factional organs, building a connection between the practical outcomes of their work and their various tactics and strategies.
17. This open struggle of tendencies allows for the politics of the workers’ movement to play out as visible blocs within the party. DSA’s caucuses have similarly played varying, if limited, roles in public discourse. Only by virtue of its factions does the party become a democratic instrument of the working masses, while only by virtue of the party do factions not dwindle into sects. This dialectic between faction and party is key for forming political consciousness within the working class, no less revolutionary political consciousness.
18. When organizational democracy is stifled, splits inevitably arise. This has resulted in the codification of splits as a strategy either,through ultimatums issued by minority factions or by using political purity to justify systematic purges. This carries significant political ramifications. Acting as if factions cannot work together problematizes practical cooperation between different strategic tendencies that otherwise share the same tasks and denies a democratic relationship to the workers’ movement. By denying the right of factions to exist within them, these groups themselves devolve into factions within the wider movement.
19. DSA, while often imperfect, has proven to be the greatest contemporary basis for a mass party of the working class. By contrast, the ecology of orphaned factions on the left of eccentric theoretical journals, single-issue committees, and micro-organizations has emerged less successful. At their best, these enfant terribles can house specialized activists and produce unique and generative ideological formations. At their worst, the strict criteria for membership and “disciplined” internal censorship give way to careerism and the subordination of committed members to the whims and abuse of uncontrolled cliques, resulting in burnout and explosive and discrediting scandals. Acknowledging that the existing left can’t be circumvented, in tandem with mass work DSA must pose itself as an alternative to advanced workers and socialists new and old, to fulfill its historical role as the core of a mass socialist party. Externally, DSA should engage in principled coalition and united front work, being willing to publicly and honestly criticize our partners to advance mass partyism. Internally, through social-republican and democratic-centralist institutions, DSA must demonstrate an organizational culture and practice of politics that insulates our members from intimidation or rebuke as an antidote to the domineering found in sections of the existing left.
20. Absent a visible organized force that can justify the risk of alienating bourgeois societal elements that the working class may otherwise rely on, workers will operate on the terms the capitalist political framework has provided to them. Capitalists will exploit these bourgeois political prejudices to secure hegemony over working class institutions, to the point that they fail to secure the interests of the workers organized within them. This leads to a section of the working class one-sidedly rejecting political participation. Another section will begin their political analysis from the value they see in the limited rights and concessions they enjoy, employing a logic of “harm reduction” through voting for left-bourgeois parties instead of organizing in defense of existing gains. Both will demand practical proof of the political alternative on the bourgeois terms that they understand politics through, and it is up to Marxists to demonstrate their alternative. In a developed party factions represent strategic tendencies, as the party is united on the basis of carrying out its program. We see three main tendencies: the right, left, and center.
21. Following a similar logic to “harm reduction,” the strategy of the right is to organize a party whose activity is exclusively oriented around securing reforms in the interest of the working class, existing as a “left of left-bourgeois” option. This exclusive practical focus on reforms leads the right to advocate for the party to form cross-class coalitions to attain them as quickly as possible, necessitating a willingness to operate as a coalition partner. At its most productive, this strategy entails a working class movement rallied around “militant” reformist political leadership that relies on mass movements to become a senior coalition partner. This carries the benefit of proving the working class’ ability to organize for its interests and wrest demands from the capitalist class through its own state, which often stems from the desires of the working class to control the conditions of their lives. But while the right relies on mass movements to secure a reformist program in practice, their coalitionism makes it such that in terms of their own strategy, they are independent of the workers' movement and will organize their party in a way that reflects the coalitions they desire.
22. The programmatic concessions inherent to the strategy’s coalitionism lead to a premature seizure of political power, independent of the strength of the workers’ movement. The consequences of this premature seizure ultimately disappoint the class and disorganize the movement. These concessions start with giving up on a transformation of the form of state, theorized as the “impossibility of revolution.” In practice, this manifests as the bureaucratic management of the workers’ movement to discourage and hold back any revolutionary surge until the moment is "just right." Working class self-government ceases to be a political possibility as a result of this practice. This abandonment of self-government as a programmatic goal eliminates the long-term threat of the workers’ movement, allowing for the concession of other demands, either through coalition strong-arming or by force. An infamous outcome of this strategic problem is the mass entry of right-wing socialists into war governments during World War I and failed coalition governments that followed during the interwar period. Another example is the fall of the socialist-led Popular Unity government in Chile due to the bourgeois parliamentary majority aligning with CIA-backed military force. This defeat reverberated across the international working class, going so far as to motivate the Italian Communist Party’s policy of peaceful co-governance with the Christian Democrats.
23. The socialist movement in the United States has not reached this point. The bourgeoisification of American legislatures caused by the stringent obstacles to entering them has enfeebled working class politics and, thus, the right in turn. DSA’s right, revolving around Groundwork and Socialist Majority Caucus, consistently advocates and practices DSA’s entry as a junior coalition partner with progressive Democrats that have largely failed to win their reform agenda. “Governance” involving socialists has been reduced from the formation of a government with the workers’ party as a senior partner (such as electing a socialist President) to aspiring for hegemony amongst the progressive NGO sphere in negotiating bills with the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. This currently places us in the position of a junior partner in a progressive coalition that itself is a junior partner to the Democratic mainstream. This manifestation of liquidationism within DSA represents an extreme point of tension between the party’s practical dependence on the workers’ movement and its independence.
24. A common response to the political failures of the right is to recognize the structural limitations of the capitalist state, seeing interventions in the capitalist state as disconnected from or even antagonistic to revolutionary strategy unless the party can call for its downfall. This is the starting point of the strategy of the left. Following this principle, the left avoids the state, instead pushing the workers’ movement towards the conquest of political power from outside the sphere of political action, independent of the sections that wish to intervene in elections or form governments. To this end, the left will use tactics like direct action not requiring mass involvement that seek to demonstrate their strategy through real damage to capital or the state, or a general strike that conceptually triggers the fall of the state and “hands” political power to the working class. A more advanced position, represented in DSA by Communist Caucus, recognizes the necessary connection between independent working class organization and effective political action. Following from the strategic conclusions of the left, however, this tendency argues that the working class must be “formed as a class” (read: organized) before the formation of a party and determination of its program. This position effectively routes their practice back to a more organized form of the left strategy.
25. The left is correct in identifying the structural constraints that constitute the capitalist class character of the state, avoiding the right’s orientation towards it. Their orientation, however, similarly leaves the party unprepared to deal with the questions of political authority that the state poses. Following their orientation, the party is additionally deprived of a practical basis for organizing the working class as a mass political force unified through party democracy. Both the right and the left involve bureaucratic management of the revolution, with the right's management from within the state and the left's from without. For the left, this can lead to a downward spiral of sectarianism: a tendency towards an expansive basis for abstention, which is how the left defines opposition to the state. The endpoint of the spiral is simply the cycle of sects, with rigid tactics, elaborate theoretical unity, and bureaucratic leadership to enforce it through splits, abuses, and purges. Large sections of the left end up outside of the party as a result. Conversely, the strategic weakness behind the left also leads to its members flipping over to the right once the left strategy is frustrated, as both sides see interventions in the state as disconnected from revolutionary strategy.
26. The strategy of the center is based on the recognition that the working class’ power derives from its ability to organize collectively, and the necessity of doing so to achieve partial aims. We recognize that this necessity is shared between struggles on the shop floor, struggles for reforms, the struggles of the working class for self-government in the form of a democratic republic at home, and the struggle for the international interests of the class. Building on this, the center then seeks to steer the party around the following strategic principles: 1) using the party’s presence in legislatures and its election campaigns to build up the surrounding organized movement around a revolutionary program, both through anti-coalitionist reform efforts and agitation; 2) refusing to form a government until the workers’ movement is both organized and aware enough of the necessity of democratic self-government such that a conquest of political power, a revolutionization of the state, and the subsequent self-emancipation of the majority is possible.
27. The specific form of program we advocate for, the minimum-maximum program, is split into two sections. The minimum program represents the minimum conditions for the party to assume power on the basis described above. It consists of a set of demands that, if fully enacted, allows the working class to self-govern. Some goals in a minimum program may be possible under capitalism, but if all of the demands are achieved, the state would be transformed into a democratic republic. The maximum program describes the final, communist aims of the party as well as the development of capitalism and the conditions that the party and the working class face. From our founding MUG has stood by the need of a minimum-maximum program . Socialists cannot rest on the hope that the procession of events will lead workers to exactly what we believe. We disdain to conceal our views and aims
28. While it is true that the center tendency grounds the left and right in the party, this is an effect of its strategy. To focus on unity above all else merely serves to obscure political disagreement, causing a split behind the backs of party members. At worst, it privileges the right when it is on the wrong side of the barricades. Unity is not a mechanistic “golden mean” between the left and right achieved by making the right balance of decisions between them, as seen in the practice of members of the Bread & Roses caucus on divisive political questions. Rather, the political practice of the revolutionary center is what grounds and unifies the party up through the point of revolution. Through this practice alone, a party emerges that can both wrest reforms from the capitalist class and conquer political power. This allows all levels of the party to become productive sites of cooperation and competition between the left, center, and right tendencies towards fulfilling the party program. From here on, we will describe the specific implications and mandates of the center strategy as we seek to carry it out within DSA.
INTERNATIONAL
29. In 1991, with the fall of the Soviet Union, the world was ordered under a unipolar Washington Consensus system, where US and European capital were able to administer the flows of free trade in such a way that industrial production was largely done by the global south and particularly China. This allowed a global division of labor, with NATO states transitioning to high-end manufacturing and services as the global south proletarianized.
30. Since the 2008 financial crisis, the West has been facing a triple crisis: declining rates of productivity, a crisis of legitimacy, and a crisis of hegemony. Millions of people across the West are facing declining livelihoods. This led to a crisis of legitimacy in the EU and the United States, as well as peripheral states, leading to the Movement of the Squares in the Mediterranean, which became the Arab Spring and Occupy Wall Street. At the same time, the People’s Republic of China, whose permutation of the Soviet system allows for better capital planning, has begun overtaking the production of the West, and is on track to overtake the United States in hard power terms sometime in the next twenty years.
31. The offshoring of production to East Asia has also matured a large amount of finance capital in those same countries, continuing the shift Westward of the global capitalist system away from transatlantic relations and towards a Pacific-centered trade network. This further undermined the Washington Consensus, paving the way for revisionist initiatives to be taken by emerging powers; these include the Belt & Road Initiative, competing with the US International Monetary Fund in FDI flow for developing countries, and the BRICS alliance to undermine US dollar hegemony.
32. The United States has spent the last twenty years involved in land wars throughout the Middle East, attempting to secure the region as an extraction site for oil and hub of global trade. This has deepened the relationships between the US and the reactionary powers of the region, including the absolute monarchies of the United Arab Emirates and Saudi Arabia, but the necessities of a twenty-year-long counter-insurgency and the opposition to the war has led to a US military designed primarily to insulate itself from casualties. Increasingly, the fighting edge of American power has been mercenary groups, ‘contractors’, and local allies, with the military under Obama focused on ‘leading from behind’, with investments made into satellites, drone warfare, and other supportive technologies as the US focused itself on disciplining the world through our control of international institutions and our ability to exclude ‘rogue states’ from them. Trump and Biden have tried to pivot back to a ‘peer competitor’ military and more aggressive actions to keep opposing states in line. This turn from ‘soft’ to ‘hard’ power is itself a sign of imperial decline, as states can now move outside the system of international institutions the US has set up--the World Bank, the IMF, the WTO--without facing total exclusion from the world. Further, the reckless actions of both Trump administrations and Biden’s continuation of Trump’s tariff policy have made participation in US-led institutions far less rewarding than it once was.
33. The biggest example of the decline of the US world order has been the war in Ukraine, wherein Russian revisionism of the post-Soviet order was able to grow into a full-scale interstate conflict between Russia and Ukraine, bypassing the previous proxy war scenario set up by the Russian-speaking separatist movements. This demonstrates the weakness of the US’s ability to maintain the hegemony set up after the collapse of the USSR, and the willingness of emerging powers to capitalize on the hesitancy of Western interventionism. While some amongst the Western bourgeoisie have perceived this as dangerous global instability (i.e., Alessandro Orsini, Tucker Carlson), others have instead taken it as a sign for further militarization, calling for the necessity of a renewed NATO military effort as a way to uphold this old order. Regardless, militarization has become the new trend amongst Western capitalist states, including the ‘dovish’ European Union.
34. Von Der Leyen’s resounding slogan: If you want peace, you must prepare for war is emblematic of the EU’s new opinion regarding militarization. Lighting changes to the German constitution greenlit historical highs in military spending; this action, alongside the many new programs in education and military contracting taking root across the continent, reveals a large Europeanist turn of opinion on the Pax Americana. Von Der Leyen’s call has only been emboldened by the deteriorating relationship with Europe’s ally to the West, the United States, which has been making increasingly hostile moves against the Union -- imposing steep tariffs and calling out the Union in its latest National Security Strategy-- leading many journalists, politicians, and generals to believe that European reliance on US military presence for continental security is no longer beneficial for the EU. These have not been just words in the wind; the EU’s “Readiness 2030” plan (formerly also called “Rearm Europe”) has committed 800 billion euros to a 5-part program to bolster European militaries and the defense industry on the continent.
35. This rise in military spending will affect all of society. As Vik Chechi-Ribeiro notes, the ‘securonomics’ approach of the Starmer government is to use increased military spending to embed the military further in all parts of British society, and hopefully resolve the economic crisis Great Britain finds itself in. This will lead to a 30% expansion in the Cadet Corps of high school-aged reservists and the setting up of six new technical colleges to serve this growing military-industrial complex. These facts show the dangerous allure of militarization--to the leaders of states the world over, increasing military expenditures is seen as a way to potentially resolve the crisis of declining profits, and integrating the military further into civil society is seen as a way to resolve the legitimacy crisis Western states are facing.
36. The decline of US hegemony, the Trump administration’s increasingly thuggish actions on the world stage, and the rising military expenditures related to the Russo-Ukraine war are all leading to a cascading global arms race, as state actors are forced to raise their military spending to keep up with their rivals’ increased military spending, leading to regional arms races such as India-Pakistan or Algeria-Morocco. It has also led to border conflicts, like the Thailand-Cambodia conflict this year. This has increased worldwide military expenditure by 300 billion dollars in 2025 alone, with further growth to come every year this decade. This has existential effects: each dollar spent on aircraft, tanks, and guns is a dollar not spent on hospitals, schools, and efforts to avert the worst effects of climate change. Militarization as a response to the legitimacy crisis also poses the constant threat that states will use their militaries against their own populations. We should also be tremendously worried about a world-system that increasingly reflects that of the 1910s, where increasingly armed states scared of their own populations are liable to be set to war from any number of local crises. Once again, the imperialist powers resemble the tragedy of the sleepwalkers -- lumbering pinnacles of war-making capability, so unaware of their own potentially catastrophic nature, that even not wanting a full-scale conflict immediately, they just might “sleepwalk” themselves into one. That we are facing a crisis of this kind again after the promises of neoliberal post-history shows the vast inadequacy of capitalism as a means of ordering the world system.
37. The inability of the international bourgeois political class to guarantee a stable world order is again presented in the behaviors of revisionist state actors, who, despite acting against US hegemony, do not have a functional alternative to global capitalism. This is made clear in the Russian and “petty imperialist” ideas of a sovereignist world order proposed by its transnational conservative alliances -- effectively emulating old realist ideas of balance of power, which, as demonstrated by the bloody history of 19th-century Europe, is not an effective solution to the world-system crisis. Similarly, the vague multipolarity proposed by Chinese visions of a post-US order does not give any more confidence in how to overcome the systemic issues of capitalist imperialism, something underlined by their actions in the Israeli war of extermination.
38. The struggle for the complete liberation of Palestine from Zionist settler colonialism and US imperialism remains a defining democratic task of our present moment. The settler colony of Israel is a Jewish supremacist state that aims to destroy the presence of the indigenous Palestinian people, segregate them, and deny them rights and liberties, most crucially the right to universal and equal suffrage, through the outrageous system of apartheid. Just as we recognize that the US is not a democracy and that a new democratic constitution must foreground the right to national self-determination for indigenous and colonized peoples, we stand unconditionally with the Palestinian people in their liberation struggle. Shattering “constitutional illusions” here at home must be paired with agitation and organizing about the internationalist duty of socialists to dismantle all tyrannical, oppressive systems.
39. In the wake of the Gaza prison break of October 2023, the Zionist entity and the United States have murdered as many as 680,000 Palestinians in the Gaza Genocide. Since October 2025, a so-called ceasefire, already violated countless times by Israel, has been in place. This, however, does not mean the genocide has ceased. Israel remains in control of 50% of the Gaza Strip, establishing 48 military outposts, disrupting or preventing aid distribution to Palestinians, systematically destroying Palestinian property, and constructing road networks leading to Zionist bases and settlements outside of Gaza. In other words, Israel has no intention of leaving. Meanwhile, US and Israeli officials have been courting various destinations to relocate forcibly displaced Palestinians from Gaza, including the internationally isolated breakaway statelet Somaliland, now first recognized by the Zionist state. Simultaneously, Tel Aviv is eager to resume the genocide at full intensity and is seeking a means to do so. Despite the farcical “ceasefire”, Israel’s settler colonial aims remain the same as they have been since 1948: the extirpation and ethnic cleansing of Palestinians from Palestine.
40. The “special relationship” between the US and Israel, and its persistence despite the seemingly detrimental effects of the latter’s actions on the former’s interests, is determined by a wide variety of factors, but ultimately comes down to an alignment of interests, however incomplete and unstable that alignment may be at times. This is not to say that Israel serves as an “aircraft carrier” of US empire, or that its actions always or immediately accord with the interests of its imperial patron. It is rather to say that the US (and the broader Western ruling class) supports Israel because it can’t afford not to—because the destruction of the Israeli settler-colony would be too costly to its own interests for it to countenance. To abandon Israel would be to rip the center from the structure of US-led economic and political integration in the region, laboriously built as a bulwark against declining US hegemony in the most important hub of the oil-fueled accumulation system that undergirds the current configuration of the imperialist world order. It would also be to disrupt the circuit of petrodollar recycling that holds up the US financial system and provides a critical customer base of the military-industrial complex. Finally, it would be to acknowledge the illegitimacy of the deeply intertwined legal and ideological apparatuses that uphold and structure the ongoing Nakba, normalization of relations between Israel and the Arab states, the US domestic security state and imperial intervention in the era of the “Global War on Terror.” The mutually reinforcing dynamic created by the interplay of these factors ensures that the US remains deeply committed to the continued existence of the Zionist settler-colony despite the more immediate negative and destabilizing consequences of the latter’s actions.
41. Simultaneously, worldwide, Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of global public opinion. The past two years of well-documented genocidal carnage have exposed to the world the reality of the Zionist project and further discredited US imperialism. A massive, international Palestine solidarity movement has developed, bringing millions into the streets, concretely pressuring various countries' ruling classes on the Question of Palestine, and employing a wide range of tactics to support the Palestinian people. As a result, the ferocious repression Palestine activists and organizations have always been subject to has substantially increased. The deep inextricable ties to the US-Israeli military alliance and the civic surveillance state position themselves against us both privately and publicly as domestic terrorists and antisemites, manufacturing consent for further violence and repression at the hands of our IDF-trained police army. Welcome as this global anti-Zionist movement has been, it is beyond evident that more is needed, especially as political opportunists on both the far-right and liberal-left attempt to channel anger around Palestine into their own reactionary projects.
42. It is our chief international task to create a worker-led democratic movement for peace and against militarization. We have the historic opportunity to build a new International due to the interconnection of global supply chains, even between the imperialist powers in competition, which creates the necessity for us to organize at the scale capitalism organizes us. This new International is an urgent matter if we are to coordinate the struggle for peace.
ELECTORAL STRATEGY
43. Beyond generalities, the development of a Marxist electoral strategy in the United States has been stuck in the rut of an undemocratic electoral system. The Constitution dictates the fundamental structure of the federal government and the separation of its powers into three independent branches: the legislative, executive, and judiciary. The legislative branch is split into two bodies: the House of Representatives, with seats allocated to states proportionate to their populations but divided between 435 increasingly populous single member districts since the mid-20th century, and the Senate, with seats allocated equally between States of mismatched populations and elected to staggered terms. The executive is headed by a President, elected indirectly through an Electoral College, which assigns delegates by State per the number of combined seats that they possess in both the Senate and the House, who then vote as a bloc for the plurality winner of their respective State. The resultant decision-making structure and electoral system have increasingly constricted socialist political action for the past 100 years.
44. This undemocratic electoral system conditions an equally undemocratic decision-making system within the capitalist state. The undemocratically elected Senate, not the House, has the powers of advice and consent over Presidential treaties, impeachment, cabinet appointments, and Supreme Court judges. These powers, combined with the land-based nature of the Senate, give the legislative process a reactionary skew that reflects the politics of the white petty bourgeoisie, inheritors of the yeoman settler. If a bill can make it through both Houses, it must face further “checks” from the other branches of government. Following the precedent of Marbury v. Madison (1803), the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, may practice its so-called right of judicial review to declare “unconstitutional” any law within the United States. The President may further veto a bill, requiring a 2/3rds vote of both Houses to override.
45. The 10th Amendment further serves to explicitly reserve all other functions not elaborated in the Constitution for the States. These States, determined arbitrarily to "fairly" divide settler power between the more and less pro-slavery forces in the early republic, are given broad oversight over "their own" affairs. As capitalist development proceeded, the divisions between urban and rural grew but the boundaries of states, so essential for the apportionment of the Senate, did not change. The result is the division of major industrial areas into fragmented constituencies within states dominated by big agriculture and large landowners. In practice, this means that erstwhile social and democratic reforms cannot find the necessary working class majority in constituencies and are cut down by the interests of landowners, capitalists, and their political elites. Even in urban centers with a working class majority, winning a majority within municipal government faces many challenges, as seen in Jackson, Mississippi, and various municipal governments in Texas. States are given discretion over municipal government itself, often placing limitations over taxation and large capital budgets, and can easily overrule or carve out jurisdiction over the heads of the municipal government itself.
46. DSA’s legal status as a 501(c)(4) grants it flexibility in navigating a mazy election law system that gravitates around political party committees, which a 501(c)(4) is required to operate independently of for political action. However, electoral work cannot be the primary purpose of a 501(c)(4), whose legal purpose is “social welfare.” Rather, legal campaign work must be separated into a separate legal entity, a Political Action Committee (PAC). This divorce of the 501(c)(4) from political action continues into the formal nomination of party candidates, which must occur through government-run “primary” elections, while party member registration typically also occurs through the government. States, meanwhile, are free to craft electoral systems at their discretion. They may apportion districts, structure primaries, set ballot access requirements, and structure the ballot itself with few limits, preventing only the most absurd arrangements. This has created an uneven web of undemocratic electoral systems throughout the country that divide and conquer the class’ attempts at political action. In effect, this system formally divorces freedom of association for the working class from organized political action through a party.
47. The challenges posed by our electoral system have produced multiple orientations to address them. The party surrogate, the electoral strategy of organizing a party in the Marxist sense without necessarily using a corresponding ballot line, is the hegemonic position within DSA. The “clean break” tendency argues for a legal ballot line as the minimum condition for running a candidate on behalf of DSA. While recognizing the importance of identifying ourselves outwardly as independent and distinct from the Democratic and Republican parties, the clean break places primacy in the ballot line, not program or party organization, as the key distinction. Much like the example of the Green Party, this deemphasizes the role of the Marxist program and its role in uniting economic and local political movements into a nationwide party-movement of the class.
48. The liquidationist position in DSA, described in Socialist Majority Caucus’ The Agitator as the “dirty stay,” takes this primacy but turns it on its head. Rather than seeing this supposed identity with the Democratic Party as a problem to be overcome, the dirty stay tendency argues that we must learn to work as part of a broader left faction of the Democratic Party, corresponding to the progressive NGO sphere. Following the “junior partner, twice removed” position, the tendency advocates for organizing DSA’s existing party surrogate as the prime mover of this faction, which will win influence and reforms from the Democratic Party center through its demonstrable electoral performance as the “consistent progressives.” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) will be the most likely figurehead of this faction if she follows through on her potential 2028 presidential run, having attained an ascendancy within the Democratic Party by leaving behind many of the principles she built a coalition on to enter office.
49. Broadly positing itself between these two extremes exists the “dirty break” tendency, where operational independence from the Democratic Party will gradually become formal independence either as centrists leave a Democratic Party we have won over or we are expelled. Although the name would suggest a productive synthesis, the liquidationists and clean breakers alike have correctly pointed out the lack of movement behind its advocates. Underlying it is a broad set of tactical and electoral-strategic positions that fail to form a coherent practical orientation towards an otherwise shared goal of developing the working class into an independent political actor. Most striking is how its advocates frequently ask, "how do we break from the Democratic Party?” MUG’s position can best be described as a unity between “party surrogate in form” and “clean break in content.” We believe the way to break out of being a junior partner in the progressive faction of the Democratic Party is to recognize that DSA is a party in the Marxist sense by virtue of its democratic structure and subsequent operational independence. Consequently, it has no necessary political obligation to the Democratic Party. Our program is not reducible to the agitation we engage in to awaken the working class base captured by the Democrats.
50. The “dirty stay” capitulation is not the means to address our undemocratic political system, nor is the shortsighted rebellion of the “clean break.” Rather, we must bring our independent organization and program to whatever races we can run candidates, be it on the Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot line. While running, these candidates should be expected to agitate against the undemocratic political system by condemning the imperial presidency, the Supreme Court, and the Senate. They should also advance the long-term goal of a democratic constitution. If elected, DSA should urge socialists in office to use their positions to elevate the battle for democracy. Borrowing from the tradition of historic socialist parties, this could take the form of introducing legislation mandating proportional representation in the House of Representatives, refusing to vote for appropriations for the police state, the military, or the judiciary at any level of government, or attaching “not subject to judicial review” clauses to popular reform legislation to put the issue of the undemocratic court system front-and-center in wider freedom struggles. The role of a socialist in office should be to draw as stark a dividing line as possible between the capitalist parties of the Constitution and the working-class party of democracy.
51. The US political system is not neutral; rather, it is a site of intense class conflict. Democratic Socialists should demand a democratic electoral system based on universal and equal suffrage, proportional representation, and multi-member districts. On one hand, it is pedantic and reductive to see partyism as the mere desire for a third-party legal entity. On the other hand, we do not underestimate how the current first-past-the-post and winner-takes-all system, combined with an extreme version of federalism, disorganizes working-class political action. Democratic Socialists should put forward the mass party and a democratic electoral system built around it as key planks of our vision for a democratic republic and fight for a single nationwide election law that organizes elections on this basis.
52. Election campaigns are a function specific to the workers’ party, but what makes the party’s campaigns unique is their ability to connect with the various movements and institutions of the working class. In the field, a “party surrogate” relies on the mass deployment of its members beyond the cadre that develops the campaign to reach workers' homes with socialist politics. This deployment to at least thousands of doors is only possible when the campaign expresses the politics of its members, which can only be discerned through democracy. A democratic campaign presupposes end to end infrastructure run by DSA members and in concert with the politics of the body (chapters or national) running it. Conversely, the political option that Democratic Socialist election campaigns put forward is the party's program and the democratic character of its operations all the way down to the field. This quality of Democratic Socialist organization in connection with the party program must play a key role in campaign agitation for DSA’s electoral efforts.
53. For these efforts to remain part of the long-term party project, their continuation into the elected office must also bear the politics of the party membership. This requires disciplined organization of the elected officials for which the party organizes campaigns. However, discipline does not emerge from the threat of a retracted endorsement, recall, or of organizing a campaign against a renegade incumbent. Both represent failures of the party to elect strategically aligned candidates who can work within a larger body of electoral cadre to fight for the party program, which produces abstentionist and recallist tendencies. Rather, discipline emerges from cultivating an open culture of critique, where membership and member bodies are capable of channeling discontent with unprincipled behavior of electeds. This can be done with the help of Socialists in Office (SIO) committees that organize elected officials to carry out the programmatic politics decided by membership, with a democratic and transparent relationship to party members.
54. To facilitate this democratic relationship, elected officials must integrate themselves into the party structure to democratically participate in political debates as equal members, not leaders beyond our capacity to disagree with or tools without their own wills or politics that can be engaged with and developed over time. Similarly, candidates must enter the endorsement process prepared to work as individual members of collective organizing efforts toward revolutionary parliamentarism on behalf of the party program. This entails a level of political education that the candidate must already have, or must agree to follow through on as a duty of being a socialist in office.
55. A threat to the democratic nature of DSA’s electoral program is strategy conferences held for DSA electeds outside of member control. Despite the connection suggested by the name, the DSA Fund is a legally separate organization from DSA. The historical overlap between the organizations has withered over time and the self-perpetuating board is under no obligation to follow democratic decisions by DSA’s membership. The DSA Fund has been holding retreats for members in office on electoral strategy and governance, including by inviting electeds who may be members but are not endorsed by their chapters. This blurs distinctions around which elected officials have received the democratic approval of DSA members. Decisions about electoral strategy and who is a DSA elected must belong to DSA members and DSA members alone. The DSA Fund needs to be repurposed from a shell for the DSA right’s sectarianism into a proper fundraising apparatus for a mass party. The DSA Fund's activities, including but not limited to events and expenditures, must be subordinated to the democratic mandate of membership, or it must cease to exist.
56. Bringing our vision of the party to electoral work necessarily begins and occurs primarily at the level of the chapter. However, DSA’s electoral work has faced repeated crises where chapters like Philadelphia, LA, and NYC have failed to publicly respond as a chapter to the unprincipled behavior of elected officials. Even in cases like Nithya Raman where both a significant portion of membership and the majority of electoral cadre across tendencies feel national leadership should intervene, national has few established tools with which to do so.
57. Creating the national bonds between electoral organizers needed to to address this, with reforms like abolishing the national/local endorsement division, requires local electoral organizers to see themselves as part of a nationwide political party. This depends on a dramatic increase in the capacity of the National Electoral Commission (NEC). Last year, MUG and our allies, on both the NPC and NEC, successfully opened the NEC to broad membership instead of a more selective cadre model. This reform made an expansion in the NEC’s capacity possible, but we must recognize that considerable work remains to be done to realize this possibility. In practical terms, this means working to integrate the hundreds of NEC members into practical projects such as targeted national support for projects like the Zohran Mamdani race; formalized trainings and mentorship programs replacing informal caucus based relationships; developing common processes for electoral work and campaigns that align to our national electoral policy for locals in order for national/local consistency in practice; building national research capacity around legislative and compliance questions; and support groups for electoral organizers in similar conditions to discuss how to successfully organize and build deeper bonds nationally.
INDEPENDENT WORKING CLASS ORGANIZATION
58. In DSA, MUG members lead reading groups, campaigns for state legislature, sit-ins, rent strikes, choruses, ballot initiatives, and union reform caucuses. We are building an alternative culture in the form of democratic spaces that create the starting point of politics. But how we do politics in working class institutions matters. We do not believe in pursuing politics in mass institutions exclusively through lowest common denominator issues that are “widely and deeply felt.” In this framework, our victories are not just putting meat and potatoes on the plate “for” the working class, but expanding the circles of awareness and political consciousness that sustain a party. How we realize this vision is still to some extent an open question. It is clear from the widespread difficulties faced by tenant unions in translating immediate victories into sustained tenant engagement and political-organizational development that participation in rent strikes and other forms of collective action are not enough on their own to politicize masses of tenants and cohere them into a militant bloc capable of contesting the terms of the landlord-tenant relationship on the scale necessary for decisive change in the balance of forces. Through participation in rent strikes, tenants not only win lower rent and safer living conditions but, with the collective of their neighbors, create the militant tenant protagonism necessary for the building of socialism. They become the embodiment of that alternative experiential vision.
59. Since the deindustrialization and tax revolts of the 70s, cities have grown more and more reliant on tax break-funded redevelopment and rezonings to raise property values and the tax base. Cities are bound through mandatory balanced budgets and tax caps to fund themselves through regressive user fees, budget cuts, and the mirage of real estate development catalyzing a wealthier tax base. As the tide of the George Floyd Uprising recedes, liberal cities are now turning to a politics of urban revanchism, promoting “solutions” to homelessness like further carceralization, institutionalization, sweeps, and deportations. Simultaneously, there is a concerted effort to create a cross-ideological consensus on pushing new construction of private market rate housing as the “solution” to the housing crisis. The market must be free, the people must be disciplined. In these frameworks, working class organization is absent and tenants are victims to be helped with mild “protections” as capital shapes and controls their neighborhoods. Our vision sees tenants as those who do not have control over their homes, and tenant unions as bodies to fight for community control and sovereignty.
60. In the face of this situation, it is the task of socialist tenant-unionists to ensure that the militant tenant movement is “united by combination and led by knowledge.” This means shaking off the understandable but misguided aversion among many in our unions (and among our own ranks) to pursuing legislative and electoral campaigns or otherwise contesting landlord-developer dominance on the terrain of the state. It means developing a coherent socialist program around housing that is oriented towards connecting the struggle to address the most pressing and widespread immediate concerns of tenants to the future horizon of the conquest of political power and the abolition of the rent relation—a program that can contest the hegemonic place of market fundamentalism and urban revanchism both within our movement and within the consciousness of the broader public. Finally, it means strengthening the local, regional and national ties between our organizations around such a program and developing deliberative and coordinating bodies on ever-increasing scales, bodies that engage both the leadership and the rank and file of the movement in ever-widening spheres of political struggle and ever-growing levels of organizational and strategic coherence. It is not enough to join and support tenants in their fighting organizations and struggles, as socialists it is our task to lead—to provide the clarity and organizational resources necessary to cohere those organizations and elevate those struggles to the level of nation-wide organization and struggle able to directly confront and overcome landlord-developer power at its foundations in the state and constitutional order.
61. In pursuit of the realization of these tasks, we renew our call from last year’s Tasks & Perspectives for a revitalization of the Housing Justice Commission and add to it a call for more determined struggle along the lines laid out here within our unions and DSA chapters. To turn the HJC into a force capable of cohering national-level struggle, expanding its provision of organizational support and training, and building programmatic unity across the movement, it needs more dedicated organizers who prioritize it over other work, even if this means a relative disengagement from local work for a period of time. Socialist tenant organizers should meet with their comrades across local chapters and unions to figure out a division of labor that allows them to devote time and resources to national work without putting undue strain on those local projects. The tasks of building up our national and local organizations can and should be complementary, but can only be maximally so if we put in the time and effort on the national level to build the scaffolding needed to further cohere and expand our local work. This means that national work needs to be a relative priority for the coming year if we want to see the full fruits of our local efforts pay off.
62. At the same time, if the HJC is to play the clarifying and unifying role we have been discussing here, it is not enough to simply provide more capacity for its current work, but rather it is necessary to expand the scope of this work in two directions. The first is towards doing more political education, agitation & propaganda work and developing materials for chapters and organizers to use to do the same. The second is towards providing a forum for the strategic and programmatic discussions and debates that are currently either not happening on the level they need to be or happening in isolated and dispersed pockets without broad visibility or reciprocal engagement. A publication could be one way of addressing many of these concerns at the same time, but the form isn’t as important as the content here, so long as whatever form(s) this work takes are centralized, accessible and oriented towards countering the rising tide of market fundamentalism, fostering the development of the movement as a whole, and developing a socialist program for housing that said movement can cohere around.
63. In our local tenant organizing projects our focus must be on strengthening the connective tissue between organizations across geographical boundaries, broadening the scope of our work to include properly political tactics, and introducing programmatic considerations for discussion and debate. Additionally, we must not shy away from openly identifying as members of DSA as we carry out our work within our independent organizations and emphasizing the importance of building a socialist party and fighting for political democracy to the realization of any tenant-centered program. It is past time to shake off any lingering reticence we have towards breaking down the barriers between our work and self-conceptions as DSA members and as tenant organizers, actively working to bring rank & file tenants into not just the DSA itself but also into the project of making it into an effective and democratic vehicle for working-class self-emancipation.
LABOR STRATEGY
64. The history of the labor movement in the United States cannot and should not be treated separately from this country’s history as a European settler colony and as a slaveholding power, nor from its active status as the beating heart of a vast global empire. The weakness of the American labor movement–characterized today by a loose mass of atomized workers not only disorganized, but misorganized by racism, national chauvinism, and petty bourgeois individualism–can be traced through the material foundation that has been laid down by these histories. If our goal is to unite the labor movement with the socialist movement, our labor strategy must be armed with a program that can reconstitute the American labor movement, for the first time in its history, on the basis of class independence, Black and indigenous self-determination, and internationalism.
65. Since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, labor has been mediated by the state. This has secured its stability, but on the condition of tying unions to federal regulation. The Act did not cover all sectors equally, however; domestic and agricultural workers and "independent contractors" are excluded. The Railway Labor Act (1926) subjects workers employed by rail and airlines to more direct oversight, which places bargaining under a government-appointed mediator and further restricts the ability to legally strike. Also restricted are public workers, including teachers, who face strike restrictions in many states. This legal framework, unevenly distributed across the working class, gives an incentive for unions to join grand coalitions of "pro-labor" politicians. For union leadership, this means hobnobbing with various government officials for meagre shows of support or legislative answers to organizing questions.
66. Of course, this approach to politics arose at a different time, with drastically different conditions. The upsurge in labor struggles leading up to 1936, helped along by politicians with an unknown mixture of sympathy and fear, led to the creation of modern labor law, with unions generally supportive of this shift to legality. This was a significant shift from the old AFL policy of purely organizing trades and opposing any government intervention or concessions. More broadly, it represented a hope that state mediation could lead up to a form of industrial democracy through the outside pressure of labor, even without the presence of a politically independent workers’ party given the CPUSA’s “popular front” policy. This illusion still colors the labor movement's relationship to the state today, in spite of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), McCarthyite trials, and economic crises such as the Volcker Shock.
67. Since the late 1970s, deindustrialization has involved transformative changes in the labor process, the export of large-scale manufacturing, and a move towards the service sector have altered the makeup of the class. Both craft and industrial unions suffered as a result of these economic pressures and subsequent policy decisions, with membership numbers sharply declining. Their solution to this crisis of organization has been amalgamation "from above" and a turn away from sectoral organizing into many “general” organizing unions. The 1990s and early 2000s represented the pinnacle of this trend. Andy Stern's “Purple Monster” devoured smaller unions and stitched together ultra-bureaucratic national unions and affiliations such as 32BJ, and the now-defunct Service Workers Union. Stern's SEIU also created the Change to Win federation in a process driven by interpersonal spats and the corporate reorganization of labor into a professionalized staffer organizing model. The culmination of the "mega-merger" era was the short-lived marriage of UNITE (textile manufacturing) and HERE (hospitality sector) in order to generalize the union, preventing UNITE’s death from the hemorrhaging of the textile industry while giving HERE a much needed cash-infusion through dues and control over UNITE's Amalgamated Bank.
68. These union mergers created top-down associations of bloated locals, which spread over a wide geographic area. Rather than serving as associations of the rank-and-file, they are run by a professional layer of labor-liberal staff. Instead of relying on the power of the union’s organized numbers, staffers operate on behalf of the union through corporate campaigns whose successes rely on offering favors to politicians. The “organizing-by-agreement” style of the new mega-unions encouraged them to pressure incoming politicians in the Obama era to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have enshrined the card check agreement into law and bypassed the typical NLRB election model used before. Despite extensive lobbying, EFCA and its successor The PRO act, failed to pass under multiple Democratic party administrations. The Change to Win federation, promising mass organizing “from above” through competent administration and big spending, failed to live up to its promises and SEIU, tail tucked between their legs, has returned to the AFL-CIO to ride out the Trump administration.
69. Generally, the building trade unions have shifted from nearly all-encompassing municipal works to high-cost projects in commercial real estate. Here business unionism is in its most reactionary form: business agents offer up highly-skilled labor to project management, often encouraging building spurious projects like hotels, stadiums, and other commercial real estate for the sake of continued employment. For the service unions, these backroom deals usually earn card check agreements and gentlemen's agreements exchanging meagre contracts for labor peace. For the building trades business agents, there is little interest in new organizing through deals, or the traditional organization of casual labor. Some trades are being left behind with technological changes, such as boilermakers; others – bricklayers, roofers, and painters – refuse to organize work that isn't directly controlled by the business agent's contract.
70. Unlike UNITE or UAW during the shift in light and heavy industry, there are no attempts to move away from irrelevance or parochialism and merge into cross-industrial unions or expand into general organizing unions. The issue of membership in trades is exacerbated by insular apprenticeships, though these have generally opened up in the last decade after many years of small and selective recruits. The untapped sections of the building trades perform the vast majority of the work: private contracting, utilities, small-scale construction, and most residential housing is all performed largely outside organized labor. This work is also predominantly organized by sections of the class less frequently represented by the building trades, especially immigrant labor and Black labor. These masses of workers, fresh and potentially rejuvenating to the labor movement in the building trades, are neglected and ignored by the old school bureaucrats, relegating them to the hardest and most exploitative casual labor in their sector.
71. The predominant tendency of existing unions follows from the strategy of the old school bureaucrats which prioritizes legislative cretinism over the organization of the rank-and-file. Old school bureaucrats rely on amalgamation, political favors, and existing funds, ignoring the growing mass of unorganized workers who now form 90% of the American workforce. Yet this merely results in failures and setbacks for organized labor. Organizing the unorganized into unions must be made a top priority and a core responsibility of all existing unions, yet it lacks political valence for their top brass. This is grounded in a fundamental political difference between socialists and labor liberalist union administrators. Only the party coordination between our elected officials’ attack on undemocratic labor law that divides the working class, and our labor organizers’ attack on workplace dictatorship can offer a path forward that involves the increase in union density. Even if we offer this path as DSA, labor organizers must identify with the organization and struggle for union support of this party project— this is the only way we can bring this task forward as a genuine organizational priority for unions. The other option is for organized labor to continue its downward spiral into irrelevance, making it easier for the capitalist class to isolate existing union members and pit them against unorganized workers. The UAW organizing drives in the South are a positive move in that direction as are other national campaigns such as that of Starbucks and Amazon workers. Dwindling numbers notwithstanding, unions possess tremendous resources, over $13 billion in liquid assets collectively, to invest in new organizing drives but either sit on those resources as if this were not an existential question or misuse them by prioritizing “pro-labor” election campaigns over organizing workers. Open socialists should agitate for and take the lead in new organizing drives in order to demonstrate solidarity with the masses of workers, connecting their struggle against dictatorships at the workplace with DSA’s struggle against the dictatorship of the capitalist class.
72. There has been a new wave of labor action in the past decade, with major strikes like the red state teachers strike and the UAW stand up strike. Despite this rise in militancy, however, the raw numbers of the labor movement are still at its nadir: union elections by the NLRB may be rising, but the overall bargaining unit size is small. Particular sections of the labor movement do seem to be leading the way, especially Starbucks Workers United and the various Amazon organizing campaigns that have seen an upswing the last four years. The “organizing-by-agreement” spirit of legislating labor wins briefly returned under the Biden administration as support of the PRO Act, but this was quickly extinguished. Now, the biggest fight on the horizon appears to be related to Shawn Fain’s talk of a “general strike” in 2028, coordinated by a mass contract alignment across industries. There is no evidence that it is actually being organized, despite the grand pronouncements.
73. Only an independent socialist party can provide the basis for an independent labor movement. Through the dedicated work of its openly affiliated organizers within unions and the workplace, the party establishes immediate practical links with organized workers. Through the support it can offer through legislation, strike support, and agitation that develops pro-union consciousness in tandem with the program, the party provides a path between these practical links and its political interventions, including that for the conquest of political power. Establishing these practical links first requires a party orientation towards workplace organization, which in turn means systematic party organization within the workplace. This does not mean running to plant a red banner with resolutions or socialist caucuses, but rather the organization of party members within the same industries and workplaces to develop tactics, labor strategy, and analyses which inform their interventions. All of this leads into how the party wins the support of unions: through the rank-and-file. “Affiliation,” a subject of debate within Bread & Roses, simply means a rubber stamp from union leadership, and leads to a violation of the “one member, one vote” policy so central to party democracy. Instead, our approach must be grounded in political discussions with workers which stem from the practical links we form through our organizing. The party we are building should be a socialist party, united by a program for the conquest of political power by the whole international proletariat, not a labor party of procedurally affiliated unions dominated by parochial and economistic or social-chauvinist interests.
74. Two labor strategies predominate in the socialist movement: the sectarian approach of the "left" and the neutralist approach of the right. The sectarian orientation is the "red union" group, where socialists engage in agitation as part of a permanent campaign of pure opposition within their unions. This comes to a head during contract campaigns, where the "red caucus" seeks to provoke and maintain a strike indefinitely to catalyze the workers’ movement. However, these are typically small groups of radicals and a few frustrated rank-and-filers looking to move the class from without, not a democratic organization seeking to win a majority. This is directly related to the sectarian conception of the party: the "general staff of revolution" who can manage the mass of workers through their small, professionalized groups during a revolutionary upsurge. We see this in Teamsters Mobilize, who took off alongside the 2023 UPS contract fight, opposing O'Brien and the TDU.
75. The position of the right, neutralism, is DSA’s current practice in the labor movement. In practical work it manifests as the tendency to avoid high political divisions within unions and, by extension, avoids a systematic focus on winning the rank-and-file to the party. In strategic discussions it is exemplified by figures such as Jeremy Gong, who see the labor movement as an independent and separate field from the party that effectively precedes it in terms of strategy, despite his numerous individual caveats. Without the option of a Democratic Socialist opposition, the workers organized through the rank and file strategy are left with the dead ends of continued suffocation under the Democratic Party, the false promises of the Republican Party, or an apolitical and Sisyphean commitment to organize to recreate a New Deal.
76. The alternative isn’t to attempt to seize control of the labor movement as a “militant” minority, or break with the democratic decisions of the rank-and-file. Instead, we patiently use every struggle as a chance to contrast the program and practice of Democratic Socialism against all others in the labor movement, putting ourselves forward as the latter’s most consistent fighter. To put forward the practice of Democratic Socialism in the labor movement, we need a robust National Labor Commission (NLC). The current state of the NLC is dysfunctional even for the basic functions of practical coordination and support for chapter labor organizing. While consisting of hundreds of dedicated labor organizers, their focus exists largely outside of the Commission. Neutralist policy draws practical attention almost entirely out of systematically building organic connections between the party and the workplace, which leads to the neglect of bodies such as the NLC. To thrive as a body for supporting and coordinating our labor struggles, the NLC needs to set its primary focus around forming coordinating sections for the industries that DSA members are organizing within.
77. NLC’s industrial sections must be the starting point for our political interventions in labor. Through these groups, DSA members can study the structure and practices of their industry, map major workplaces, and assess the state of unionism to develop effective interventions. We can provide education in industrial and union history, both on the shop floor and through Labor Notes-style gatherings, and develop literature that takes aim at the business practices and maneuverings of business leaders. Workers can develop policy and political interventions using research and on-the-job knowledge. More importantly, this prepares the class to develop the skills and expertise necessary to administer society collectively. With the support of the NLC, chapters can support the development of industrial sections by building workplace branches, encouraging chapter members to take jobs in strategic sectors and coordinate political interventions in the workplace.
78. Tactics will naturally vary between sectors and workplaces. Workplace bulletins and political education can help develop a rank-and-file culture where workers think beyond the drudgery of work, and toward the collective rule and administration of the economy. Depending on the circumstances, we may build broad caucuses on the basis of union democracy and militancy, and run leadership slates through the caucus to challenge labor misleadership, or we may intervene in existing caucuses by advocating for independent political action. It is not enough to simply put a red coat of paint on hollowed out unions. We aim to win endorsements of political action organized by the party through meetings of the rank-and-file, not through the rubber stamp of leadership. Through our interventions, we will build a commitment to industrial unionism and organizing the unorganized.
79. We are small numbers of socialists intervening in a battered and often ineffective labor movement under conditions where large sections of the working class remain unorganized. In many cases, our immediate tasks are basic: fighting for a union to exist at all, or fighting for the right to access our contracts or holding regular union meetings. As we educate, organize, and struggle against the bosses, our numbers will grow. Broad caucuses organized on the basis of basic union democracy will be eclipsed by expanding socialist industrial sections in truly democratic unions, as workers join the party itself and take on Democratic Socialist demands. This mass vanguard will transform their unions into organs of class struggle, united by their party and its program for a new republic. This merger of ideas and struggle begins with our intervention as socialists, which is, by necessity, explicitly and openly political.
