# Marxist Unity Group
> An orthodox Marxist faction within the Democratic Socialists of America.
Public Ghost content for AI and LLM tooling. This file includes a bounded export of public pages first, then recent public posts.
Append `.md` to any post or page URL to get the content in Markdown (for example, `/example-post.md`).
## Pages
### About Light and Air
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/about/
Last updated: 2026-06-28T17:37:19.000Z
Light & Air is the official publication of [Marxist Unity Group](https://www.marxistunity.com/), a faction in the Democratic Socialists of America.
We aim to organize activists within DSA and the broader workers' movement around the principles necessary for conquering political power by the working class through a mass socialist party.
Sign up to our newsletter to receive article round-ups alongside updates from Marxist Unity Group.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### MUG Bulletin
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mug-bulletin/
Last updated: 2026-05-13T23:28:06.000Z
_No content available._
### Join MUG
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/join-mug/
Last updated: 2026-08-30T18:24:31.000Z
## Apply Now
Fall 2026 MUG applications are open until September 18th! **Submit your application** [**here**](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSfQl4OSVYMIeO5WFINkaA4naDnLWpmAoQbadmtHX090fgniGg/viewform?ref=marxistunity.com)**.**
## Information for Applicants
Please review the following before applying:
- [Points of Unity](https://www.marxistunity.com/)
- [Rules and Code of Conduct](https://www.marxistunity.com/rules-code-of-conduct)
- [Tasks and Perspectives](https://www.marxistunity.com/2026-tasks-perspectives/)
- [Member Activity Standards](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1hHYb%5F172bE%5FEnnKw6g%5FIy-IKsEPkycYvYjB7r%5FOyj6A/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com)
The application process involves an intake interview, a ten week reading group ([link to reader here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oPtPzLo4%5FJqmMAH73AveFN9pgBIfpZpz/view?ref=marxistunity.com)), and a second interview.
Applicants should have a basic understanding of Marxism, but do not need to be developed DSA cadres. **Reading group participation aims to transform participants' political analysis and develop political alignment. Participation in the reading group does not guarantee admission to MUG.** The goal of the reading group is to bring applicants to the level of understanding of Marxist theory that they can meaningfully align with the following points:
- Commitment to a long-term struggle in DSA
- Agreement with a majority of the Points of Unity
- Acceptance of all points as the group’s democratically-elaborated mission
- An overall understanding of the concepts in the reader.
- Readiness to advance all MUG initiatives in their local chapter work, while retaining the right to criticize them in their personal capacity.
If you have any questions about joining please email marxistunitygroup@gmail.com
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### MUG Cadre School Curriculum
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/curriculum/
Last updated: 2026-08-29T23:34:31.000Z
### Contents
1. [Preface to the First Edition](#preface-1)
2. [Preface to the Third Edition](#preface-3)
3. [Reader Contents](#reader-contents)
4. [Foundational Reading List](#foundational-reading-list)
---
## Preface to the First Edition
For the most part, the list of materials included in this reader is not the usual one found in a Marxist educational curriculum. It is not intended as an exhaustive introduction to Marxism (we’re already assuming a basic level of familiarity), nor as a complete roadmap for a Marxist intervention in the contemporary United States. Thus it must necessarily exclude topics that are also essential to the formation and victory of the working class in taking state power; on questions of political economy, the relationship of socialism to black liberation, how Marxists should respond to the threat of the far-right, what strategy socialists should take in the trade union and tenant movements, etc. All of these questions and more need to be thoroughly investigated by Marxist Unity Group and DSA as a whole as we further develop our politics together.
Our view is that the main challenge for socialists in the United States is the lack of a Marxist party. That is why our reader emphasizes key texts from the period when the first socialist parties were forming into mass organs of working class struggle. These texts are all from influential European Marxists from between 1871 and 1910, with the exception of Lenin’s *Left Wing Communism* (1920) and secondary sources reflecting on and analyzing that period. In these four decades between the Paris Commune and World War I, Marxism seemed to spread through the Continental working class as rapidly as Napoleon’s armies had a few generations prior. It was also in this era that the revolutionary *theoretical* work of Marx (1818-1883) and Engels (1820-1895) was successfully transformed into a mass *political* practice in a newly united Germany by their closest comrades Wilhelm Liebknecht (1826-1900) and August Bebel (1840-1913). This strategy was further elaborated for a mass proletarian audience by Karl Kautsky (1854-1938) and his greatest pupil: a certain Russian lawyer with an acerbic pen, Vladimir Lenin (1870-1924).
At the beginning of this conjuncture, socialists in Europe were divided into small competing sects and reeling from a long series of defeats. These demoralizing retreats included the failure of the 1848 revolutions and the Paris Commune, the dissolution of the First International, the Spanish Bourbon Restoration that ended the *sexenico democratico*, and the lording over Europe by aristocratic reactionaries like Metternich, Napoleon III, and Bismarck–not unlike the contemporary far left’s sectarian irrelevancy following the Soviet collapse and the global counterrevolutionary plague of neoliberalism. By the end of that conjuncture however, the sects had united to build Marxist parties deeply ingrained in the working class with their own democratic civil societies. They elected benches of revolutionary parliamentarians who were answerable to the rank and file and committed to international proletarian solidarity over patriotic national unity, and revolutionary democratic-republicanism over narrow reformist and *economist* laborism. Or at least this was the ideal presented on the surface in the resolutions and congresses of the Second International (see Mike Taber, *Under the Socialist Banner: Resolutions of the Second International 1889-1912*, Haymarket, 2021). It was the first period of successful and mass party-building by Marxists, and it was only on the foundations of these parties that the question of taking power was even conceivable in Europe during the revolutionary period of 1917-21\. The imperative of revolutionary, democratic, and mass party-building is the first reason we chose these texts.
As every leftist knows, there was a deep rot at the center of the Second International, as its various national sections started to drop their revolutionary principles against their own national ruling classes one-by-one in the “[Spirit of 1914](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Spirit%5Fof%5F1914?ref=marxistunity.com)” when war was declared. This was a world-historic tragedy, but it was by no means an inevitability, as the usual Marxist *just-so* story goes. Marxists inherited this narrative from the history as presented by the Comintern in the period of 1920-21, when proletarian revolution was on the immediate agenda and the remnants of the Second International were scabbing against the world’s first workers’ regime. The Soviet regime was locked in an international struggle for life or death and it thus *overemphasized* its break with the “orthodox Marxism” of the Second International. Lenin himself acknowledged his grounding in Second International politics. In Lenin’s words: “When and where did I call the revolutionism of Bebel and Kautsky opportunism? When and where did I ever claim to have created any sort of special trend in International Social-Democracy *not identical* with the trend of Bebel and Kautsky?” (*Two Tactics*, Chapter 8).
A full accounting of the relationship between the Second and Third Internationals or between Kautsky and Lenin is beyond the scope of this article. Suffice to say, the *just-so* story inherited by the contemporary Left is an ahistorical caricature. For a comprehensive review, see Ben Lewis’s introduction to *Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism* (Haymarket, 2020). However, the matter of Lenin’s critique of Kautsky in one of the most widely read pamphlets on the Left–*State and Revolution*, should be addressed. In his 1920 polemic *Left Wing Communism,* Lenin, referring to Kautsky “when he was still a Marxist and not a renegade,” wrote on the very first page: “How well Kautsky wrote eighteen years ago!” In 1917’s *State and Revolution* however, he accuses Kautsky (in his pre-renegade period) of never having sufficiently grasped Marx’s revolutionary theory of the state, contrasting what Kautsky *didn’t* say in his polemics with Bernstein’s revisionism with what Marx wrote on the Paris Commune in *Civil War in France*. In fact, according to Lars Lih, *State and Revolution* is the *only* place that Lenin substantively criticized Kautsky “when he was still a Marxist.”
However, writing in Swiss exile without access to his library’s complete works of Kautsky, Lenin had apparently forgotten a pamphlet Kautsky had written which directly addresses the Commune and represents Marx’s theory of the state. Kautsky’s *Social Democracy and Republic in France* was a scathing polemic against the French socialist Alexandre Millerand and his supporters. Millerand had set off a controversy in international Social Democracy when he joined the bourgeois coalition cabinet in Pierre Waldeck-Rousseau’s government of “Republican Defense” against the far right, alongside General de Gallifet who was known as “the Commune’s executioner.” It is remarkable that Kautsky’s pamphlet was only published in English in October 2020 (by Ben Lewis in his above-mentioned book), as it is a major political work of the preeminent Marxist thinker between Engels and Lenin. It is particularly relevant to our context, as it articulates the “orthodox Marxist” (or “revolutionary Social Democratic”) strategy in the context of a so-called “[high inclusion democracy](https://www.jacobinmag.com/2021/07/democratic-socialism-russian-revolution-leninism-workers-movements?ref=marxistunity.com),” rather than the “low-inclusion” regimes of Finland or Germany or autocracies like the Russian Empire.
The second reason for the choice of these texts is their common emphasis on the centrality of democratic revolutionary political struggle. Since the crystallization of Comintern orthodoxy, Marxists—in both Stalinist and Trotskyist forms, as well as other non-Leninist offshoots—have inherited an economism that underplays the relevance of revolutionary political democracy. This has led to both left-wing and right-wing errors: the former made in the assumption that the struggle for political democracy is merely the task of the bourgeois revolution, the latter in ignoring the struggle against the bourgeois rule-of-law and the specific political form of the class-state, only working towards democratic reform within a legalist constitutional-loyalist schema. Rather than conceding the term ‘democracy’ to the bourgeois liberal-constitutional state, Marx held a two-tier schema of revolution: first, the conquest of political power by the proletariat to form a democratic republic (in other words a *dictatorship of the proletariat*), second for the transition from the democratic regime of the working class towards communism: the abolition of all classes, etc. In the 1847 document “Principles of Communism,” an alternate draft to the *Manifesto*, Engels puts it well:
*What will be the course of this revolution? Above all, it will establish a democratic constitution, and through this, the direct or indirect dominance of the proletariat…Democracy would be wholly valueless to the proletariat if it were not immediately used as a means for putting through measures directed against private property and ensuring the livelihood of the proletariat.*
In his critique of the Erfurt Program, Engels again is clear: “If one thing is certain it is that our party and the working class can only come to power under the form of a democratic republic. This is even the specific form for the dictatorship of the proletariat, as the Great French Revolution has already shown.” The final section of this reader is devoted to Marx’s conception of the democratic republic, which is consistent with the programmatic demands documented in section II.
The readings address the question of the organization of the party in sections I, on the merger formula, II, on the minimum-maximum program, section IV, on the party of a new type, and section VII on ‘fraction politics’. However, due to the length of the reader already, we have foregone adding a section on democratic centralism: an important but massively bastardized concept usually only understood as the militarized party model that was necessarily adapted by the Communist Party under the conditions of civil war. In fact, democratic centralism had a rich history in Marxism prior to the ban on factions with which it is usually associated today. Democratic centralism is particularly relevant in DSA after the Bowman affair, and it would be good to do a supplemental reading series on the topic in the future. Section VII, which focuses on "fraction politics," does explore democratic centralism indirectly, without getting into its deeper history, by looking at Lenin’s electoral strategy for Russian Social Democrats in the Duma, as well as the ‘intransigent’ Marxist oppositional political strategy of SPD legislators in the German Reichstag.
A broad study of the classical Marxist political strategy might not seem like the most immediately relevant political education guide to cohere a new tendency within DSA. It doesn’t provide us with an obvious answer to tactical questions like what DSA policy should be towards China, how we implement the rank and file strategy, whether or not Marxists should engage in so-called mutual aid, or how to relate to liberal NGO coalition partners in reform campaigns. Even so, it is our view that a rethinking of the *whole history* of the workers movement is necessary to achieve the great goal of working class self-emancipation. The texts in this reader provide a *starting point*. In DSA today, and indeed in the wider history of the US Left, a focus on rethinking the ideological inheritance of Marxism is seen as a distraction from "doing the work" of practical organizing. In order for us as Marxists to develop a solid political footing in the present and be fully confident of our path ahead, we must be critical of following popular trends of thought and ideological narratives not of our own making. Without more critical reflection and rethinking of the dominant narratives of Left history, the necessary spread of awareness and widespread reiteration of what need to be our movement's aims or "great goals" will not be victorious.
A particularly vulgar example of this thinking surfaced during the Bowman affair, when members of the liquidationist right argued that focusing on “internal matters,” like how to relate to a DSA Congressman who flagrantly broke our Zionism boycott, distracted us from the outward-facing organizing we should be doing. This was nothing more than a cynical attempt to shut down criticism of the dominant opportunist electoral strategy. However, we would argue it is precisely the lack of debate on the questions posed in this reader that makes these sorts of crises endemic on the Left, and forces us to reinvent the wheel strategically where many of the brilliant minds of Marxism have already intensely labored. While we may not have every *tactical* question figured out, we believe studying these texts together will give us a wider *strategic* outlook that can build a principled unity of Marxists towards the basis necessary for a real Communist Party.
P.M.
January 2022
## Preface to the Third Edition
When this book was first compiled, Marxist Unity was a group of seven people who had been working together at Cosmonaut for three years, but had only just begun to formalize our political views by making a coordinated intervention at the DSA 2021 convention. We have since held two courses, where prospective members and facilitators studied it together. It was therefore necessary to update it based on these experiences, both on the technical level of the layout and, more importantly, the editorial level of content.
The astute reader will notice significant changes between the table of contents in the first and third editions. To make it more readable, we tried to focus less on primary sources, which need to always be placed in their historical context to be understood, and replaced some with the best contemporary secondary sources. We divided the first week’s reading into two in order to lighten the load, and we added a section from Neil Harding’s groundbreaking study of Lenin which, in the 1970s, set the stage for the critique of the “text-book interpretation”. Besides the last two sections, the most significant change was taking out the section entitled ‘Democratic Revolution to the End’, which included Marx & Engels’ famous 1850 Address, Lenin’s Two Tactics, and a few other articles. It was too much of a detour to unpack the specific issues of the peasantry in the 1905 Revolution, and felt eclectic to connect it to the “Address”. However, the issues of permanent revolution, its relation to the Bolshevik strategy of hegemony, and what that means to us from the vantage point of the 21st century are important and messy theoretical issues that do need to be unpacked and understood by Marxists.
Sections VIII and IX were also significant revisions. In the first and second editions, the last section, “The Social Republic”, was the curriculum’s shortest and sweetest. We decided to expand it to include Marx’s most important political work, his commentary on the Paris Commune from Civil War in France, as well as a commentary on Lenin’s State and Revolution. The final section is a new addition. It is focused on grounding the preceding sections in US history, as well as pointing towards the strategic objective for our time and place.
Despite Section IX’s US focus, it should be clear that MUG rejects putting forward an analysis based entirely on the current conjuncture. Part of our hypothesis is that in a broad sense, there are only a few strategic choices available to the working class, and all of them now have significant historic case studies. The mistake of privileging the conjuncture obscures the tendencies of capitalism and the bourgeois state within the longue duree of history, and thus obscures the tasks of the rising class: in our case the proletariat.
We hope that this edition of the curriculum, one that is more collaborative and hopefully easier to read, will be more closely approaching its finalized form, and come to be seen as a definitive statement on our tendency’s views.
PM
March 2023
---
# Reader Contents
If you would like a copy of the reader, contact MUG at marxistunitygroup@gmail.com
## **Section I**: **The** **Merger Formula**
1. *Lenin Rediscovered*, Lars Lih, Chapter 1 ([audiobook link](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/09/audio-book-of-lars-lihs-lenin-rediscovered-what-is-to-be-done-in-context/?ref=marxistunity.com)) Source: Haymarket Books (2008)
## **Section II: Economism and High Politics**
1. [*Lenin’s Political Thought Vol. 1*](https://redyouthnwa.files.wordpress.com/2018/05/lenins-political-thought-harding.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com), Neil Harding, Chapter 7 (The Reaffirmation of Orthodoxy- Social-Democratic Consciousness and the Party) and preceding two pagesSource: Haymarket Books (2019)
2. [*What Is To Be Done?*](https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/C15-What-Is-to-Be-Done-2nd-Printing.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)*,* Vladimir Lenin, Chapter 3Source: Marxist Internet Archive
3. [Political Agitation and the Class Point of View](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/feb/01.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), Vladimir LeninSource: Marxist Internet Archive
## **Section III**: **The Classical Marxist** **Minimum-Maximum Program**
1. [Programme: Lessons of Erfurt](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/976/programme-lessons-of-erfurt/?ref=marxistunity.com), Mike MacnairSource: Weekly Worker
2. [The Program of the Party Ouvrier,](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) Karl Marx and Jules GuesdeSource: Marxist Internet Archive
3. [Engels’ critique of the draft Erfurt Program](https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1891/06/29.htm?ref=marxistunity.com)Source: Marxist Internet Archive
4. The [Erfurt Program](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm?ref=marxistunity.com)Source: Marxist Internet Archive
5. [Wilhelm Liebknecht’s Speech to the Erfurt Congress](https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/620-wilhelm-liebknecht-and-german-social-democracy?ref=marxistunity.com)Source: Marxist Internet Archive
6. [1903 Program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm?ref=marxistunity.com)Source: Marxist Internet Archive
7. [1912 Program of the Socialist Party of America](http://sageamericanhistory.net/progressive/docs/SocialistPlat1912.htm?ref=marxistunity.com)Source: Sage American History
## **Section IV: Party of a New Type?**
1. [*Revolutionary Strategy*](https://archive.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Revolutionary%20Strategy%202.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com), Mike Macnair, Chapters 5 and 6 ([audiobook link](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/09/audio-book-of-mike-macnairs-revolutionary-strategy/?ref=marxistunity.com))Source: November Publications (2010)
2. [A Faction is Not a Party](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/912/a-faction-is-not-a-party/?ref=marxistunity.com), Lars LihSource: Weekly Worker
3. [The Myth of Lenin’s “Concept of The Party”](https://www.marxists.org/archive/draper/1990/myth/myth.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), Hal DraperSource: Marxist Internet Archive
## **Section V: The Strategy of Patience**
1. [*Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder*](https://foreignlanguages.press/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/C29-Left-Wing-Communism-1st-Printing.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)*,* Vladimir Lenin, Chapters 5-10Source: Marxist Internet Archive
2. [*Revolutionary Strategy*](https://archive.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Revolutionary%20Strategy%202.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com), Mike Macnair, Chapters 2 and 3 ([audiobook link](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/09/audio-book-of-mike-macnairs-revolutionary-strategy/?ref=marxistunity.com))Source: November Publications (2010)
## **Section VI: Anti-Coalitionism in Liberal Constitutional Regimes**
1. [The Book that Didn’t Bark](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/863/the-book-that-didnt-bark/?ref=marxistunity.com), Lars LihSource: Weekly Worker
2. Excerpts from [*Republic & Social Democracy in France*](https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1564-karl-kautsky-on-democracy-and-republicanism?ref=marxistunity.com), Karl Kautsky, Chapters 2, 5-8Source: Haymarket Books (2020)
3. *Karl Kautsky and Republicanism*, Ben Lewis’s introduction, pp. 32-37Source: Haymarket Books (2020)
### **Section VII: Fraction Politics**
1. [*Parliamentarism & Democracy*](https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1564-karl-kautsky-on-democracy-and-republicanism?ref=marxistunity.com), Karl Kautsky, Chapter 12\. Source: Haymarket Books (2020)
2. *The Outlawed Party,* Vernon Lidkte, Chapter 7: "Growth of Social Democracy Creates a Major Crisis for the Party" pp. 176-203
3. "Lenin and Bogdanov: Protagonists in the 'Bolshevik Center" Avraham Yassour
4. "The Russian Social Insurance Movement, 1912-1914: An Ideological Analysis" Sally Ewing
## **Section VIII: Decolonization**
1. [*The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self Determination*](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/oct/16.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), Lenin
2. [*Democracy Was a Decolonial Project*](https://www.bostonreview.net/articles/democracy-was-a-decolonial-project/?ref=marxistunity.com), Aziz Rana
3. *Race and Globalization* p. 7-17, Ruth Wilson Gilmore
## **Section IX: The Democratic Social Republic**
1. [Control the Bureaucrats](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/552/control-the-bureaucrats/?ref=marxistunity.com), Mike MacnairSource: Weekly Worker
2. [*Revolutionary Strategy*](https://archive.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Revolutionary%20Strategy%202.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)*,* Mike Macnair, Chapter 9 ([audiobook link](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/09/audio-book-of-mike-macnairs-revolutionary-strategy/?ref=marxistunity.com))Source: November Publishing (2010)
3. [*Civil War in France*](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/ch06.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), Karl Marx, Chapter 6Source: Marxist Internet Archive
4. [Marx’s Social Republic](https://www.academia.edu/41691042/Marxs%5FSocial%5FRepublic%5FRadical%5FRepublicanism%5Fand%5Fthe%5FPolitical%5FInstitutions%5Fof%5FSocialism?ref=marxistunity.com), Bruno LeipoldSource: University of Oxford (2017)
5. [Theory and Practice](https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1910/theory-practice/ch01.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), Rosa Luxemburg, Chapter 1Source: Marxist Internet Archive
## **Section X: Fight the Constitution, Demand a New Republic**
1. [The American Workingmen’s Parties, Universal Suffrage, and Marx’s Democratic Communism](https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/modern-intellectual-history/article/abs/american-workingmens-parties-universal-suffrage-and-marxs-democratic-communism/B120613CB43DA9F78ADD9C4805EBE1B4?ref=marxistunity.com), Sean F. MonahanSource: Cambridge University (2021)
2. [Fight the Constitution! Demand a New Republic!](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/03/fight-the-constitution-demand-a-new-republic/?ref=marxistunity.com), Jenna Grove ([audio recording](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/03/fight-the-constitution-demand-a-new-republic/?ref=marxistunity.com))Source: Cosmonaut Magazine
---
# Foundational Reading List
The following list does not represent a comprehensive curricula for an education in Marxism: it’s specifically geared towards our shared views on party-building and strategic orientation, and what makes those views *unique as a political project within DSA*. Thus it necessarily excludes important topics, such as political economy, black liberation, imperialism, etc. We look forward to building curriculum on these and other topics that will be usable in DSA chapters.
### **Program:**
#### Historic Origins of the Marxist Program:
[Mike Macnair - Lessons of Erfurt](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/976/programme-lessons-of-erfurt/?ref=marxistunity.com)
#### Historic Marxist Programs:
[Karl Marx and Jules Guesde - Program of the French Workers Party (1880)](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1880/05/parti-ouvrier.htm?ref=marxistunity.com)
[Erfurt Program](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/1891/erfurt-program.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) (1891)
[Russian Social Democratic Labor Party Program](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) (1903)
[Socialist Party of America Platform (1912) ](http://sageamericanhistory.net/progressive/docs/SocialistPlat1912.htm?ref=marxistunity.com)
#### Contemporary analysis:
[Parker McQueeney - Why Have a Political Program?](https://cosmonaut.blog/2018/09/03/why-have-a-political-program/?ref=marxistunity.com)
[Mike Macnair - 'Transitional' to What?](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/684/transitional-to-what/?ref=marxistunity.com)
[Ben Lewis interview on Karl Kautsky](https://jacobinmag.com/2020/10/karl-kautsky-ben-lewis-marx-lenin?ref=marxistunity.com)
### **Strategy:**
#### Party:
[Jonah Martell - A Twelve-Step Program for Democrat Addiction](https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/12/10/a-twelve-step-program-for-democrat-addiction/?ref=marxistunity.com)
[Donald Parkinson - From Workers Party to Workers Republic](https://cosmonaut.blog/2018/10/17/from-workers-party-to-workers-republic/?ref=marxistunity.com)
[Eric Blanc introduction](https://johnriddell.com/2016/05/24/party-class-and-marxism-did-kautsky-advocate-leninism/?ref=marxistunity.com) to [Karl Kautsky - Sects or Class Parties?](https://johnriddell.com/2016/05/24/karl-kautsky-sects-or-class-parties/?ref=marxistunity.com)
#### Importance of Political Agitation:
[Gil Schaeffer - Lenin and the “Class Point of View”](https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/12/02/lenin-and-the-class-point-of-view-looking-at-chris-maisanos-the-constitution-and-the-class-struggle/?ref=marxistunity.com)
[Daniel Lazare - The US Constitution: Hiding in Plain Sight](https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/09/29/us-constitution-hiding-in-plain-sight/?ref=marxistunity.com)
[Bruno Leipold - Marx's Social Republic](https://www.academia.edu/41691042/Marxs%5FSocial%5FRepublic%5FRadical%5FRepublicanism%5Fand%5Fthe%5FPolitical%5FInstitutions%5Fof%5FSocialism?auto=download&ref=marxistunity.com)
#### ‘Democratic Centralism’
[Mike Macnair - Reclaiming Democratic Centralism](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1252/reclaiming-democratic-centralism/?ref=marxistunity.com)
[Lars T. Lih - Fortunes of a Formula: From 'DEMOCRATIC centralism' to 'democratic CENTRALISM'](https://johnriddell.com/2013/04/14/fortunes-of-a-formula-from-democratic-centralism-to-democratic-centralism/?ref=marxistunity.com)
### **Book Length works:**
[Mike Macnair - *Revolutionary Strategy*](https://archive.cpgb.org.uk/assets/files/resources/Revolutionary%20Strategy%202.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) \- [audio version](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lfWxGqCtq5Y&list=PLMU35K4iExMWPjCCZhCSKmP8s0DDi-9LS&ref=marxistunity.com)
[Lars T. Lih - *Lenin Rediscovered: 'What is to be Done?' in Context*](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-sCjTRN7l5g&list=PLMU35K4iExMVCGQc7jHMbRezuB83Fn4XY&ref=marxistunity.com)
August H. Nimtz - *The Ballot, The Streets – or Both? From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution* \- [podcast discussion](https://cosmopod.libsyn.com/revolutionary-parliamentarism-with-august-nimtz?ref=marxistunity.com)
Ben Lewis - *Karl Kautsky on Democracy and Republicanism* \- [podcast discussion](https://cosmopod.libsyn.com/the-revolutionary-karl-kautsky-with-ben-lewis?ref=marxistunity.com)
Karl Kautsky - [*The Historic Accomplishment of Karl Marx*](https://cosmonaut.blog/2020/11/03/the-historic-accomplishment-of-karl-marx-by-karl-kautsky/?ref=marxistunity.com)
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### About MUG
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/about-us/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T23:32:33.000Z
Marxist Unity Group is an organization committed to political struggle within the Democratic Socialists of America. This makes us a DSA faction, and we aim to be a constructive one. Our words "Marxist Unity" are aspirational: we hope to rally the thousands of Marxists in DSA around a shared vision for our movement’s future. Our faction is based on seven points of unity that we hope DSA will eventually embrace. These principles of struggle are far-reaching, and they all serve one fundamental goal—one unspoken dream that we will wear on our chest. It is a dream now quietly shared by millions of people in this country: the dream of a socialist revolution in the United States.
[Lee en Español](https://www.marxistunity.com/sobre-nosotros/)| [(नेपाली अनुवाद यहाँ)](https://www.marxistunity.com/ektaakaa-saat-bundaahruu/)| [(हिंदी अनुवाद यहाँ)](https://www.marxistunity.com/hindii-anuvaad-yhaan/)
---
# Seven Points of Unity
1. [Political Independence](#political-independence)
2. [Programmatic Unity](#programmatic-unity)
3. [Democratic Discipline](#democratic-discipline)
4. [Nationwide Struggle](#nationwide-struggle)
5. [Fight the Imperial Police State](#fight-the-imperial-police-state)
6. [Fight the Constitution](#fight-the-constitution)
7. [Demand a New Republic, Finish Reconstruction](#demand-a-new-republic)
---
# 1\. Political independence.
#### We want DSA to free itself from the Democratic Party and all other capitalist influences.
###
Teachers and support staff rally outside of Los Angeles City Hall ahead of strike, 2023\. Photo credit: Francine Orr/AP
Marxist Unity Group strives to transform DSA into an independent socialist party. Independence means establishing a distinct public profile for DSA with our own platform, branding, and rhetoric. It also means building our own institutions and our own party discipline in the halls of power. We would stand with unwavering confidence in our cause, never watering down our socialist vision or subordinating our interests to those of a capitalist party.
Together, we would cultivate a popular mandate for revolution by running militant socialist candidates for public office—while simultaneously organizing grassroots institutions of working class power. We would create party-affiliated media, community services, mutual aid and defensive organizations. Within the labor movement, we would fight the existing labor bureaucracy, build militant and democratic unions, and strive to win these unions to socialist politics. As we nurture a vast ecosystem of socialist-allied institutions, our socialist party will simultaneously become a mass movement: a party-movement.
Marxist Unity Group calls for immediate steps towards political independence. We become a party by acting like one.For us, the "break" with the Democratic Party is a continuous process that must begin in earnest *right now.* This will require courage and faith in our ability to succeed as an independent movement, but we believe that the socialist movement is worthy of that faith. We support a transition towards independent campaigns wherever ballot access laws make this readily achievable—even if this causes a temporary decrease in our number of electoral victories. Building a distinct socialist constituency is the paramount task of our political era, and independent campaigns [help us cultivate](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/05/why-run-independents-a-response-to-collective-power-network/?ref=marxistunity.com) loyalty that is completely disconnected from loyalty to the Democratic Party.
---
# 2\. Programmatic unity.
#### We want a program to guide DSA’s political work.
Delegates holding up voting cards at DSA's 2019 Convention. Photo credit: Audra Melton/NY Times
To achieve political independence, we must learn to act with greater unity and determination. We want a disciplined, self-reliant organization that is run democratically by its rank and file members. What holds parties together is agreement on final goals, not minor immediate tactical concerns. This approach is called programmatic unity: unity based on common struggle for essential political goals, rather than on dogmatic purity or vague slogans that obscure our true objectives. Acceptance of a political program with specific demands on the state is how the first mass socialist parties succeeded in winning the working class of their countries by the millions. A program provides direction on the political demands that will establish socialism and democratic rule by the working class without prescribing a narrow tactical route.
Marxist Unity Group works towards adopting a minimum-maximum program for DSA. We view both the "minimum" and "maximum" program as essential. The minimum program refers to the party’s comprehensive platform: the policies that it will immediately implement upon taking power to establish working-class political rule and place society on the path of a socialist transition out of capitalism. The maximum program refers to the results of this process: a world free of the market, borders, classes, and all other oppressive structures that exist under capitalism—in a word, communism. Centering programmatic politics will restore the sense of unity and purpose that socialists enjoyed during the Sanders campaigns. However, our program will have much more ambitious aims, and instead of belonging to a single candidate, it will be developed democratically by the entire socialist movement.
We would like to make "program acceptance" the basis of DSA membership. Acceptance does not mean agreeing with everything in the program. It simply means being willing to fight for the program as an expression of the movement’s democratically-elaborated aims. Members would have the right to organize for specific changes to the program at conventions. Members will be free to publicly voice disagreement with any majority decision, as long as they can accept the decision as legitimate and assist with its implementation. This is the true meaning of democratic centralism.
---
# 3\. Democratic discipline.
#### We want “tribunes of the people” to represent our party in every arena of the class war.
Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF) members ejected from South African National Assembly after disrupting the President’s state of the nation address, 2015\. Photo credit: Rodger Bosch/Reuters
Wherever we organize—in labor and tenant unions, at the ballot box, or in social movements—socialists must fight side-by-side to advance DSA’s program. We reject bureaucratic approaches to party discipline that try to micromanage tactics or conceal real difficulties in our movement. Our strategy and tactics should be democratically elaborated. Our representatives in all arenas should be accountable to the party membership.
Democratic discipline is acutely necessary in elected office, where socialists are often operating behind enemy lines yet tasked with representing socialism to the working class. If DSA candidates are truly dedicated to socialist politics, they should run together on a common DSA platform. Even if some are elected on a Democratic ballot line, they should form their own legislative caucuses, vote as a bloc, and refuse to join the Democratic Party caucus. They should also campaign for other socialists, refuse to endorse non-socialists, and only take the wage of a typical union worker. Through this type of discipline, our candidates will rise as "tribunes of the people": organized representatives of the socialist movement.
In the labor movement, democratic discipline requires the coordination of DSA members by industry and union. In this way, our members can establish practical links among the rank and file in and between workplaces, coordinating our actions in the economic and political spheres through DSA. We believe that only an independent socialist movement can provide the basis for a strong and independent labor movement, because only that kind of party is able to democratically resolve workers’ particular different interests across sectors in order to articulate our demands together as a class.
Horse-trading, neutralism, and spineless compromise have failed to truly advance socialist politics. We will always embrace the struggle for political reforms and economic improvements, but we want socialists to conduct that struggle out in the open and win by acting as an intransigent opposition to the ruling class. Instead of cutting backroom deals as a junior coalition partner, socialists can use their platforms to raise the expectations of the working class and mobilize it to force concessions from the capitalists.
---
# 4\. Nationwide struggle.
#### We want socialists to treat U.S. politics as a nationwide struggle for power.
March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom, 1963.
As socialists in the United States, we live in a reactionary political culture that encourages us to think small. Americans are taught to believe that all problems should be solved locally, and socialists often accept this logic by confining themselves to isolated local campaigns, assuming that this is where "real change happens." Yet despite our backwards federal system, the United States is not an alliance of city-states or a network of 20,000 police departments. It is a colossal empire propped up by the most powerful military on Earth. Even local police are armed, trained, and integrated by the federal government. If we ignore national politics, we will become blind to the true nature of our oppressors. We will obscure their nationwide abuse of the working class, not to mention their imperialist crimes in every corner of the world. Local organizing is an indispensable foundation of our movement, but it will be infinitely more effective when it is connected to a nationwide, pan-American, and global vision for working class revolution.
Marxist Unity Group will work to increase DSA acting as a nationwide organization. We will build nationwide collaboration and debate through DSA’s national committees and also through developing a lively party press. We support efforts to lift chapters out of parochialism by increasing member communication across chapter lines, maintaining staffing levels required to make member-led organizing possible at the national level while ensuring fair pay and working conditions, and by integrating locals into larger state-level organizations. It is also why we want DSA to run an organized slate of socialist candidates to contest the House of Representatives. By conducting principled agitation in the halls of Congress, socialists can deliver a common message to every corner of the country. While we use the federal government as a bully pulpit, our candidates could also use their public profiles to support state and municipal organizing efforts. Federal, state, and local struggles—strikes, electoral campaigns, and mass demonstrations—will all be fused together in one grand movement that demands nothing less than a working-class, socialist revolution.
---
# 5\. Fight the Imperial Police State.
#### We want socialists to challenge the repressive structures of the capitalist state.
Osha Neumann and Brian Thiele, **Murals at People's Park*, Berkeley CA.
Socialists have a duty to stand firmly against militarism and police tyranny, beginning with a clear opposition to the imperialist designs of our own state. In the belly of the American empire, any socialist program must firmly oppose (neo)colonialism and advance the principles of national self-determination—that each country must be sovereign to decide its own affairs, free from military coercion or economic extortion. This means taking a defeatist stance against our country's wars, including those engaged by proxies and through military alliances like NATO, as well as cruel economic sanctions and military and diplomatic cover for colonial occupation, police repression, and ethnic cleansing.
But a defeatist stance against U.S. imperialism must exist alongside a revolutionary commitment to politically-independent international action. A lasting transition to socialism in any one country is impossible, and the working class can only emancipate itself on an international scale. The decline of much of the socialist movement in the 20th century into variant forms of nationalism and popular frontism —from the official communist "national roads to socialism" to the earlier capitulation of social democracy to "defense of the nation" during WWI—have equally led to strategic dead-ends and tragic defeat. Though the working class of any country must first of all ‘come to terms with its own bourgeoisie,’ domestic reforms are only partial victories for an international class.
The socialist movement takes a leading role in expressing this international character in several ways, such as coordinated international strike action — like the historic May Day strikes —fiercely combating anti-immigrant chauvinism, and organizing to defend and extend the civil liberties of the migrant working class. As its far-reaching political objective, our party should commit to building fraternal ties with class-independent socialist parties towards the horizon of a new International.
With every tool available to us, we must erode the political, cultural, and physical hegemony of the U.S. police state. The affirmative votes of DSA-endorsed electeds for military and cop budgets, arms shipments to US vassal states, and the legal condemnation of anti-Zionism, all serve to weaken the socialist project for human emancipation. It is insufficient for socialist legislators to rhetorically criticize excessive military spending. They should be bound by our program to force a genuine public confrontation over the matter by refusing to vote for military, police, national security and intelligence budgets. By building a genuine and disciplined party infrastructure, DSA legislators and councilors would be on the forefront of a nation-wide confrontation with the imperialist state, exposing the interconnectedness of police and military brutality.
As we wage immediate struggles against repressive capitalist institutions like police departments and ICE, a socialist vision for abolitionism requires concrete, programmatic commitment to alternative, radically democratic political institutions, recognizing that abolition is impossible without the working class taking state power into its own hands. The racist militarized border regime will be replaced by an open border, with complete freedom of movement for all peoples and universal citizenship for residents. The armed forces of international capital—the prison industrial complex, police, and the military—will be replaced by a democratic and popular militia, flowing from the working class and the oppressed’s organs of self-defense established under capitalism—defined by the right to bear arms, the sovereignty of the people, universal service and training, and a rigorous community control coexisting with the democratic rights of members.
---
# 6\. Fight the Constitution.
#### We want socialists to fight to overthrow the Constitution.
Civil War-era propaganda aimed at "Copperheads" who opposed the war and promoted immediate peace with the Confederacy. Harper's Weekly, 1863.
Marxist Unity opposes a constitution that was written by a "holy alliance" of capitalists and slavers to make the United States a perpetual oligarchy. There can be no question of submitting to a political order that exists to divide and conquer the working class, that slices up the government and divorces it from the will of the people—that is set in stone and almost impossible to amend. Black people cannot be free under a constitution written by slaveholders; indigenous people cannot win sovereignty under a constitution designed to facilitate their elimination; women cannot be free under a constitution written before they had the right to vote, and working people cannot be free under a constitution that enshrines private property. No one can be truly free if they are forced to bow to a reactionary constitution written by the dead. We want socialist leaders to erode the popular legitimacy of the U.S. Constitution through combative political agitation: never bowing to the old order, and always acknowledging the need for a working class revolution in the United States.
The socialist revolution will not base its legitimacy on the laws of the slaveholder constitution. We will base it on a democratic majority mandate for socialism. This majority may be expressed by the popular vote of an election, but it does not have to take that form if the state represses our ability to contest elections. We stand for the right of the working class to take power by any means necessary. To win a socialist republic, millions of working people must be mobilized in their workplaces, at the ballot box, and in the street. We recognize that the capitalist class relies on the minoritarian rule of the U.S. Constitution, and they will not give it up peacefully. The working class will need armed self-defense to protect itself from the inevitable violence of reaction. We also recognize that we must fight for the democratic rights of enlisted U.S. soldiers. To complete a successful revolution, we must win a decisive section of the military rank and file over to our side.
---
# 7\. Demand a New Republic, Finish Reconstruction.
#### We want to win a plurinational democratic socialist republic in North America.
Konstantin Yuon, **A New Planet,* 1921.
We fight the Constitution to win a democratic socialist republic in North America, to complete the partial overthrow of the constitutional order by the Civil War and the abolition of slavery, and to finish the project of Reconstruction by establishing a multiracial and multinational democracy ruled by the toilers of society. Forged in revolution, this continental republic will strive for the global liberation of all working and oppressed people. We desire the widest possible geographic scope for such a state so that it can most effectively carry out this mission, but we also recognize the principle of national self-determination. All indigenous and colonized peoples must win sovereignty, including those living within the current borders of the United States. No oppressed nation will be incorporated into the socialist republic against its will.
Alongside ecological and economic crises, the minoritarian and sclerotic constitutional order will contribute to massive political crises in the coming decades. This period of crisis will provide our class with an opportunity to topple the old order and convene a revolutionary Popular Assembly: a majoritarian constitutional convention elected by all the people. Under the democratic leadership of a victorious socialist party, the Popular Assembly will proceed to construct the socialist order. It will dismantle the slaveholder constitution and write the founding documents of the new republic.
Immediately upon taking power, socialists will implement a sweeping minimum program to cement working class political rule. We will need to destroy every institution that denies the people an authentic popular democracy, abolishing the Senate, the Electoral College, the Supreme Court, and the independent presidency. We will implement direct, universal, and equal suffrage. Supreme power will rest in the hands of a popular, unicameral assembly elected by proportional representation. Delegates will be recallable at any time and will receive no more than a skilled worker’s wage. All parties that accept the laws of the new revolutionary order will be free to operate. Local organs of government will have a wide degree of autonomy. Unrestricted freedom of speech will be guaranteed to all. To make good on the unfulfilled promise of Reconstruction, our republic will launch social programs of targeted wealth redistribution, striving to eliminate all racial inequalities. The socialist republic will put political power and economic resources into the hands of all racially oppressed and colonized people.
Our broader economic program will include unimpeded labor and union rights, a massive reduction in working hours, and a truly universal welfare state that provides for all citizens from cradle to grave. We will create programs to reduce the power of bureaucrats and teach administrative skills to all workers. Worker self-management will be encouraged to the greatest extent achievable in every industry. Large industry will be placed under collective ownership early on, and we will progressively socialize the rest of the economy as we build our capacity for democratic economic planning. We will pursue crash course programs to address the ecological crisis and establish resilient forms of production, distribution and habitation. Climate refugees will be welcomed into our republic with open arms.
With the shackles of the old order broken, the working class will finally have the power to remake society on egalitarian lines. In cooperation with the global socialist movement, we will move closer with every passing year to a fully liberated classless society: communism. Communism abolishes money, class distinctions, racial discrimination, patriarchy, national boundaries, oppressive gender roles, the mental/manual division of labor, and all other forms of social oppression. It is a society truly based on the principle “from each according to their ability, to each according to their need,” where humanity collectively plans its economic activities through a free association of labor. Communism brings freedom to both society and the individual and will be the true beginning of human history.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Sobre GUM
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/sobre-nosotros/
Last updated: 2026-07-03T19:07:22.000Z
El Grupo de Unidad Marxista es una organización comprometida con la lucha política dentro de los Socialistas Democráticos de América (DSA). Esto significa que somos una facción de DSA, y tenemos como objetivo ser una facción constructiva. Nuestras palabras de 'Unidad Marxista' son aspiracionales: esperamos reunir a los miles de marxistas en DSA en torno a una visión compartida para el futuro de nuestro movimiento. Nuestra facción se basa en siete puntos de unidad que esperamos que DSA eventualmente adopte. Estos principios de lucha son de amplio alcance y todos sirven a un objetivo fundamental--un sueño tácito que llevaremos en el pecho. Es un sueño que ahora comparten silenciosamente millones de personas en este país: el sueño de una revolución socialista en los Estados Unidos.
---
## Siete puntos de unidad
1. [Independencia Política](#1-independencia-pol%C3%ADtica)
2. [Unidad Programática](#2-unidad-program%C3%A1tica)
3. [Disciplina Democrática](#3-disciplina-electoral)
4. [Lucha a Nivel Nacional](#4-lucha-a-nivel-nacional)
5. [Luchar Contra el Estado Policial Imperial](#5-luchar-contra-el-estado-policial-imperial)
6. [Luchar Contra la Constitución](#6-luchar-contra-la-constituci%C3%B3n)
7. [Exigir una Nueva República, Concluir la Reconstrucción](#7-exigir-una-nueva-rep%C3%BAblica-completar-la-reconstrucci%C3%B3n)
---
# **1\. Independencia política.**
### Queremos que DSA se libere del Partido Demócrata y de todas las demás influencias capitalistas.
El Grupo de Unidad Marxista se esfuerza por transformar DSA en un partido socialista independiente. Independencia significa establecer un perfil público distinto para DSA con nuestra propia plataforma, marca y retórica. También significa construir nuestras propias instituciones y nuestra propia disciplina partidista en los pasillos del poder. Mantendremos una confianza inquebrantable en nuestra causa, sin diluir nunca nuestra visión socialista ni subordinar nuestros intereses a los de un partido capitalista.
Juntos, cultivaríamos un mandato popular para la revolución presentando candidatos socialistas militantes para cargos públicos, y al mismo tiempo organizaríamos instituciones de base representando el poder de la clase trabajadora. Crearíamos medios de comunicación afiliados al partido, servicios comunitarios, ayuda mutua y organizaciones defensivas. Dentro del movimiento sindical, lucharíamos contra la burocracia laboral existente, construiríamos sindicatos militantes y democráticos y nos esforzaríamos por ganar estos sindicatos para la política socialista. A medida que nutrimos un vasto ecosistema de instituciones aliadas de los socialistas, nuestro partido socialista se convertirá simultáneamente en un movimiento de masas: un partido-movimiento.
El Grupo de Unidad Marxista pide medidas inmediatas hacia la independencia política. Nos convertimos en un partido actuando como tal. Para nosotros, la "ruptura" con el Partido Demócrata es un proceso continuo que debe comenzar en serio *ahora mismo.* Esto requerirá coraje y fe en nuestra capacidad de tener éxito como movimiento independiente, pero creemos que el movimiento socialista es digno de esa fe. Apoyamos una transición hacia campañas independientes dondequiera que las leyes de acceso a las boletas hagan que esto sea fácilmente alcanzable, incluso si esto causa una disminución temporal en nuestro número de victorias electorales. Construir un electorado socialista distintivo es la tarea primordial de nuestra era política, y las campañas independientes[ ](https://translate.google.com/website?sl=en&tl=es&hl=en&client=webapp&u=https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/05/why-run-independents-a-response-to-collective-power-network/&ref=marxistunity.com)[nos ayudan a cultivar](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/05/why-run-independents-a-response-to-collective-power-network/?ref=marxistunity.com) una lealtad que está completamente desconectada de la lealtad al Partido Demócrata.
---
# **2\. Unidad programática.**
#### Queremos un programa para guiar el trabajo político de DSA.
Para lograr la independencia política, debemos aprender a actuar con mayor unidad y determinación. Queremos una organización disciplinada y autosuficiente que esté dirigida democráticamente por sus miembros de base. Lo que mantiene unidos a los partidos es el acuerdo sobre los objetivos finales, no las cuestiones tácticas menores e inmediatas. A este enfoque se le llama unidad programática: una unidad basada en la lucha común por objetivos políticos esenciales, en lugar de en la pureza dogmática o en consignas vagas que oscurecen nuestros verdaderos objetivos. La aceptación de un programa político con demandas específicas al Estado fue lo que permitió a los primeros partidos socialistas de masas ganarse a millones de trabajadores de sus países. Un programa ofrece una orientación sobre las demandas políticas que establecerán el socialismo y el gobierno democrático de la clase trabajadora, sin imponer una línea táctica limitada.
El Grupo de Unidad Marxista trabaja para que la DSA adopte un programa mínimo-máximo. Consideramos que tanto el programa «mínimo» como el «máximo» son esenciales. El programa mínimo se refiere a la plataforma integral del partido: las políticas que implementará inmediatamente al asumir el poder para consolidar el gobierno político de la clase trabajadora y colocar a la sociedad en el camino de una transición socialista para salir del capitalismo. El programa máximo se refiere a los resultados de este proceso: un mundo libre del mercado, fronteras, clases y todas las demás estructuras opresivas que existen bajo el capitalismo; en una palabra, el comunismo. Centrar la política programática restaurará el sentido de unidad y propósito que disfrutaron los socialistas durante las campañas de Bernie Sanders. Sin embargo, nuestro programa tendrá objetivos mucho más ambiciosos y, en lugar de pertenecer a un solo candidato, será desarrollado democráticamente por todo el movimiento socialista.
Nos gustaría hacer "aceptación de la plataforma" la base para ser miembro de DSA. Aceptar no significa estar de acuerdo con todo lo que hay en la plataforma. Simplemente significa estar dispuesto a luchar por la plataforma como expresión de los objetivos democráticamente elaborados por el movimiento. Los miembros tendrían derecho a organizar cambios específicos en la plataforma en las convenciones. Los miembros tendrán libertad para expresar públicamente su desacuerdo con cualquier decisión mayoritaria, siempre que puedan aceptar la decisión como legítima y ayudar en su implementación. Este es el verdadero significado del centralismo democrático.
---
# **3\. Disciplina electoral.**
### Queremos que “tribunos del pueblo” representen a nuestro partido en cada ámbito de la lucha de clases.
Dondequiera que nos organicemos —en sindicatos de trabajadores y de inquilinos, en las urnas o en movimientos sociales—, los socialistas debemos luchar codo a codo para avanzar el programa de la DSA. Rechazamos los enfoques burocráticos de la disciplina partidaria que intentan controlar minuciosamente las tácticas u ocultar dificultades reales en nuestro movimiento. Nuestra estrategia y nuestras tácticas deben elaborarse democráticamente. Nuestros representantes en todos los ámbitos deben rendir cuentas ante los miembros del partido
La disciplina democrática es absolutamente necesaria en los cargos electos, donde los socialistas suelen actuar tras las líneas enemigas, pero tienen la tarea de representar al socialismo ante la clase trabajadora. Si los candidatos del DSA están verdaderamente dedicados a la política socialista, deberían postularse juntos en una plataforma común del DSA. Incluso si algunos son elegidos según una línea electoral Demócrata, deberían formar sus propios grupos legislativos, votar en bloque y negarse a unirse al grupo legislativo del Partido Demócrata. También deberían hacer campaña a favor de otros socialistas, negarse a respaldar a los no socialistas y aceptar únicamente el salario de un trabajador sindicalizado típico. A través de este tipo de disciplina, nuestros candidatos se elevarán como “tribunos del pueblo”: representantes organizados del movimiento socialista.
En el movimiento obrero, la disciplina democrática exige la coordinación de los miembros de DSA por sector y sindicato. De esta manera, nuestros miembros pueden establecer vínculos prácticos entre las bases, tanto dentro de los lugares de trabajo como entre ellos, coordinando nuestras acciones en los ámbitos económico y político a través de DSA. Creemos que solo un movimiento socialista independiente puede sentar las bases para un movimiento obrero fuerte e independiente, porque solo ese tipo de partido es capaz de resolver democráticamente los diferentes intereses particulares de los trabajadores de distintos sectores, a fin de articular nuestras demandas de manera conjunta como clase.
Los regateos, el neutralismo, y los compromisos cobardes no han logrado realmente hacer avanzar la política socialista. Siempre acogemos la lucha por las reformas políticas y mejoras económicas, pero queremos que los socialistas lleven a cabo esa lucha abiertamente y obtengan concesiones actuando como una oposición intransigente a la clase dominante. En lugar de llegar a acuerdos secretos como socio menor de coalición, los socialistas pueden usar su plataforma para elevar las expectativas de la clase trabajadora y movilizarse para obligar a los capitalistas a hacer concesiones.
---
# **4\. Lucha a nivel nacional.**
### Queremos que los socialistas traten la política estadounidense como una lucha nacional por el poder.
Como socialistas en los Estados Unidos, vivimos en una cultura política reaccionaria que nos anima a pensar en pequeño. A los estadounidenses se les enseña a creer que todos los problemas deben resolverse localmente, y los socialistas a menudo aceptan esta lógica limitándose a campañas locales aisladas, asumiendo que ahí es donde "se produce el verdadero cambio". Sin embargo, a pesar de nuestro atrasado sistema federal, Estados Unidos no es una alianza de ciudades-estado ni una red de 20.000 departamentos de policía. Es un imperio colosal sostenido por el ejército más poderoso de la Tierra. Incluso la policía local está armada, entrenada e integrada por el gobierno federal. Si ignoramos la política nacional, nos volveremos ciegos ante la verdadera naturaleza de nuestros opresores. Ocultaremos su abuso a nivel nacional contra la clase trabajadora, sin mencionar sus crímenes imperialistas en todos los rincones del mundo. La organización local es una base indispensable de nuestro movimiento, pero será infinitamente más efectiva cuando esté conectada a una visión nacional, panamericana y global para la revolución de la clase trabajadora.
El Grupo de Unidad Marxista trabajará para fortalecer a la DSA como organización de alcance nacional. Fomentaremos la colaboración y el debate a nivel nacional a través de los comités nacionales de la DSA y también mediante el desarrollo de una prensa partidaria dinámica. Apoyamos los esfuerzos para que las secciones superen el provincialismo al fomentar la comunicación entre los miembros de distintas secciones, manteniendo los niveles de personal necesarios para que la organización dirigida por los miembros sea posible a nivel nacional —al tiempo que se garantizan salarios y condiciones laborales justas— e integrando a las secciones locales en organizaciones más amplias a nivel estatal. También es por eso que queremos que la DSA presente una lista organizada de candidatos socialistas para competir en la Cámara de Representantes. Al llevar a cabo una agitación basada en principios en los pasillos del Congreso, los socialistas pueden transmitir un mensaje común a todos los rincones del país. Si bien utilizamos al gobierno federal como púlpito, nuestros candidatos también podrían utilizar sus perfiles públicos para apoyar los esfuerzos de organización estatales y municipales. Las luchas federales, estatales y locales (huelgas, campañas electorales y manifestaciones masivas) se fusionarán en un gran movimiento que exige nada menos que una revolución socialista de la clase trabajadora.
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# **5\. Luchar contra el Estado policial imperial.**
### Queremos que los socialistas se enfrenten a las estructuras represivas del Estado capitalista.
Los socialistas estadounidenses tienen un deber de oponerse firmemente al militarismo y la tiranía policial. En el corazón del imperio estadounidense, cualquier programa socialista debe oponerse firmemente al (neo)colonialismo y promover los principios de la autodeterminación nacional: que cada país sea soberano para decidir sus propios asuntos, libre de coacción militar o extorsión económica. Esto significa adoptar una postura derrotista en contra de las guerras de nuestro país, incluidas aquellas libradas por fuerzas aliadas y a través de alianzas militares como la OTAN, así como las crueles sanciones económicas y el respaldo militar y diplomático a la ocupación colonial, la represión policial y la limpieza étnica.
Pero una postura derrotista frente al imperialismo estadounidense debe coexistir con un compromiso revolucionario con la acción internacional políticamente independiente. Una transición duradera al socialismo en un solo país es imposible, y la clase trabajadora sólo puede emanciparse a escala internacional. El declive de gran parte del movimiento socialista en el siglo XX hacia diversas formas de nacionalismo y frentismo popular —desde las «vías nacionales hacia el socialismo» oficiales del comunismo hasta la capitulación anterior de la socialdemocracia ante la «defensa de la nación» durante la Primera Guerra Mundial — ha conducido igualmente a callejones sin salida estratégicos y a derrotas trágicas. Aunque la clase trabajadora de cualquier país debe, ante todo, «contraponerse a su propia burguesía», las reformas nacionales no son más que victorias parciales para una clase internacional.
El movimiento socialista desempeña un papel de vanguardia a la hora de expresar este carácter internacional de diversas maneras, tales como las huelgas internacionales coordinadas —como las históricas huelgas del Primero de Mayo—, la lucha enérgica contra el chovinismo antiinmigrante y la organización para defender y ampliar las libertades civiles de la clase trabajadora migrante. Como objetivo político de largo alcance, nuestro partido debe comprometerse a forjar lazos fraternos con partidos socialistas independientes de clase, con miras a una nueva Internacional.
Con todas las herramientas a nuestro alcance, debemos erosionar la hegemonía política, cultural y física del estado policial estadounidense. Los votos de los representantes electos respaldados por la DSA a favor de los presupuestos militares y policiales, los envíos de armas a los estados vasallos de EE. UU. y la condena legal del antisionismo sirven, en su conjunto, para debilitar el proyecto socialista de emancipación humana. No basta con que los legisladores socialistas critiquen retóricamente el gasto militar excesivo. Deberían forzar una auténtica confrontación pública sobre el asunto negándose a votar a favor de los presupuestos militares, de policía, seguridad nacional e inteligencia. Al construir una infraestructura partidaria genuina y disciplinada, los legisladores y concejales de la DSA estarían a la vanguardia de una confrontación a nivel nacional con el Estado imperialista, poniendo al descubierto la interrelación entre la brutalidad policial y la militar.
Mientras libramos luchas inmediatas contra instituciones capitalistas represivas como los departamentos de policía y ICE, una visión socialista del abolicionismo exige un compromiso concreto y programático con instituciones políticas alternativas y radicalmente democráticas, reconociendo que la abolición es imposible sin que la clase trabajadora tome el poder estatal en sus propias manos. El régimen fronterizo militarizado y racista será reemplazado por una frontera abierta, con total libertad de movimiento para todos los pueblos y la ciudadanía universal para los residentes. Las fuerzas armadas del capital internacional —el complejo industrial carcelario, la policía y el ejército— serán sustituidas por una milicia democrática y popular, surgida de la clase trabajadora y de los órganos de autodefensa de los oprimidos establecidos bajo el capitalismo —definida por el derecho a portar armas, la soberanía del pueblo, servicio y entrenamiento universales, y un control comunitario riguroso que coexista con los derechos democráticos de los miembros.
---
# **6\. Luchar contra la Constitución.**
### Queremos que los socialistas luchen para derrocar la Constitución.
El Grupo de Unidad Marxista se opone a una constitución que fue escrita por una "santa alianza" de capitalistas y esclavistas para hacer de Estados Unidos una oligarquía perpetua. No se puede contemplar someterse a un orden político que existe para dividir y conquistar a la clase trabajadora, que divide al gobierno y lo divorcia de la voluntad del pueblo, que está escrito en piedra y es casi imposible de modificar. Los afroamericanos no pueden ser libres bajo una constitución escrita por esclavistas; los pueblos indígenas no pueden ganar soberanía bajo una constitución diseñada para facilitar su eliminación; las mujeres no pueden ser libres bajo una constitución escrita antes de que tuvieran derecho a votar, y los trabajadores no pueden ser libres bajo una constitución que consagra la propiedad privada. Nadie puede ser verdaderamente libre si se ve obligado a someterse a una constitución reaccionaria escrita por los muertos. Queremos que los líderes socialistas erosionen la legitimidad popular de la Constitución de Estados Unidos a través de una agitación política combativa: sin inclinarse nunca ante el viejo orden y reconociendo siempre la necesidad de una revolución de la clase trabajadora en Estados Unidos.
La revolución socialista no basará su legitimidad en las leyes de la constitución esclavista. La basaremos en un mandato de mayoría democrática para el socialismo. Esta mayoría puede expresarse mediante el voto popular de una elección, pero no tiene que adoptar esa forma si el Estado reprime nuestra capacidad de participar en las elecciones. Defendemos el derecho de la clase trabajadora a tomar el poder por cualquier medio necesario. Para ganar una república socialista, millones de trabajadores deben movilizarse en sus lugares de trabajo, en las urnas y en las calles. Reconocemos que la clase capitalista depende del gobierno minoritario de la Constitución de Estados Unidos y no renunciará a él pacíficamente. La clase trabajadora necesitará autodefensa armada para protegerse de la inevitable violencia de la reacción. También reconocemos que debemos luchar por los derechos democráticos de los soldados estadounidenses alistados. Para completar una revolución exitosa, debemos ganarnos a un sector decisivo de las bases militares.
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# **7\. Exigir una Nueva República, completar la Reconstrucción.**
### Queremos ganar una república socialista democrática plurinacional en América del Norte.
Luchamos contra la Constitución para ganar una república socialista democrática en América del Norte, completar el derrocamiento parcial del orden constitucional por la Guerra Civil y la abolición de la esclavitud, y terminar el proyecto de Reconstrucción estableciendo una democracia multirracial y multinacional gobernada por los trabajadores de la sociedad. Forjada en la revolución, esta república continental luchará por la liberación global de todos los trabajadores y oprimidos. Deseamos el alcance geográfico más amplio posible para dicho Estado para que pueda llevar a cabo esta misión de la manera más efectiva, pero también reconocemos el principio de autodeterminación nacional. Todos los pueblos indígenas y colonizados deben ganar soberanía, incluidos aquellos que viven dentro de las fronteras actuales de Estados Unidos. Ninguna nación oprimida será incorporada a la república socialista en contra de su voluntad.
Además de las crisis ecológicas y económicas, el orden constitucional minoritario y esclerótico contribuirá a crisis políticas masivas en las próximas décadas. Este período de crisis brindará a nuestra clase la oportunidad de derribar el viejo orden y convocar una Asamblea Popular revolucionaria: una convención constitucional mayoritaria elegida por todo el pueblo. Bajo la dirección democrática de un partido socialista victorioso, la Asamblea Popular procederá a construir el orden socialista. Desmantelará la constitución esclavista y redactará los documentos fundacionales de la nueva república.
Inmediatamente después de tomar el poder, los socialistas implementarán un amplio programa mínimo para consolidar el gobierno político de la clase trabajadora. Tendremos que destruir todas las instituciones que niegan al pueblo una auténtica democracia popular, aboliendo el Senado, el Colegio Electoral, la Corte Suprema y la presidencia independiente. Implementaremos el sufragio directo, universal e igualitario. El poder supremo estará en manos de una asamblea popular unicameral elegida por representación proporcional. Los delegados podrán ser revocados en cualquier momento y no recibirán más que el salario de un trabajador calificado. Todos los partidos que acepten las leyes del nuevo orden revolucionario tendrán libertad para operar. Los órganos de gobierno locales tendrán un amplio grado de autonomía. Se garantizará a todos la libertad de expresión irrestricta. Para cumplir la promesa incumplida de la Reconstrucción, nuestra república lanzará programas sociales de redistribución selectiva de la riqueza, esforzándose por eliminar todas las desigualdades raciales. La república socialista pondrá poder político y recursos económicos en manos de todos los pueblos colonizados y oprimidos racialmente.
Nuestro programa económico más amplio incluirá derechos laborales y sindicales sin obstáculos, una reducción masiva de las horas de trabajo y un estado de bienestar verdaderamente universal que atienda a todos los ciudadanos desde la cuna hasta la tumba. Crearemos programas para reducir el poder de los burócratas y enseñaremos habilidades administrativas a todos los trabajadores. Se fomentará la autogestión de los trabajadores en la mayor medida posible en todas las industrias. Las grandes industrias pasarán pronto a ser propiedad colectiva y socializaremos progresivamente el resto de la economía a medida que desarrollemos nuestra capacidad de planificación económica democrática. Llevaremos a cabo programas intensivos para abordar la crisis ecológica y establecer formas resilientes de producción, distribución y habitación. Los refugiados climáticos serán recibidos con brazos abiertos en nuestra república.
Una vez rotas las cadenas del viejo orden, la clase trabajadora finalmente tendrá el poder de rehacer la sociedad a base de líneas igualitarias. En cooperación con el movimiento socialista global, cada año que pase nos acercaremos a una sociedad sin clases totalmente liberada: el comunismo. El comunismo abole el dinero, las distinciones de clases, la discriminación racial, el patriarcado, las fronteras nacionales, los roles de género opresivos, la división mental/manual del trabajo y todas las demás formas de opresión social. Es una sociedad verdaderamente basada en el principio “de cada uno según su capacidad, a cada uno según su necesidad”, donde la humanidad planifica colectivamente sus actividades económicas a través de una libre asociación de trabajadores. El comunismo trae libertad tanto a la sociedad como al individuo y será el verdadero comienzo de la historia humana. Luchamos contra la Constitución para ganar una república socialista democrática en América del Norte, para completar el derrocamiento parcial del orden constitucional provocado por la Guerra Civil y la abolición de la esclavitud, y para concluir el proyecto de la Reconstrucción mediante el establecimiento de una democracia multirracial y multinacional gobernada por los trabajadores de la sociedad. Forjada en la revolución, esta república continental luchará por la liberación global de todos los trabajadores y oprimidos. Deseamos el alcance geográfico más amplio posible para dicho Estado para que pueda llevar a cabo esta misión de la manera más efectiva, pero también reconocemos el principio de autodeterminación nacional. Todos los pueblos indígenas y colonizados deben ganar soberanía, incluidos aquellos que viven dentro de las fronteras actuales de Estados Unidos. Ninguna nación oprimida será incorporada a la república socialista en contra de su voluntad.
Además de las crisis ecológicas y económicas, el orden constitucional minoritario y esclerótico contribuirá a crisis políticas masivas en las próximas décadas. Este período de crisis brindará a nuestra clase la oportunidad de derribar el viejo orden y convocar una Asamblea Popular revolucionaria: una convención constitucional mayoritaria elegida por todo el pueblo. Bajo la dirección democrática de un partido socialista victorioso, la Asamblea Popular procederá a construir el orden socialista. Desmantelará la constitución esclavista y redactará los documentos fundacionales de la nueva república.
Inmediatamente después de tomar el poder, los socialistas implementarán un amplio programa mínimo para consolidar el gobierno político de la clase trabajadora. Tendremos que destruir todas las instituciones que niegan al pueblo una auténtica democracia popular, aboliendo el Senado, el Colegio Electoral, la Corte Suprema y la presidencia independiente. Implementaremos el sufragio directo, universal e igualitario. El poder supremo estará en manos de una asamblea popular unicameral elegida por representación proporcional. Los delegados podrán ser retirados en cualquier momento y no recibirán más que el salario de un trabajador calificado. Todos los partidos que acepten las leyes del nuevo orden revolucionario tendrán libertad para operar. Los órganos de gobierno locales tendrán un amplio grado de autonomía. Se garantizará a todos la libertad de expresión irrestricta. Para cumplir la promesa incumplida de la Reconstrucción, nuestra república lanzará programas sociales de redistribución selectiva de la riqueza, esforzándose por eliminar todas las desigualdades raciales. La república socialista pondrá poder político y recursos económicos en manos de todos los pueblos colonizados y oprimidos racialmente.
Nuestro programa económico más amplio incluirá derechos laborales y sindicales sin obstáculos, una reducción masiva de las horas de trabajo y un estado de bienestar verdaderamente universal que atienda a todos los ciudadanos desde la cuna hasta la tumba. Crearemos programas para reducir el poder de los burócratas y enseñaremos habilidades administrativas a todos los trabajadores. Se fomentará la autogestión de los trabajadores en la mayor medida posible en todas las industrias. Las grandes industrias pasarán pronto a ser propiedad colectiva y socializaremos progresivamente el resto de la economía a medida que desarrollemos nuestra capacidad de planificación económica democrática. Llevaremos a cabo programas intensivos para abordar la crisis ecológica y establecer formas resilientes de producción, distribución y habitación. Los refugiados climáticos serán bienvenidos en nuestra república mientras adoptamos fronteras abiertas y ciudadanía universal para todos los residentes de larga duración.
Una vez rotas las cadenas del viejo orden, la clase trabajadora finalmente tendrá el poder de rehacer la sociedad sobre líneas igualitarias. En cooperación con el movimiento socialista global, cada año que pase nos acercaremos a una sociedad sin clases totalmente liberada: el comunismo. El comunismo abole el dinero, las distinciones de clases, la discriminación racial, el patriarcado, las fronteras nacionales, los roles de género opresivos, la división mental/manual del trabajo y todas las demás formas de opresión social. Es una sociedad verdaderamente basada en el principio “de cada uno según su capacidad, a cada uno según su necesidad”, donde la humanidad planifica colectivamente sus actividades económicas a través de una libre asociación de trabajadores. El comunismo trae libertad tanto a la sociedad como al individuo y será el verdadero comienzo de la historia humana.
### एकता के सात बिंदु
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/hindii-anuvaad-yhaan/
Last updated: 2026-06-03T20:24:59.000Z
एकता के सात बिंदु
**१.** **राजनीतिक स्वतंत्रता।** हम चाहते हैं कि DSA खुद को डेमोक्रेटिक पार्टी और अन्य सभी पूंजीवादी प्रभावों से मुक्त करे।
मार्क्सवादी एकता समूह DSA को एक स्वतंत्र समाजवादी पार्टी में बदलने का प्रयास करता है। स्वतंत्रता का अर्थ है अपने स्वयं के मंच, ब्रांडिंग और बयानबाजी के साथ DSA के लिए एक अलग सार्वजनिक प्रोफ़ाइल स्थापित करना। इसका अर्थ सत्ता के हॉल में अपनी खुद की संस्थाएँ और अपनी खुद की पार्टी अनुशासन बनाना भी है। हम अपने उद्देश्य में अटूट विश्वास के साथ खड़े रहेंगे, कभी भी अपनी समाजवादी दृष्टि को कम नहीं करेंगे या अपने हितों को पूंजीवादी पार्टी के हितों के अधीन नहीं करेंगे।
साथ मिलकर, हम सार्वजनिक पद के लिए उग्र समाजवादी उम्मीदवारों को खड़ा करके क्रांति के लिए एक लोकप्रिय जनादेश तैयार करेंगे - साथ ही साथ मजदूर वर्ग की सत्ता के जमीनी संस्थानों का आयोजन करेंगे। हम पार्टी से जुड़े मीडिया, सामुदायिक सेवाएँ, आपसी सहायता और रक्षात्मक संगठन बनाएंगे। श्रमिक आंदोलन के भीतर, हम मौजूदा श्रम नौकरशाही से लड़ेंगे, उग्र और लोकतांत्रिक यूनियनों का निर्माण करेंगे और इन यूनियनों को समाजवादी राजनीति में लाने का प्रयास करेंगे। जैसे-जैसे हम समाजवादी-संबद्ध संस्थाओं के एक विशाल पारिस्थितिकी तंत्र का पोषण करते हैं, हमारी समाजवादी पार्टी एक साथ एक जन आंदोलन बन जाएगी: एक पार्टी-आंदोलन।
मार्क्सवादी एकता समूह राजनीतिक स्वतंत्रता की दिशा में तत्काल कदम उठाने का आह्वान करता है। हम एक पार्टी की तरह काम करके एक पार्टी बनते हैं। हमारे लिए, डेमोक्रेटिक पार्टी के साथ 'ब्रेक' एक सतत प्रक्रिया है जिसे अभी से गंभीरता से शुरू करना चाहिए। इसके लिए एक स्वतंत्र आंदोलन के रूप में सफल होने की हमारी क्षमता में साहस और विश्वास की आवश्यकता होगी, लेकिन हमारा मानना है कि समाजवादी आंदोलन उस विश्वास के योग्य है। हम स्वतंत्र अभियानों की ओर संक्रमण का समर्थन करते हैं जहाँ भी मतपत्र पहुँच कानून इसे आसानी से प्राप्त करने योग्य बनाते हैं - भले ही इससे हमारी चुनावी जीत की संख्या में अस्थायी कमी आए। एक अलग समाजवादी निर्वाचन क्षेत्र का निर्माण हमारे राजनीतिक युग का सर्वोपरि कार्य है, और स्वतंत्र अभियान हमें ऐसी वफादारी विकसित करने में मदद करते हैं जो डेमोक्रेटिक पार्टी के प्रति वफादारी से पूरी तरह से अलग है।
**२. कार्यक्रमगत एकता।** हम डीएसए के राजनीतिक कार्य का मार्गदर्शन करने के लिए एक कार्यक्रम चाहते हैं।
राजनीतिक स्वतंत्रता प्राप्त करने के लिए, हमें अधिक एकता और दृढ़ संकल्प के साथ कार्य करना सीखना चाहिए। हम एक अनुशासित, आत्मनिर्भर संगठन चाहते हैं जो अपने रैंक और फ़ाइल सदस्यों द्वारा लोकतांत्रिक रूप से चलाया जाता है। पार्टियों को जो एक साथ रखता है वह अंतिम लक्ष्यों पर सहमति है, न कि छोटी तात्कालिक सामरिक चिंताएँ। इस दृष्टिकोण को कार्यक्रमगत एकता कहा जाता है: आवश्यक राजनीतिक लक्ष्यों के लिए आम संघर्ष पर आधारित एकता, न कि हठधर्मी शुद्धता या अस्पष्ट नारों पर जो हमारे वास्तविक उद्देश्यों को अस्पष्ट करते हैं। राज्य पर विशिष्ट मांगों के साथ एक राजनीतिक कार्यक्रम की स्वीकृति ही वह तरीका है जिससे पहली जन समाजवादी पार्टियाँ अपने देशों के लाखों लोगों के मज़दूर वर्ग को जीतने में सफल रहीं। एक कार्यक्रम राजनीतिक माँगों पर दिशा प्रदान करता है जो एक संकीर्ण सामरिक मार्ग निर्धारित किए बिना मज़दूर वर्ग द्वारा समाजवाद और लोकतांत्रिक शासन स्थापित करेगा।
मार्क्सवादी एकता समूह डीएसए के लिए न्यूनतम-अधिकतम कार्यक्रम अपनाने की दिशा में काम करता है। हम 'न्यूनतम' और 'अधिकतम' दोनों कार्यक्रमों को आवश्यक मानते हैं। न्यूनतम कार्यक्रम पार्टी के व्यापक मंच को संदर्भित करता है: सत्ता में आने के तुरंत बाद लागू की जाने वाली नीतियां, ताकि मजदूर वर्ग का राजनीतिक शासन स्थापित किया जा सके और समाज को पूंजीवाद से बाहर निकलकर समाजवादी संक्रमण के रास्ते पर लाया जा सके। अधिकतम कार्यक्रम इस प्रक्रिया के परिणामों को संदर्भित करता है: बाजार, सीमाओं, वर्गों और पूंजीवाद के तहत मौजूद सभी अन्य दमनकारी संरचनाओं से मुक्त दुनिया - एक शब्द में, साम्यवाद। कार्यक्रमिक राजनीति को केंद्र में रखने से एकता और उद्देश्य की भावना बहाल होगी जो सैंडर्स अभियानों के दौरान समाजवादियों को मिली थी। हालाँकि, हमारे कार्यक्रम में बहुत अधिक महत्वाकांक्षी लक्ष्य होंगे, और किसी एक उम्मीदवार से संबंधित होने के बजाय, इसे पूरे समाजवादी आंदोलन द्वारा लोकतांत्रिक रूप से विकसित किया जाएगा।
हम DSA सदस्यता का आधार ‘कार्यक्रम स्वीकृति’ बनाना चाहेंगे। स्वीकृति का मतलब कार्यक्रम में हर चीज से सहमत होना नहीं है। इसका मतलब बस आंदोलन के लोकतांत्रिक रूप से विस्तृत उद्देश्यों की अभिव्यक्ति के रूप में कार्यक्रम के लिए लड़ने के लिए तैयार होना है। सदस्यों को सम्मेलनों में कार्यक्रम में विशिष्ट परिवर्तनों के लिए संगठित होने का अधिकार होगा। सदस्य किसी भी बहुमत के फैसले से सार्वजनिक रूप से असहमति जताने के लिए स्वतंत्र होंगे, बशर्ते वे उस फैसले को वैध मानें और उसके क्रियान्वयन में सहायता करें। लोकतांत्रिक केंद्रीयवाद का यही सही अर्थ है।
**३. चुनावी अनुशासन।** हम चाहते हैं कि समाजवादी चुनावी उम्मीदवार समाजवादी आंदोलन का प्रतिनिधित्व करें।
अनुशासन और सामंजस्य हमारी राजनीतिक स्वतंत्रता का एक और आधार है। यदि DSA उम्मीदवार वास्तव में समाजवादी राजनीति के लिए समर्पित हैं, तो उन्हें एक आम DSA मंच पर एक साथ चलना चाहिए। भले ही कुछ डेमोक्रेटिक बैलट लाइन पर चुने गए हों, उन्हें अपना खुद का विधायी दल बनाना चाहिए, एक ब्लॉक के रूप में वोट करना चाहिए और डेमोक्रेटिक पार्टी के दल में शामिल होने से इनकार करना चाहिए। उन्हें अन्य समाजवादियों के लिए भी प्रचार करना चाहिए, गैर-समाजवादियों का समर्थन करने से इनकार करना चाहिए और केवल एक सामान्य संघ कार्यकर्ता का वेतन लेना चाहिए। इन मुखर राजनीतिक युक्तियों के साथ, हमारे उम्मीदवार 'लोगों के ट्रिब्यून' के रूप में उभरेंगे: समाजवादी आंदोलन के संगठित प्रतिनिधि। DSA सदस्यों ने न्यूयॉर्क राज्य विधानमंडल में इस दृष्टिकोण के कुछ तत्वों को पहले ही लागू कर दिया है, लेकिन हम इसे औपचारिक और सार्वभौमिक बनाना चाहेंगे।
खरीद-फरोख्त और रीढ़विहीन समझौता समाजवादी राजनीति को वास्तव में आगे बढ़ाने में विफल रहे हैं। हम सुधारों के लिए संघर्ष को हमेशा अपनाएंगे, लेकिन हम चाहते हैं कि समाजवादी उस संघर्ष को खुले तौर पर संचालित करें और एक अड़ियल विपक्ष के रूप में कार्य करके रियायतें जीतें। एक जूनियर गठबंधन भागीदार के रूप में गुप्त सौदे करने के बजाय, समाजवादी निर्वाचित लोग अपने मंच का उपयोग करके मजदूर वर्ग की उम्मीदों को बढ़ा सकते हैं और पूंजीपतियों से रियायतें लेने के लिए उसे लामबंद कर सकते हैं।
**४. राष्ट्रव्यापी संघर्ष।** हम चाहते हैं कि समाजवादी अमेरिकी राजनीति को सत्ता के लिए राष्ट्रव्यापी संघर्ष के रूप में देखें।
संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिका में समाजवादी होने के नाते, हम एक प्रतिक्रियावादी राजनीतिक संस्कृति में रहते हैं जो हमें छोटा सोचने के लिए प्रोत्साहित करती है। अमेरिकियों को यह विश्वास करना सिखाया जाता है कि सभी समस्याओं का समाधान स्थानीय स्तर पर किया जाना चाहिए, और समाजवादी अक्सर इस तर्क को अलग-अलग स्थानीय अभियानों तक सीमित करके स्वीकार करते हैं, यह मानते हुए कि यहीं 'वास्तविक परिवर्तन होता है।' फिर भी हमारी पिछड़ी संघीय प्रणाली के बावजूद, संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिका शहर-राज्यों का गठबंधन या 20,000 पुलिस विभागों का नेटवर्क नहीं है। यह पृथ्वी पर सबसे शक्तिशाली सेना द्वारा समर्थित एक विशाल साम्राज्य है। यहां तक कि स्थानीय पुलिस भी संघीय सरकार द्वारा सशस्त्र, प्रशिक्षित और एकीकृत है। यदि हम राष्ट्रीय राजनीति को नजरअंदाज करते हैं, तो हम अपने उत्पीड़कों की वास्तविक प्रकृति के प्रति अंधे हो जाएंगे। हम मजदूर वर्ग के साथ उनके राष्ट्रव्यापी दुर्व्यवहार को छिपा देंगे, दुनिया के हर कोने में उनके साम्राज्यवादी अपराधों का तो जिक्र ही न करें। स्थानीय संगठन हमारे आंदोलन का एक अनिवार्य आधार है, लेकिन यह तब और भी अधिक प्रभावी होगा जब इसे राष्ट्रव्यापी, अखिल अमेरिकी और मजदूर वर्ग की क्रांति के लिए वैश्विक दृष्टिकोण से जोड़ा जाएगा।
मार्क्सवादी एकता समूह डीएसए को एक राष्ट्रव्यापी संगठन के रूप में कार्य करने के लिए बढ़ाने के लिए काम करेगा। हम डीएसए की राष्ट्रीय समितियों के माध्यम से और एक जीवंत पार्टी प्रेस विकसित करके राष्ट्रव्यापी सहयोग और बहस का निर्माण करेंगे। हम अध्यायों के बीच सदस्यों के बीच संचार बढ़ाकर, राष्ट्रीय स्तर पर सदस्य-नेतृत्व वाले संगठन को संभव बनाने के लिए आवश्यक स्टाफिंग स्तरों को बनाए रखते हुए उचित वेतन और काम करने की स्थिति सुनिश्चित करके और स्थानीय लोगों को बड़े राज्य-स्तरीय संगठनों में एकीकृत करके अध्यायों को संकीर्णता से बाहर निकालने के प्रयासों का समर्थन करते हैं। यही कारण है कि हम चाहते हैं कि डीएसए प्रतिनिधि सभा में चुनाव लड़ने के लिए समाजवादी उम्मीदवारों की एक संगठित सूची चलाए। कांग्रेस के हॉल में सैद्धांतिक आंदोलन करके, समाजवादी देश के हर कोने में एक आम संदेश दे सकते हैं। जबकि हम संघीय सरकार को एक धमकाने वाले मंच के रूप में उपयोग करते हैं, हमारे उम्मीदवार राज्य और नगरपालिका के आयोजन प्रयासों का समर्थन करने के लिए अपनी सार्वजनिक प्रोफ़ाइल का भी उपयोग कर सकते हैं। संघीय, राज्य और स्थानीय संघर्ष - हड़तालें, चुनाव अभियान और जन प्रदर्शन - सभी एक साथ मिलकर एक विशाल आंदोलन का रूप ले लेंगे, जो श्रमिक वर्ग, समाजवादी क्रांति से कम कुछ भी नहीं मांगेगा।
**५. शाही पुलिस राज्य से लड़ो।** हम चाहते हैं कि समाजवादी पूंजीवादी राज्य की दमनकारी संरचनाओं को चुनौती दें।
अमेरिकी समाजवादियों का कर्तव्य है कि वे सैन्यवाद और पुलिस अत्याचार के खिलाफ मजबूती से खड़े हों, जिसकी शुरुआत हमारे अपने राज्य के साम्राज्यवादी डिजाइनों के स्पष्ट विरोध से हो। अमेरिकी साम्राज्य के गर्भ में, किसी भी समाजवादी कार्यक्रम को (नव) उपनिवेशवाद का दृढ़ता से विरोध करना चाहिए और राष्ट्रीय आत्मनिर्णय के सिद्धांतों को आगे बढ़ाना चाहिए - कि प्रत्येक देश को अपने मामलों को तय करने के लिए संप्रभु होना चाहिए, सैन्य दबाव या आर्थिक जबरन वसूली से मुक्त होना चाहिए। इसका मतलब है कि हमारे देश के युद्धों के खिलाफ पराजयवादी रुख अपनाना, जिसमें प्रॉक्सी द्वारा और नाटो जैसे सैन्य गठबंधनों के माध्यम से लगे युद्ध, साथ ही क्रूर आर्थिक प्रतिबंध और औपनिवेशिक कब्जे, पुलिस दमन और जातीय सफाई के लिए सैन्य और कूटनीतिक कवर शामिल हैं।
लेकिन अमेरिकी साम्राज्यवाद के खिलाफ पराजयवादी रुख राजनीतिक रूप से स्वतंत्र अंतरराष्ट्रीय कार्रवाई के लिए क्रांतिकारी प्रतिबद्धता के साथ मौजूद होना चाहिए। किसी भी देश में समाजवाद की ओर स्थायी संक्रमण असंभव है, और मजदूर वर्ग केवल अंतरराष्ट्रीय स्तर पर ही खुद को मुक्त कर सकता है। 20वीं सदी में समाजवादी आंदोलन के अधिकांश हिस्से का राष्ट्रवाद और लोकप्रिय मोर्चे के विभिन्न रूपों में पतन - आधिकारिक कम्युनिस्ट 'समाजवाद के लिए राष्ट्रीय मार्ग' से लेकर प्रथम विश्व युद्ध के दौरान 'राष्ट्र की रक्षा' के लिए सामाजिक लोकतंत्र के पहले आत्मसमर्पण तक - समान रूप से रणनीतिक गतिरोध और दुखद हार का कारण बना है। हालाँकि किसी भी देश के मजदूर वर्ग को सबसे पहले 'अपने स्वयं के पूंजीपति वर्ग के साथ समझौता करना' चाहिए, लेकिन घरेलू सुधार अंतरराष्ट्रीय वर्ग के लिए केवल आंशिक जीत हैं।
समाजवादी आंदोलन कई तरीकों से इस अंतर्राष्ट्रीय चरित्र को व्यक्त करने में अग्रणी भूमिका निभाता है, जैसे कि समन्वित अंतर्राष्ट्रीय हड़ताल कार्रवाई - ऐतिहासिक मई दिवस की हड़तालों की तरह -, आप्रवासी विरोधी कट्टरता का जमकर मुकाबला करना, और प्रवासी श्रमिक वर्ग की नागरिक स्वतंत्रता की रक्षा और विस्तार के लिए संगठित होना। अपने दूरगामी राजनीतिक उद्देश्य के रूप में, हमारी पार्टी को एक नए अंतर्राष्ट्रीय क्षितिज की ओर वर्ग-स्वतंत्र समाजवादी दलों के साथ भाईचारे के संबंध बनाने के लिए प्रतिबद्ध होना चाहिए।
हमारे पास उपलब्ध हर उपकरण के साथ, हमें अमेरिकी पुलिस राज्य के राजनीतिक, सांस्कृतिक और भौतिक आधिपत्य को खत्म करना चाहिए। सैन्य और पुलिस बजट, अमेरिकी जागीरदार राज्यों को हथियारों की खेप, और ज़ायोनीवाद-विरोध की कानूनी निंदा के लिए डीएसए-समर्थित निर्वाचितों के सकारात्मक वोट, सभी मानव मुक्ति के लिए समाजवादी परियोजना को कमजोर करने का काम करते हैं। समाजवादी विधायकों के लिए अत्यधिक सैन्य खर्च की बयानबाजी करना पर्याप्त नहीं है। उन्हें हमारे कार्यक्रम से बाध्य होना चाहिए ताकि वे सैन्य, पुलिस, राष्ट्रीय सुरक्षा और खुफिया बजट के लिए वोट देने से इनकार करके इस मामले पर एक वास्तविक सार्वजनिक टकराव को मजबूर कर सकें। एक वास्तविक और अनुशासित पार्टी बुनियादी ढांचे का निर्माण करके, डीएसए विधायक और पार्षद साम्राज्यवादी राज्य के साथ राष्ट्रव्यापी टकराव के मोर्चे पर सबसे आगे होंगे, जो पुलिस और सैन्य क्रूरता के अंतर्संबंध को उजागर करेगा।
जबकि हम पुलिस विभागों और आईसीई जैसी दमनकारी पूंजीवादी संस्थाओं के खिलाफ तत्काल संघर्ष करते हैं, उन्मूलनवाद के लिए एक समाजवादी दृष्टिकोण के लिए वैकल्पिक, मौलिक रूप से लोकतांत्रिक राजनीतिक संस्थाओं के लिए ठोस, कार्यक्रमिक प्रतिबद्धता की आवश्यकता होती है, यह पहचानते हुए कि श्रमिक वर्ग द्वारा राज्य की सत्ता को अपने हाथों में लिए बिना उन्मूलन असंभव है। नस्लवादी सैन्यीकृत सीमा व्यवस्था को एक खुली सीमा से बदल दिया जाएगा, जिसमें सभी लोगों के लिए आवागमन की पूरी स्वतंत्रता और निवासियों के लिए सार्वभौमिक नागरिकता होगी। अंतर्राष्ट्रीय पूंजी के सशस्त्र बलों - जेल औद्योगिक परिसर, पुलिस और सेना - को एक लोकतांत्रिक और लोकप्रिय मिलिशिया द्वारा प्रतिस्थापित किया जाएगा, जो पूंजीवाद के तहत स्थापित श्रमिक वर्ग और उत्पीड़ितों के आत्मरक्षा के अंगों से निकलेगा - जिसे हथियार रखने के अधिकार, लोगों की संप्रभुता, सार्वभौमिक सेवा और प्रशिक्षण, और सदस्यों के लोकतांत्रिक अधिकारों के साथ सह-अस्तित्व में एक कठोर सामुदायिक नियंत्रण द्वारा परिभाषित किया जाएगा।
**६. संविधान के खिलाफ लड़ो।** हम चाहते हैं कि समाजवादी संविधान को उखाड़ फेंकने के लिए लड़ें।
मार्क्सवादी एकता ऐसे संविधान का विरोध करती है जिसे पूंजीपतियों और दास व्यापारियों के एक 'पवित्र गठबंधन' ने संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिका को एक स्थायी कुलीनतंत्र बनाने के लिए लिखा था। ऐसी राजनीतिक व्यवस्था के आगे झुकने का कोई सवाल ही नहीं उठता जो मज़दूर वर्ग को विभाजित करने और जीतने के लिए मौजूद है, जो सरकार को काटती है और उसे लोगों की इच्छा से अलग करती है - जो पत्थर की लकीर है और जिसे संशोधित करना लगभग असंभव है। गुलाम मालिकों द्वारा लिखे गए संविधान के तहत काले लोग स्वतंत्र नहीं हो सकते; स्वदेशी लोग उनके उन्मूलन की सुविधा के लिए बनाए गए संविधान के तहत संप्रभुता नहीं जीत सकते; महिलाएँ वोट देने के अधिकार से पहले लिखे गए संविधान के तहत स्वतंत्र नहीं हो सकतीं, और कामकाजी लोग ऐसे संविधान के तहत स्वतंत्र नहीं हो सकते जो निजी संपत्ति को सुनिश्चित करता है। कोई भी व्यक्ति वास्तव में स्वतंत्र नहीं हो सकता अगर उसे मृतकों द्वारा लिखे गए प्रतिक्रियावादी संविधान के आगे झुकने के लिए मजबूर किया जाए। हम चाहते हैं कि समाजवादी नेता जुझारू राजनीतिक आंदोलन के माध्यम से अमेरिकी संविधान की लोकप्रिय वैधता को नष्ट कर दें: कभी भी पुरानी व्यवस्था के आगे न झुकें, और हमेशा संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिका में मजदूर वर्ग की क्रांति की आवश्यकता को स्वीकार करें।
समाजवादी क्रांति अपनी वैधता को गुलामी के संविधान के कानूनों पर आधारित नहीं करेगी। हम इसे समाजवाद के लिए लोकतांत्रिक बहुमत के जनादेश पर आधारित करेंगे। यह बहुमत चुनाव के लोकप्रिय वोट द्वारा व्यक्त किया जा सकता है, लेकिन अगर राज्य चुनाव लड़ने की हमारी क्षमता को दबाता है तो इसे उस रूप में लेने की आवश्यकता नहीं है। हम मजदूर वर्ग के किसी भी तरह से सत्ता हासिल करने के अधिकार के लिए खड़े हैं। समाजवादी गणराज्य जीतने के लिए, लाखों कामकाजी लोगों को अपने कार्यस्थलों, मतपेटी और सड़क पर लामबंद होना चाहिए। हम मानते हैं कि पूंजीपति वर्ग अमेरिकी संविधान के अल्पसंख्यक शासन पर निर्भर करता है, और वे इसे शांतिपूर्वक नहीं छोड़ेंगे। प्रतिक्रिया की अपरिहार्य हिंसा से खुद को बचाने के लिए मजदूर वर्ग को सशस्त्र आत्मरक्षा की आवश्यकता होगी। हम यह भी मानते हैं कि हमें भर्ती किए गए अमेरिकी सैनिकों के लोकतांत्रिक अधिकारों के लिए लड़ना चाहिए। एक सफल क्रांति को पूरा करने के लिए, हमें सैन्य रैंक और फ़ाइल के एक निर्णायक हिस्से को अपने पक्ष में जीतना होगा।
**७. एक नए गणराज्य की मांग करें, पुनर्निर्माण को पूरा करें।** हम उत्तरी अमेरिका में एक बहुराष्ट्रीय लोकतांत्रिक समाजवादी गणराज्य जीतना चाहते हैं।
हम उत्तरी अमेरिका में एक लोकतांत्रिक समाजवादी गणराज्य जीतने के लिए संविधान से लड़ते हैं, गृहयुद्ध और गुलामी के उन्मूलन द्वारा संवैधानिक व्यवस्था को आंशिक रूप से उखाड़ फेंकने के लिए, और समाज के मेहनतकशों द्वारा शासित एक बहुजातीय और बहुराष्ट्रीय लोकतंत्र की स्थापना करके पुनर्निर्माण की परियोजना को पूरा करने के लिए। क्रांति में गढ़ा गया, यह महाद्वीपीय गणराज्य सभी कामकाजी और उत्पीड़ित लोगों की वैश्विक मुक्ति के लिए प्रयास करेगा। हम ऐसे राज्य के लिए सबसे व्यापक भौगोलिक दायरे की इच्छा रखते हैं ताकि यह इस मिशन को सबसे प्रभावी ढंग से पूरा कर सके, लेकिन हम राष्ट्रीय आत्मनिर्णय के सिद्धांत को भी पहचानते हैं। सभी स्वदेशी और उपनिवेशित लोगों को संप्रभुता जीतनी चाहिए, जिसमें संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिका की वर्तमान सीमाओं के भीतर रहने वाले लोग भी शामिल हैं। किसी भी उत्पीड़ित राष्ट्र को उसकी इच्छा के विरुद्ध समाजवादी गणराज्य में शामिल नहीं किया जाएगा।
पारिस्थितिक और आर्थिक संकटों के साथ-साथ, अल्पसंख्यक और कठोर संवैधानिक व्यवस्था आने वाले दशकों में बड़े पैमाने पर राजनीतिक संकटों में योगदान देगी। संकट का यह दौर हमारे वर्ग को पुरानी व्यवस्था को उखाड़ फेंकने और एक क्रांतिकारी लोकप्रिय सभा बुलाने का अवसर प्रदान करेगा: सभी लोगों द्वारा निर्वाचित एक बहुमतवादी संवैधानिक सम्मेलन। एक विजयी समाजवादी पार्टी के लोकतांत्रिक नेतृत्व में, लोकप्रिय सभा समाजवादी व्यवस्था का निर्माण करने के लिए आगे बढ़ेगी। यह दास-स्वामी संविधान को नष्ट कर देगी और नए गणराज्य के संस्थापक दस्तावेज़ लिखेगी।
सत्ता संभालने के तुरंत बाद, समाजवादी मजदूर वर्ग के राजनीतिक शासन को मजबूत करने के लिए एक व्यापक न्यूनतम कार्यक्रम लागू करेंगे। हमें हर उस संस्था को नष्ट करना होगा जो लोगों को एक प्रामाणिक लोकप्रिय लोकतंत्र से वंचित करती है, सीनेट, इलेक्टोरल कॉलेज, सुप्रीम कोर्ट और स्वतंत्र राष्ट्रपति पद को समाप्त करना होगा। हम प्रत्यक्ष, सार्वभौमिक और समान मताधिकार लागू करेंगे। सर्वोच्च शक्ति आनुपातिक प्रतिनिधित्व द्वारा निर्वाचित एक लोकप्रिय, एकसदनीय सभा के हाथों में रहेगी। प्रतिनिधियों को किसी भी समय वापस बुलाया जा सकेगा और उन्हें एक कुशल श्रमिक के वेतन से अधिक कुछ नहीं मिलेगा। नई क्रांतिकारी व्यवस्था के कानूनों को स्वीकार करने वाली सभी पार्टियाँ काम करने के लिए स्वतंत्र होंगी। सरकार के स्थानीय अंगों को व्यापक स्वायत्तता प्राप्त होगी। सभी को अभिव्यक्ति की अप्रतिबंधित स्वतंत्रता की गारंटी दी जाएगी। पुनर्निर्माण के अधूरे वादे को पूरा करने के लिए, हमारा गणतंत्र लक्षित धन पुनर्वितरण के सामाजिक कार्यक्रम शुरू करेगा, जो सभी नस्लीय असमानताओं को खत्म करने का प्रयास करेगा। समाजवादी गणतंत्र राजनीतिक शक्ति और आर्थिक संसाधनों को सभी नस्लीय रूप से उत्पीड़ित और उपनिवेशित लोगों के हाथों में रखेगा।
हमारे व्यापक आर्थिक कार्यक्रम में निर्बाध श्रम और संघ अधिकार, काम के घंटों में भारी कमी और वास्तव में सार्वभौमिक कल्याणकारी राज्य शामिल होगा जो सभी नागरिकों को जन्म से लेकर मृत्यु तक प्रदान करता है। हम नौकरशाहों की शक्ति को कम करने और सभी श्रमिकों को प्रशासनिक कौशल सिखाने के लिए कार्यक्रम बनाएंगे। हर उद्योग में अधिकतम संभव सीमा तक श्रमिक स्व-प्रबंधन को प्रोत्साहित किया जाएगा। बड़े उद्योग को शुरू में सामूहिक स्वामित्व में रखा जाएगा, और हम लोकतांत्रिक आर्थिक नियोजन के लिए अपनी क्षमता का निर्माण करते हुए अर्थव्यवस्था के बाकी हिस्सों को उत्तरोत्तर सामाजिक बनाएंगे। हम पारिस्थितिक संकट को संबोधित करने और उत्पादन, वितरण और आवास के लचीले रूपों को स्थापित करने के लिए क्रैश कोर्स कार्यक्रमों का पालन करेंगे। जलवायु शरणार्थियों का हमारे गणतंत्र में खुले हाथों से स्वागत किया जाएगा।
पुरानी व्यवस्था की बेड़ियाँ टूटने के साथ, मज़दूर वर्ग के पास आखिरकार समाज को समतावादी आधार पर फिर से बनाने की शक्ति होगी। वैश्विक समाजवादी आंदोलन के सहयोग से, हम हर गुज़रते साल के साथ एक पूरी तरह से मुक्त वर्गहीन समाज के करीब पहुँचेंगे: साम्यवाद। साम्यवाद पैसे, वर्ग भेद, नस्लीय भेदभाव, पितृसत्ता, राष्ट्रीय सीमाओं, दमनकारी लिंग भूमिकाओं, श्रम के मानसिक/शारीरिक विभाजन और सामाजिक उत्पीड़न के सभी अन्य रूपों को समाप्त करता है। यह वास्तव में "प्रत्येक से उसकी क्षमता के अनुसार, प्रत्येक को उसकी ज़रूरत के अनुसार" सिद्धांत पर आधारित समाज है, जहाँ मानवता सामूहिक रूप से श्रम के एक स्वतंत्र संघ के माध्यम से अपनी आर्थिक गतिविधियों की योजना बनाती है। साम्यवाद समाज और व्यक्ति दोनों को स्वतंत्रता देता है और मानव इतिहास की सच्ची शुरुआत होगी।
### एकताका सात बुँदाहरू
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Last updated: 2026-06-03T20:26:56.000Z
**१. राजनीतिक स्वतन्त्रता। हामी चाहन्छौं कि DSA ले आफूलाई डेमोक्रेटिक पार्टी र अन्य सबै पूँजीवादी प्रभावहरूबाट मुक्त गरोस्।**
मार्क्सवादी एकता समूहले DSA लाई एक स्वतन्त्र समाजवादी पार्टीमा रूपान्तरण गर्न प्रयासरत छ। स्वतन्त्रता भनेको हाम्रो आफ्नै प्लेटफर्म, ब्रान्डिङ र बयानबाजीको साथ DSA को लागि एक विशिष्ट सार्वजनिक प्रोफाइल स्थापना गर्नु हो। यसको अर्थ शक्तिको हलमा हाम्रा आफ्नै संस्थाहरू र हाम्रो आफ्नै पार्टी अनुशासन निर्माण गर्नु पनि हो। हामी हाम्रो उद्देश्यमा अटल विश्वासका साथ उभिनेछौं, हाम्रो समाजवादी दृष्टिकोणलाई कहिल्यै कमजोर पार्नेछैनौं वा हाम्रो हितलाई पूँजीवादी पार्टीको अधीनमा राख्नेछैनौं।
सँगै, हामी सार्वजनिक पदका लागि लडाकू समाजवादी उम्मेदवारहरू चलाएर क्रान्तिको लागि लोकप्रिय जनादेश खेती गर्नेछौं - जबकि एकै साथ श्रमिक वर्ग शक्तिको तल्लो स्तरका संस्थाहरूलाई व्यवस्थित गर्नेछौं। हामी पार्टी-सम्बद्ध मिडिया, सामुदायिक सेवाहरू, पारस्परिक सहायता र रक्षात्मक संगठनहरू सिर्जना गर्नेछौं। श्रम आन्दोलन भित्र, हामी अवस्थित श्रम नोकरशाहीसँग लड्नेछौं, लडाकू र लोकतान्त्रिक युनियनहरू निर्माण गर्नेछौं, र यी युनियनहरूलाई समाजवादी राजनीतिमा जित्न प्रयास गर्नेछौं। जब हामी समाजवादी-सम्बद्ध संस्थाहरूको विशाल पारिस्थितिक प्रणालीलाई पोषण गर्छौं, हाम्रो समाजवादी पार्टी एकै साथ एक जनआन्दोलन बन्नेछ: एक पार्टी-आन्दोलन।
मार्क्सवादी एकता समूहले राजनीतिक स्वतन्त्रतातर्फ तुरुन्तै कदम चाल्न आह्वान गर्दछ। हामी एक जस्तै काम गरेर एउटा पार्टी बन्छौं। हाम्रो लागि, डेमोक्र्याटिक पार्टीसँगको 'ब्रेक' एक निरन्तर प्रक्रिया हो जुन अहिले नै गम्भीरतापूर्वक सुरु हुनुपर्छ। यसका लागि स्वतन्त्र आन्दोलनको रूपमा सफल हुन हाम्रो क्षमतामा साहस र विश्वास चाहिन्छ, तर हामी विश्वास गर्छौं कि समाजवादी आन्दोलन त्यो विश्वासको योग्य छ। हामी स्वतन्त्र अभियानहरूतर्फ संक्रमणलाई समर्थन गर्छौं जहाँ मतपत्र पहुँच कानूनहरूले यसलाई सजिलै प्राप्त गर्न सक्छन् - यदि यसले हाम्रो चुनावी विजयको संख्यामा अस्थायी कमी ल्याउँछ भने पनि। एक विशिष्ट समाजवादी निर्वाचन क्षेत्र निर्माण गर्नु हाम्रो राजनीतिक युगको सर्वोपरि कार्य हो, र स्वतन्त्र अभियानहरूले हामीलाई डेमोक्र्याटिक पार्टीप्रतिको वफादारीबाट पूर्ण रूपमा विच्छेद भएको वफादारी खेती गर्न मद्दत गर्दछ।
**२. कार्यक्रमगत एकता। हामी DSA को राजनीतिक कार्यलाई निर्देशित गर्ने कार्यक्रम चाहन्छौं।**
राजनीतिक स्वतन्त्रता प्राप्त गर्न, हामीले ठूलो एकता र दृढ संकल्पका साथ काम गर्न सिक्नुपर्छ। हामी एक अनुशासित, आत्मनिर्भर संगठन चाहन्छौं जुन यसको पद र फाइल सदस्यहरूद्वारा लोकतान्त्रिक रूपमा सञ्चालित हुन्छ। पार्टीहरूलाई एकसाथ राख्ने कुरा भनेको अन्तिम लक्ष्यहरूमा सहमति हो, सानातिना तत्काल रणनीतिक चिन्ताहरू होइन। यो दृष्टिकोणलाई कार्यक्रमगत एकता भनिन्छ: हाम्रो वास्तविक उद्देश्यहरूलाई अस्पष्ट पार्ने कट्टरपन्थी शुद्धता वा अस्पष्ट नाराहरूमा भन्दा आवश्यक राजनीतिक लक्ष्यहरूको लागि साझा संघर्षमा आधारित एकता। राज्यमा विशिष्ट मागहरू सहितको राजनीतिक कार्यक्रमको स्वीकृति नै पहिलो सामूहिक समाजवादी पार्टीहरूले आफ्ना देशहरूको श्रमिक वर्गलाई लाखौंले जित्न सफल भए। कार्यक्रमले संकीर्ण रणनीतिक मार्ग तोके बिना श्रमिक वर्गद्वारा समाजवाद र लोकतान्त्रिक शासन स्थापित गर्ने राजनीतिक मागहरूमा दिशा प्रदान गर्दछ।
मार्क्सवादी एकता समूह DSA को लागि न्यूनतम-अधिकतम कार्यक्रम अपनाउने दिशामा काम गर्दछ। हामी 'न्यूनतम' र 'अधिकतम' कार्यक्रम दुवैलाई आवश्यक मान्छौं। न्यूनतम कार्यक्रमले पार्टीको व्यापक प्लेटफर्मलाई जनाउँछ: श्रमिक वर्गको राजनीतिक शासन स्थापना गर्न र समाजलाई पूँजीवादबाट बाहिर समाजवादी संक्रमणको बाटोमा राख्न सत्ता लिँदा तुरुन्तै लागू गर्ने नीतिहरू। अधिकतम कार्यक्रमले यस प्रक्रियाको नतिजालाई जनाउँछ: बजार, सीमा, वर्ग र पूँजीवाद अन्तर्गत अवस्थित अन्य सबै दमनकारी संरचनाहरूबाट मुक्त संसार - एक शब्दमा, साम्यवाद। कार्यक्रमगत राजनीतिलाई केन्द्रित गर्नाले स्यान्डर्स अभियानको समयमा समाजवादीहरूले भोगेको एकता र उद्देश्यको भावना पुनर्स्थापित हुनेछ। यद्यपि, हाम्रो कार्यक्रममा धेरै महत्वाकांक्षी उद्देश्यहरू हुनेछन्, र एकल उम्मेदवारको स्वामित्वको सट्टा, यो सम्पूर्ण समाजवादी आन्दोलनद्वारा लोकतान्त्रिक रूपमा विकसित हुनेछ।
हामी 'कार्यक्रम स्वीकृति' लाई DSA सदस्यताको आधार बनाउन चाहन्छौं। स्वीकृतिको अर्थ कार्यक्रममा भएका सबै कुराहरूसँग सहमत हुनु होइन। यसको अर्थ केवल आन्दोलनको लोकतान्त्रिक रूपमा विस्तारित उद्देश्यहरूको अभिव्यक्तिको रूपमा कार्यक्रमको लागि लड्न इच्छुक हुनु हो। सदस्यहरूलाई अधिवेशनहरूमा कार्यक्रममा विशिष्ट परिवर्तनहरूको लागि संगठित गर्ने अधिकार हुनेछ। सदस्यहरू कुनै पनि बहुमतको निर्णयसँग सार्वजनिक रूपमा असहमति व्यक्त गर्न स्वतन्त्र हुनेछन्, जबसम्म तिनीहरूले निर्णयलाई वैधको रूपमा स्वीकार गर्न सक्छन् र यसको कार्यान्वयनमा सहयोग गर्न सक्छन्। यो नै जनवादी केन्द्रीयताको वास्तविक अर्थ हो।
**३. चुनावी अनुशासन। हामी चाहन्छौं कि समाजवादी चुनावी उम्मेदवारहरूले समाजवादी आन्दोलनको प्रतिनिधित्व गरून्।**
अनुशासन र एकता हाम्रो राजनीतिक स्वतन्त्रताको अर्को आधार हो। यदि DSA उम्मेदवारहरू साँच्चै समाजवादी राजनीतिमा समर्पित छन् भने, तिनीहरूले साझा DSA प्लेटफर्ममा सँगै दौडनु पर्छ। यदि कोही डेमोक्र्याटिक मतपत्रमा निर्वाचित भए पनि, तिनीहरूले आफ्नै विधायी ककसहरू बनाउनु पर्छ, ब्लकको रूपमा मतदान गर्नुपर्छ, र डेमोक्र्याटिक पार्टी ककसमा सामेल हुन अस्वीकार गर्नुपर्छ। तिनीहरूले अन्य समाजवादीहरूको लागि पनि प्रचार गर्नुपर्छ, गैर-समाजवादीहरूलाई समर्थन गर्न अस्वीकार गर्नुपर्छ, र एक विशिष्ट युनियन कार्यकर्ताको ज्याला मात्र लिनुपर्छ। यी दृढ राजनीतिक रणनीतिहरूको साथ, हाम्रा उम्मेदवारहरू 'जनताको श्रद्धांजलि' को रूपमा उठ्नेछन्: समाजवादी आन्दोलनका संगठित प्रतिनिधिहरू। DSA सदस्यहरूले पहिले नै न्यूयोर्क राज्य व्यवस्थापिकामा यस दृष्टिकोणका केही तत्वहरू लागू गरिसकेका छन्, तर हामी यसलाई औपचारिक र विश्वव्यापी बनाउन चाहन्छौं।
घोडा व्यापार र मेरुदण्डविहीन सम्झौताले समाजवादी राजनीतिलाई साँच्चै अगाडि बढाउन असफल भएको छ। हामी सधैं सुधारको लागि संघर्षलाई अँगाल्नेछौं, तर हामी चाहन्छौं कि समाजवादीहरूले त्यो संघर्षलाई खुला रूपमा सञ्चालन गरून् र एक अविवेकी विपक्षीको रूपमा काम गरेर रियायतहरू जितून्। कनिष्ठ गठबन्धन साझेदारको रूपमा पछाडिको सम्झौताहरू कटौती गर्नुको सट्टा, समाजवादी निर्वाचितहरूले आफ्नो प्लेटफर्म प्रयोग गरेर श्रमिक वर्गको अपेक्षाहरू बढाउन र पूँजीपतिहरूबाट जबरजस्ती सहुलियतहरू प्राप्त गर्न परिचालन गर्न सक्छन्।
**४. राष्ट्रव्यापी संघर्ष। हामी चाहन्छौं कि समाजवादीहरूले अमेरिकी राजनीतिलाई शक्तिको लागि राष्ट्रव्यापी संघर्षको रूपमा व्यवहार गरून्।**
संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिकामा समाजवादीहरूको रूपमा, हामी प्रतिक्रियावादी राजनीतिक संस्कृतिमा बाँचिरहेका छौं जसले हामीलाई सानो सोच्न प्रोत्साहित गर्दछ। अमेरिकीहरूलाई सबै समस्याहरू स्थानीय रूपमा समाधान गरिनुपर्छ भन्ने विश्वास गर्न सिकाइन्छ, र समाजवादीहरूले प्रायः आफूलाई पृथक स्थानीय अभियानहरूमा सीमित गरेर यो तर्क स्वीकार गर्छन्, मानौं कि यो त्यहीं हो जहाँ 'वास्तविक परिवर्तन हुन्छ'। तर हाम्रो पछाडि परेको संघीय प्रणालीको बावजुद, संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिका शहर-राज्यहरूको गठबन्धन वा २०,००० प्रहरी विभागहरूको नेटवर्क होइन। यो पृथ्वीको सबैभन्दा शक्तिशाली सेनाद्वारा समर्थित एक विशाल साम्राज्य हो। स्थानीय प्रहरीहरू पनि सशस्त्र, प्रशिक्षित र संघीय सरकारद्वारा एकीकृत छन्। यदि हामीले राष्ट्रिय राजनीतिलाई बेवास्ता गर्यौं भने, हामी हाम्रा उत्पीडकहरूको वास्तविक प्रकृतिप्रति अन्धा हुनेछौं। हामी श्रमिक वर्गमाथि उनीहरूको राष्ट्रव्यापी दुर्व्यवहारलाई अस्पष्ट पार्नेछौं, संसारको हरेक कुनामा उनीहरूको साम्राज्यवादी अपराधहरू उल्लेख नगरौं। स्थानीय संगठन हाम्रो आन्दोलनको एक अपरिहार्य आधार हो, तर जब यो श्रमिक वर्ग क्रान्तिको लागि राष्ट्रव्यापी, प्यान-अमेरिकी र विश्वव्यापी दृष्टिकोणसँग जोडिएको हुन्छ तब यो असीम रूपमा बढी प्रभावकारी हुनेछ।
मार्क्सवादी एकता समूहले DSA लाई राष्ट्रव्यापी संगठनको रूपमा कार्य गर्न बढाउन काम गर्नेछ। हामी DSA का राष्ट्रिय समितिहरू मार्फत र एक जीवन्त पार्टी प्रेस विकास गरेर राष्ट्रव्यापी सहकार्य र बहस निर्माण गर्नेछौं। हामी अध्याय रेखाहरूमा सदस्य सञ्चार बढाएर, राष्ट्रिय स्तरमा सदस्य-नेतृत्वको संगठन सम्भव बनाउन आवश्यक कर्मचारी स्तरहरू कायम राखेर, र स्थानीयहरूलाई ठूला राज्य-स्तरीय संगठनहरूमा एकीकृत गरेर अध्यायहरूलाई संकीर्णताबाट बाहिर निकाल्ने प्रयासहरूलाई समर्थन गर्छौं। यसैकारण हामी DSA ले प्रतिनिधि सभामा प्रतिस्पर्धा गर्न समाजवादी उम्मेदवारहरूको संगठित स्लेट चलाउन चाहन्छौं। कांग्रेसको हलमा सिद्धान्तगत आन्दोलन सञ्चालन गरेर, समाजवादीहरूले देशको हरेक कुनामा साझा सन्देश दिन सक्छन्। जबकि हामी संघीय सरकारलाई धम्की दिने मंचको रूपमा प्रयोग गर्छौं, हाम्रा उम्मेदवारहरूले राज्य र नगरपालिका संगठन प्रयासहरूलाई समर्थन गर्न आफ्नो सार्वजनिक प्रोफाइलहरू पनि प्रयोग गर्न सक्छन्। संघीय, राज्य र स्थानीय संघर्षहरू - हडताल, चुनावी अभियान र आम प्रदर्शनहरू - सबै एकै ठाउँमा मिलेर एउटा महान् आन्दोलनमा परिणत हुनेछन् जसले श्रमिक वर्गको समाजवादी क्रान्ति भन्दा कम केही माग गर्दैन।
**५. शाही प्रहरी राज्यसँग लड्नुहोस्। हामी चाहन्छौं कि समाजवादीहरूले पूँजीवादी राज्यको दमनकारी संरचनाहरूलाई चुनौती दिऊन्।**
अमेरिकी समाजवादीहरूको कर्तव्य हो कि उनीहरूले सैन्यवाद र प्रहरी अत्याचारको विरुद्ध दृढतापूर्वक उभिनुपर्छ, जुन हाम्रो आफ्नै राज्यको साम्राज्यवादी योजनाहरूको स्पष्ट विरोधबाट सुरु हुन्छ। अमेरिकी साम्राज्यको पेटमा, कुनै पनि समाजवादी कार्यक्रमले (नव) उपनिवेशवादको दृढतापूर्वक विरोध गर्नुपर्छ र राष्ट्रिय आत्मनिर्णयको सिद्धान्तहरूलाई अगाडि बढाउनुपर्छ - कि प्रत्येक देशले सैन्य जबरजस्ती वा आर्थिक जबरजस्तीबाट मुक्त भएर आफ्नो मामिला आफैं निर्णय गर्न सार्वभौम हुनुपर्छ। यसको अर्थ हाम्रो देशको युद्धहरू, जसमा प्रोक्सीहरूद्वारा र नाटो जस्ता सैन्य गठबन्धनहरू मार्फत संलग्न युद्धहरू, साथै क्रूर आर्थिक प्रतिबन्धहरू र औपनिवेशिक कब्जा, प्रहरी दमन र जातीय सफायाको लागि सैन्य र कूटनीतिक आवरणहरू समावेश छन्, विरुद्ध पराजितवादी अडान लिनु हो।
तर अमेरिकी साम्राज्यवाद विरुद्ध पराजितवादी अडान राजनीतिक रूपमा स्वतन्त्र अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय कार्यको लागि क्रान्तिकारी प्रतिबद्धतासँगै अवस्थित हुनुपर्छ। कुनै पनि एक देशमा समाजवादमा स्थायी संक्रमण असम्भव छ, र श्रमिक वर्गले अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय स्तरमा मात्र आफूलाई मुक्त गर्न सक्छ। २० औं शताब्दीमा समाजवादी आन्दोलनको धेरैजसो भाग राष्ट्रवाद र लोकप्रिय मोर्चावादका विभिन्न रूपहरूमा पतन भएको थियो - आधिकारिक कम्युनिस्ट 'राष्ट्रिय मार्गहरू समाजवाद' देखि सामाजिक लोकतन्त्रको आत्मसमर्पणदेखि प्रथम विश्वयुद्धको समयमा 'राष्ट्रको रक्षा' सम्म - ले रणनीतिक गतिरोध र दुखद पराजय निम्त्याएको छ। यद्यपि कुनै पनि देशको श्रमिक वर्गले सबैभन्दा पहिले 'आफ्नै बुर्जुवा वर्गसँग सम्झौता गर्नुपर्छ', घरेलु सुधारहरू अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय वर्गको लागि आंशिक विजय मात्र हुन्।
समाजवादी आन्दोलनले यो अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय चरित्रलाई धेरै तरिकाले व्यक्त गर्न अग्रणी भूमिका लिन्छ, जस्तै समन्वित अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय हडताल कार्य - जस्तै ऐतिहासिक मे दिवस हडताल -, आप्रवासी विरोधी अराजकतावादको कडा रूपमा लड्ने, र आप्रवासी श्रमिक वर्गको नागरिक स्वतन्त्रताको रक्षा र विस्तार गर्न संगठित गर्ने। यसको दूरगामी राजनीतिक उद्देश्यको रूपमा, हाम्रो पार्टीले नयाँ अन्तर्राष्ट्रियको क्षितिजतिर वर्ग-स्वतन्त्र समाजवादी पार्टीहरूसँग भ्रातृ सम्बन्ध निर्माण गर्न प्रतिबद्ध हुनुपर्छ।
हामीलाई उपलब्ध हरेक उपकरणको साथ, हामीले अमेरिकी प्रहरी राज्यको राजनीतिक, सांस्कृतिक र भौतिक आधिपत्यलाई मेटाउनु पर्छ। सैन्य र प्रहरी बजेट, अमेरिकी वासल राज्यहरूमा हतियार ढुवानी, र सियोनवाद विरोधी कानुनी निन्दाका लागि DSA-अनुमोदित निर्वाचितहरूको सकारात्मक मतले मानव मुक्तिको लागि समाजवादी परियोजनालाई कमजोर बनाउँछ। समाजवादी विधायकहरूले अत्यधिक सैन्य खर्चको बयानबाजी गरेर आलोचना गर्नु अपर्याप्त छ। उनीहरूलाई सेना, प्रहरी, राष्ट्रिय सुरक्षा र गुप्तचर बजेटको पक्षमा मतदान गर्न अस्वीकार गरेर यस विषयमा वास्तविक सार्वजनिक टकरावलाई बाध्य पार्न हाम्रो कार्यक्रमद्वारा बाध्य पारिनुपर्छ। वास्तविक र अनुशासित पार्टी पूर्वाधार निर्माण गरेर, DSA विधायकहरू र काउन्सिलरहरू साम्राज्यवादी राज्यसँग राष्ट्रव्यापी टकरावको अग्रपंक्तिमा हुनेछन्, जसले पुलिस र सैन्य क्रूरताको अन्तरसम्बन्धलाई उजागर गर्नेछ।
जब हामी प्रहरी विभाग र ICE जस्ता दमनकारी पूँजीवादी संस्थाहरू विरुद्ध तत्काल संघर्ष गर्छौं, उन्मूलनको लागि समाजवादी दृष्टिकोणको लागि वैकल्पिक, मौलिक लोकतान्त्रिक राजनीतिक संस्थाहरूप्रति ठोस, कार्यक्रमगत प्रतिबद्धता आवश्यक छ, श्रमिक वर्गले राज्य शक्ति आफ्नै हातमा नलिई उन्मूलन असम्भव छ भनेर स्वीकार गर्दै। जातिवादी सैन्यीकृत सीमा शासनलाई खुला सीमाले प्रतिस्थापन गरिनेछ, सबै जनताको लागि आवागमनको पूर्ण स्वतन्त्रता र बासिन्दाहरूको लागि विश्वव्यापी नागरिकता सहित। अन्तर्राष्ट्रिय पूँजीको सशस्त्र बल - कारागार औद्योगिक परिसर, प्रहरी र सेना - लाई पुँजीवाद अन्तर्गत स्थापित श्रमिक वर्ग र उत्पीडितहरूको आत्मरक्षाका अङ्गहरूबाट निस्कने लोकतान्त्रिक र लोकप्रिय मिलिशियाले प्रतिस्थापन गर्नेछ - जसलाई हतियार बोक्ने अधिकार, जनताको सार्वभौमिकता, विश्वव्यापी सेवा र तालिम, र सदस्यहरूको लोकतान्त्रिक अधिकारसँगै रहने कठोर सामुदायिक नियन्त्रणद्वारा परिभाषित गरिनेछ।
**६. संविधानसँग लड्नुहोस्। हामी चाहन्छौं कि समाजवादीहरूले संविधानलाई उल्ट्याउन लडून्।**
मार्क्सवादी एकताले संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिकालाई स्थायी कुलीनशाही बनाउन पूँजीवादी र दासहरूको 'पवित्र गठबन्धन' द्वारा लेखिएको संविधानको विरोध गर्दछ। श्रमिक वर्गलाई विभाजित गर्न र जित्नको लागि अवस्थित राजनीतिक व्यवस्थाको अधीनमा बस्ने प्रश्न नै उठ्दैन, जसले सरकारलाई टुक्रा पार्छ र जनताको इच्छाबाट अलग गर्छ - जुन ढुङ्गामा स्थापित छ र संशोधन गर्न लगभग असम्भव छ। दासधारीहरूले लेखेको संविधान अन्तर्गत काला मानिसहरू स्वतन्त्र हुन सक्दैनन्; आदिवासीहरूले आफ्नो उन्मूलनलाई सहज बनाउन डिजाइन गरिएको संविधान अन्तर्गत सार्वभौमिकता प्राप्त गर्न सक्दैनन्; महिलाहरू मतदान गर्ने अधिकार हुनुभन्दा पहिले लेखिएको संविधान अन्तर्गत स्वतन्त्र हुन सक्दैनन्, र काम गर्ने मानिसहरू निजी सम्पत्तिलाई सुरक्षित गर्ने संविधान अन्तर्गत स्वतन्त्र हुन सक्दैनन्। यदि उनीहरूलाई मृतकहरूले लेखेको प्रतिक्रियावादी संविधानको अगाडि झुक्न बाध्य पारियो भने कोही पनि साँच्चै स्वतन्त्र हुन सक्दैन। हामी समाजवादी नेताहरूले लडाकु राजनीतिक आन्दोलन मार्फत अमेरिकी संविधानको लोकप्रिय वैधतालाई ध्वस्त पार्न चाहन्छौं: पुरानो व्यवस्थाको अगाडि कहिल्यै नझुक्ने, र संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिकामा श्रमिक वर्ग क्रान्तिको आवश्यकतालाई सधैं स्वीकार गर्ने।
समाजवादी क्रान्तिले दासधारी संविधानको कानूनमा आफ्नो वैधता राख्नेछैन। हामी यसलाई समाजवादको लागि लोकतान्त्रिक बहुमतको जनादेशमा आधारित गर्नेछौं। यो बहुमत चुनावको लोकप्रिय मतद्वारा व्यक्त हुन सक्छ, तर यदि राज्यले चुनाव लड्ने हाम्रो क्षमतालाई दबाउँछ भने यसले त्यो रूप लिनु पर्दैन। हामी श्रमिक वर्गको कुनै पनि आवश्यक माध्यमबाट शक्ति लिनको अधिकारको पक्षमा उभिनुपर्छ। समाजवादी गणतन्त्र जित्नको लागि, लाखौं कामदार मानिसहरूलाई उनीहरूको कार्यस्थलमा, मतपेटिकामा र सडकमा परिचालन गर्नुपर्छ। हामी स्वीकार गर्छौं कि पूँजीवादी वर्ग अमेरिकी संविधानको अल्पसंख्यक शासनमा भर पर्छ, र तिनीहरूले शान्तिपूर्वक यसलाई त्याग्ने छैनन्। प्रतिक्रियाको अपरिहार्य हिंसाबाट आफूलाई बचाउन श्रमिक वर्गलाई सशस्त्र आत्मरक्षाको आवश्यकता पर्नेछ। हामी यो पनि स्वीकार गर्छौं कि हामीले भर्ना गरिएका अमेरिकी सैनिकहरूको लोकतान्त्रिक अधिकारको लागि लड्नुपर्छ। सफल क्रान्ति पूरा गर्न, हामीले सैन्य पदको एक निर्णायक भाग जित्नुपर्छ र हाम्रो पक्षमा प्रस्तुत गर्नुपर्छ।
**७. नयाँ गणतन्त्रको माग गर्नुहोस्, पुनर्निर्माण पूरा गर्नुहोस्। हामी उत्तरी अमेरिकामा बहुराष्ट्रिय लोकतान्त्रिक समाजवादी गणतन्त्र जित्न चाहन्छौं।**
हामी उत्तरी अमेरिकामा लोकतान्त्रिक समाजवादी गणतन्त्र जित्न, गृहयुद्धद्वारा संवैधानिक व्यवस्थाको आंशिक उथलपुथल र दासत्वको उन्मूलन पूरा गर्न र समाजका श्रमिकहरूद्वारा शासित बहुजातीय र बहुराष्ट्रिय लोकतन्त्र स्थापना गरेर पुनर्निर्माणको परियोजना पूरा गर्न संविधानसँग लड्छौं। क्रान्तिमा स्थापित, यो महाद्वीपीय गणतन्त्रले सबै काम गर्ने र उत्पीडित मानिसहरूको विश्वव्यापी मुक्तिको लागि प्रयास गर्नेछ। हामी यस्तो राज्यको लागि सम्भव भएसम्म फराकिलो भौगोलिक दायरा चाहन्छौं ताकि यसले यो अभियानलाई प्रभावकारी रूपमा पूरा गर्न सकोस्, तर हामी राष्ट्रिय आत्मनिर्णयको सिद्धान्तलाई पनि मान्यता दिन्छौं। सबै आदिवासी र उपनिवेशित जनताले सार्वभौमिकता जित्नुपर्छ, जसमा संयुक्त राज्य अमेरिकाको वर्तमान सिमाना भित्र बस्नेहरू पनि समावेश छन्। कुनै पनि उत्पीडित राष्ट्रलाई यसको इच्छा विरुद्ध समाजवादी गणतन्त्रमा समावेश गरिने छैन।
पारिस्थितिक र आर्थिक संकटको साथसाथै, अल्पसंख्यक र स्क्लेरोटिक संवैधानिक व्यवस्थाले आगामी दशकहरूमा ठूलो राजनीतिक संकटमा योगदान पुर्याउनेछ। संकटको यो अवधिले हाम्रो वर्गलाई पुरानो व्यवस्थालाई भत्काउने र क्रान्तिकारी लोकप्रिय सभा बोलाउने अवसर प्रदान गर्नेछ: सबै जनताद्वारा निर्वाचित बहुमतवादी संवैधानिक सम्मेलन। विजयी समाजवादी पार्टीको लोकतान्त्रिक नेतृत्वमा, लोकप्रिय सभाले समाजवादी व्यवस्था निर्माण गर्न अगाडि बढ्नेछ। यसले दासधारी संविधानलाई भत्काउनेछ र नयाँ गणतन्त्रको संस्थापक दस्तावेजहरू लेख्नेछ।
सत्ता ग्रहण गरेपछि तुरुन्तै, समाजवादीहरूले श्रमिक वर्गको राजनीतिक शासनलाई सुदृढ पार्न व्यापक न्यूनतम कार्यक्रम लागू गर्नेछन्। हामीले सिनेट, निर्वाचन मण्डल, सर्वोच्च अदालत र स्वतन्त्र राष्ट्रपति पदलाई खारेज गर्दै जनतालाई प्रामाणिक लोकप्रिय लोकतन्त्र अस्वीकार गर्ने हरेक संस्थालाई नष्ट गर्नुपर्नेछ। हामी प्रत्यक्ष, विश्वव्यापी र समान मताधिकार लागू गर्नेछौं। सर्वोच्च शक्ति समानुपातिक प्रतिनिधित्वद्वारा निर्वाचित लोकप्रिय, एक सदनात्मक सभाको हातमा रहनेछ। प्रतिनिधिहरू जुनसुकै बेला फिर्ता बोलाउन सकिनेछन् र एक कुशल कामदारको ज्यालाभन्दा बढी प्राप्त गर्नेछन्। नयाँ क्रान्तिकारी व्यवस्थाको कानून स्वीकार गर्ने सबै दलहरू सञ्चालन गर्न स्वतन्त्र हुनेछन्। सरकारका स्थानीय निकायहरूमा व्यापक स्वायत्तता हुनेछ। सबैलाई अभिव्यक्तिको अप्रतिबन्धित स्वतन्त्रताको ग्यारेन्टी गरिनेछ। पुनर्निर्माणको अधुरो वाचा पूरा गर्न, हाम्रो गणतन्त्रले लक्षित सम्पत्ति पुनर्वितरणको सामाजिक कार्यक्रमहरू सुरु गर्नेछ, सबै जातीय असमानताहरू हटाउन प्रयास गर्नेछ। समाजवादी गणतन्त्रले राजनीतिक शक्ति र आर्थिक स्रोतहरू सबै जातीय रूपमा उत्पीडित र उपनिवेशित मानिसहरूको हातमा दिनेछ।
हाम्रो व्यापक आर्थिक कार्यक्रममा निर्बाध श्रम र संघ अधिकार, काम गर्ने घण्टामा ठूलो कटौती, र जन्मदेखि चिहानसम्म सबै नागरिकहरूको लागि प्रदान गर्ने साँच्चै विश्वव्यापी कल्याणकारी राज्य समावेश हुनेछ। हामी नोकरशाहहरूको शक्ति घटाउन र सबै कामदारहरूलाई प्रशासनिक सीपहरू सिकाउन कार्यक्रमहरू सिर्जना गर्नेछौं। प्रत्येक उद्योगमा प्राप्त गर्न सकिने अधिकतम हदसम्म कामदार स्व-व्यवस्थापनलाई प्रोत्साहित गरिनेछ। ठूला उद्योगहरूलाई प्रारम्भिक रूपमा सामूहिक स्वामित्वमा राखिनेछ, र हामी लोकतान्त्रिक आर्थिक योजनाको लागि हाम्रो क्षमता निर्माण गर्दै गर्दा बाँकी अर्थतन्त्रलाई क्रमशः सामाजिकीकरण गर्नेछौं। हामी पारिस्थितिक संकटलाई सम्बोधन गर्न र उत्पादन, वितरण र बसोबासको लचिलो रूपहरू स्थापना गर्न क्र्यास कोर्स कार्यक्रमहरू पछ्याउनेछौं। जलवायु शरणार्थीहरूलाई हाम्रो गणतन्त्रमा खुला हातले स्वागत गरिनेछ।
पुरानो व्यवस्थाको बन्धन तोडेर, कामदार वर्गले अन्ततः समतावादी रेखाहरूमा समाजलाई पुनर्निर्माण गर्ने शक्ति पाउनेछ। विश्वव्यापी समाजवादी आन्दोलनसँगको सहकार्यमा, हामी प्रत्येक वर्ष पूर्ण रूपमा मुक्त वर्गविहीन समाज: साम्यवादको नजिक पुग्नेछौं। साम्यवादले पैसा, वर्ग भेदभाव, जातीय भेदभाव, पितृसत्ता, राष्ट्रिय सीमाना, दमनकारी लिङ्ग भूमिका, श्रमको मानसिक/म्यानुअल विभाजन, र सामाजिक उत्पीडनका अन्य सबै रूपहरूलाई समाप्त गर्दछ। यो वास्तवमा "प्रत्येकबाट आफ्नो क्षमता अनुसार, प्रत्येकलाई आफ्नो आवश्यकता अनुसार" सिद्धान्तमा आधारित समाज हो जहाँ मानवताले सामूहिक रूपमा श्रमको स्वतन्त्र संघ मार्फत आफ्नो आर्थिक गतिविधिहरूको योजना बनाउँछ। साम्यवादले समाज र व्यक्ति दुवैलाई स्वतन्त्रता ल्याउँछ र मानव इतिहासको वास्तविक सुरुवात हुनेछ।
### 2026 Tasks & Perspectives
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/2026-tasks-perspectives/
Last updated: 2026-07-03T19:22:13.000Z
[Lee en Español](https://www.marxistunity.com/tareas-y-perspectivas-2026/)
## Table of Contents:
1. [Introduction](#introduction)
2. [US Political System](#us-political-system)
3. [Building the Party](#building-the-party)
4. [International](#international)
5. [Electoral Strategy](#electoral-strategy)
6. [Independent Working Class Organization](#independent-working-class-organization)
7. [Labor Strategy](#labor-strategy)
---
# 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 of our congresses, Marxist Unity Group members write, debate, and vote on a “tasks and perspectives” document to help establish a path toward this overarching goal. The following theses put forward a detailed strategic analysis of the current state of national, international, and intra-organizational politics. They are the product of an ongoing process of collectively thinking through our way forward, and represent areas of more or less substantial political overlap. As such, they form an important point of reference as we navigate political struggle in the near-term. 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.
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# 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.
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# 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 Eastward 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 five-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 between 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. The situation demands that we work to build proletarian hegemony in the global battle for democracy. This means recognizing and clearly articulating the intimate connection between the battle for democracy at home and the battle for democracy across the globe, of which the struggle for the liberation of Palestine is the beating heart. The legal-ideological and political-economic centrality of Zionism and its realization in the ongoing Nakba to the current configuration of the imperialist world order makes Palestinian liberation a fulcrum for global revolutionary transformation and the democratic self-emancipation of the global proletariat, and socialists must take the lead in developing the clarity and organization needed for its realization.
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.
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# 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 proper 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 *mis*organized 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.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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## **Marxist Unity Group Rules**
#### **Membership**
**Article 1\.** A member is one who joins the Marxist Unity Group through its admittance process, accepts its rules and points of unity, works to carry out the aims of the group, and regularly pays any required membership dues.
**Article 2\.** Members must fulfill all tasks assigned to them, fight for the Marxist Unity Group's strategic objectives, and use the group's resources in a responsible manner. Members also have a right and a duty to study Marxism and develop the group’s political positions.
#### **Organization**
**Article 3\.** The Marxist Unity Group bases its organizational principles on genuine democratic centralism. The part is subordinate to the whole, lower committees to higher, all committees to the Central Committee, and the Central Committee to the congress.
**Article 4.** Except where the rules state otherwise, in all organizational bodies decisions are taken by the majority of members participating in the meeting. Decisions may only be taken at meetings that have achieved quorum. Except where specified otherwise, a quorum shall be set at one-half the membership of the body in question. It is the right and the duty of members to participate in the meetings of the bodies of which they are a member and to openly state their views on all matters. In between meetings assigned tasks must be fulfilled.
**Article 5\.** Organizational bodies are autonomous within their sphere of responsibility.
**Article 6\.** Higher committees have the right to appoint representatives to participate in the meetings of lower bodies and establish relations with their members.
**Article 7.** During a particular action, members have the right to submit their views to higher committees up to the Central Committee for discussion and to publish them in the press. While acting fully by the principle of unity in action, members can oppose decisions taken by higher committees. That includes the right to organize to change the group's policy or its leadership.
#### **Structure**
**Article 8.** The Congress is the highest decision-making body of the Marxist Unity Group. The Congress considers reports, resolutions, proposed changes to the group’s rules, points of unity, and code of conduct, and all matters it considers relevant. The Congress is held annually and must be announced to members at least three months in advance.
**Article 9\.** All members in good standing have the right to attend and vote at the Congress. The Central Committee may invite delegates to the Congress who have speaking but not voting rights. If more than one-third of the membership demands it, the Central Committee must convene an Extraordinary Congress. It shall be held within thirty (30) days, with at least fourteen (14) days notice given to all members. Business will be limited to the items in the call for the Extraordinary Congress. An Extraordinary Congress can also be called by a majority decision of the Central Committee.
**Article 10.** A General Meeting is the highest decision-making body between Congresses. A General Meeting considers reports, resolutions, and all matters it considers relevant, but it cannot propose changes to the group’s rules, points of unity, and code of conduct. The Central Committee shall set a regular meeting schedule for General Meetings and promptly make that schedule, and all subsequent meeting minutes, available to the membership.
**Article 11.** All members in good standing have the right to attend and vote at a General Meeting. The Central Committee may invite guests to a General Meeting who have speaking but not voting rights. If more than one-fifth of the membership demands it, the Central Committee must convene an Extraordinary General Meeting. It should be held within fifteen (15) days, with at least seven (7) days notice given to all members. An Extraordinary General Meeting can also be called by a majority decision of the Central Committee.
**Article 12.** The Central Committee is the highest decision-making body between General Meetings. The Central Committee considers reports, resolutions, and all matters it considers relevant, but it cannot propose changes to the group’s rules, points of unity, and code of conduct. The Central Committee shall set a regular meeting schedule for itself and promptly make that schedule, and all subsequent meeting minutes, available to the membership.
**Article 13.** The Central Committee shall be composed of seven (7) members, unless otherwise decided by vote of the Congress. Elections to the Central Committee shall be conducted via a single transferable vote. All members in good standing have the right to stand for election to the Central Committee. The Central Committee must hold a special election for vacancies. Candidates for vacancies must be confirmed as full Central Committee members, with voting rights, upon an affirmative or winning vote initiated at a General Meeting. If more than one-third of the Central Committee membership demands it, the Central Committee must convene an extraordinary meeting of the Central Committee. It should be held within three days. The Central Committee may appoint people to fill specific technical roles, such as Treasurer. Such appointees, if they are not members of the Central Committee, have the right to attend and speak at Central Committee meetings, but may not vote.
**Article 14.** The Central Committee should not consist entirely of white, cis men. If an elected Central Committee does not meet these standards, it will use the nomination process as outlined in Article 13 as necessary to adhere to this policy in a reasonable time frame. The Central Committee may coordinate with established committees to assist in any training or special development necessary to develop members toward qualification to serve on the Central Committee.
**Article 15.** The Congress, a General Meeting, and the Central Committee have the power to establish and dissolve organizational bodies, such as cells and committees. Cells are organized at the level of a DSA chapter/s where three or more members of the group are active. Committees are organized based on a specific task or issue.
#### **Discipline**
**Article 16.** Members may be disciplined for violations of the group’s rules, organizational discipline, and code of conduct in accordance with the procedures laid out in the code of conduct.
**Article 17.** Any member who is subject to disciplinary procedures has the right to appeal to higher bodies, including the congress.
**Article 18.** The expulsion of a member from the Central Committee must be agreed upon by a two-thirds majority of its full membership.
**Admittance and Dues**
**Article 19.** The Central Committee shall determine the admittance process and the level of membership dues, but the congress may review and alter these decisions. Dispensation can be negotiated in particular cases by the basic committees, but have to be ratified by the Central Committee.
## **Code of Conduct**
Members of Marxist Unity Group should remember that both online and in person they will be seen as representing the faction. While we don’t seek to police each other’s behavior at all times, we should strive to collectively keep ourselves broadly held to these principles. Both in online interactions and in person, members should aim for the following:
1) Always avoid chauvinist tendencies in personal interactions, give space for women, gender/sexual minorities and non-white comrades to speak and prevent your voice from personally dominating political spaces.
2) “No investigation, no right to speak.”Try not to make generalizations about things you don’t really know—especially about other DSA factions. Treat members of other socialist factions-- both inside and outside of DSA-- as comrades in the struggle for socialism regardless of how poor we think their strategy is--both in person and online. Keep arguments and disagreements over principled political differences rather than personal mudslinging, etc. *When you do have a principled position, never be afraid to respectfully share it*: contribute to our political development by making it known to all.
3) Stay committed to our vision and principles as broadly laid out in our Points of Unity. Practice organizational discipline by helping to implement the decisions that we make together democratically, as Marxist Unity Group membership and the elected Central Committee.
#### Rule Violations
1. Marxist Unity **Arbiters** (as outlined in the following section) will deem potential Code of Conduct violations to be either **major** or **minor.** No more than one should be a man unless there aren’t enough non-men willing to take the position. In this situation the second chair will be held provisionally until gender parity can be achieved.
2. **Major offenses** refer to:a. Breach of discipline: b. All forms of physical, sexual, and domestic violence.c. Behavior presenting a clear safety threat to members of the group.d. Inappropriate or unprofessional behavior that makes other members feel so uncomfortable that they are reluctant to participate in the group.e. Behavior that causes immediate and substantial dysfunction at wider DSA meetings and events.f. Repeatedly committing minor offenses after receiving clear warnings from Arbiters or other Marxist Unity Group members.
1. Endangering organizational security.
2. Obstructing organizational work.
3. Refusing to assist with agreed-upon tasks.
4. Abandoning Marxist Unity Group’s principles and revolutionary vision as broadly envisioned in our Points of Unity.
3. **Minor offenses** refer to any problematic behavior that brings discredit to our organization or violates our Code of Conduct, but does not present an immediate threat to members’ safety, and does not cause severe disruption to the functioning of the group.
4. Only major offenses are grounds for suspension, expulsion, and other formal disciplinary measures. Minor offenses should be resolved through informal dialogue and mediation. If an offending party refuses to resolve their behavior, their offense may be reclassified as major.
#### Grievance Policy
Marxist Unity recognizes that it does not have the resources to create a miniature judicial system and fully investigate crimes against its members. However, our faction cannot function effectively unless all of its members are treated with dignity and respect. To make sure this is the case, we have established the following procedure to resolve conflicts and maintain internal discipline.
1. Marxist Unity members will elect two people by single transferable vote to serve as **Arbiters** for simultaneous one-year terms, acting as neutral investigators in cases of interpersonal conflict or breach of discipline. If necessary, Arbiters may facilitate a disciplinary process against members who violate National DSA’s Harassment Policy and Codes of Conduct or Marxist Unity’s Code of Conduct.
2. These individuals must not be members of the Central Committee or occupy any other leadership position within the group.
3. At the request of any member or the Central Committee, an Arbiter can attempt to resolve an issue or conflict by consulting with all parties and coming to a mutually agreed-upon resolution, or if necessary by pursuing disciplinary action.a. Although Arbiters are encouraged to work together, either may pursue a case independently of the other.b. If an Arbiter has personal entanglements or other limitations making it impossible for them to treat both parties fairly and impartially, they must recuse themselves from the case and defer to the other Arbiterc. If both Arbiters need to recuse themselves from the process, they must find a temporary solution to the underlying conflict, and then present the issue to the chapter’s membership at the next General Body Meeting. By majority vote, the chapter will designate two people to temporarily take their place, resolving the case as ad hoc Arbiters.d. If one Arbiter has a grievance with the other Arbiter, they will inform the Central Committee. The Central Committeewill inform general membership so that one or more ad hoc Arbiters can be selected by membership.e. When the case concerns breaches of discipline or otherwise public misbehavior, Arbiters should share information and coordinate with the Central Committee to the greatest extent possible.f. All arbitration should be documented in writing.
4. If efforts at mutual resolution fail or the accused’s behavior appears to constitute a major offense, the Arbiter(s) may pursue disciplinary action.
5. When pursuing disciplinary action, the Arbiter(s) may inform the accused member that they have been temporarily banned from the group.
6. When the case concerns violence (major offense b.) or a breach of organizational security that cannot be publicly disclosed, the accused member shall be temporarily banned from Marxist Unity and furthermore may not appear in any DSA spaces pending resolution. Should the accused violate this, they will be immediately and permanently expelled from Marxist Unity.
7. When the case concerns violence, harassment, or breach of organizational security that cannot be publicly disclosed, adjudication may also be carried out by a panel of five MUG members that will respect the need for privacy and anonymity. At least three of the five panelists must be rank and file members. Panel members will be nominated by the Arbiter(s) and confirmed by the Central Committee. If the Arbiter(s) and Central Committee cannot agree on a full set of panel members, the Arbiter(s) may instead present nominees to MUG membership for confirmation at a General Meeting. Once all panel members are confirmed, the arbiters will then present their findings and recommendations, and the panel will proceed to hold a hearing where the accused member can make their perspective known. Only the panelists, Arbiter(s), accused member, and grievant may attend this hearing, unless the grievant and Arbiter(s) decide otherwise. If the accused party repeatedly and negligently misses their hearing or fails to agree on a hearing date despite good faith efforts to accommodate them, then after three weeks the panel may choose to conduct the hearing asynchronously, submitting questions and requesting a written statement from the accused party. If the accused fails to submit their question responses and statement within one week, they will be considered to have forfeited their right to a hearing. A majority vote of the panel is sufficient to make a final decision regarding the discipline of an accused member. The arbiter(s) and panel members will inform the general body of Marxist Unity of the final decision and explain its justification. The Arbiter(s) should also release records of the disciplinary proceedings, with redactions made as necessary to protect organizational security as well as the privacy and anonymity of victims and witnesses.
8. If the anonymous adjudication process is not needed, the Arbiter(s) will arrange a public hearing where the accused member can make their perspective known. If the accused party repeatedly and negligently misses their hearing or fails to agree on a hearing date despite good faith efforts to accommodate them, then after three weeks the Arbiter(s) may choose to conduct the hearing asynchronously, submitting questions and requesting a written statement from the accused party. If the accused fails to submit their question responses and statement within one week, they will be considered to have forfeited their right to a hearing.
9. After the hearing, at a Marxist Unity general meeting or special meeting that they arrange themselves, the Arbiter(s) will share their findings and recommendations with membership as a whole.
10. After a substantial discussion, membership will decide by majority vote whether (and if so, how) the accused member should be formally disciplined. The vote may take place during or after the meeting at the discretion of the Arbiter(s). Quorum for any decision is one half of membership. Disciplinary measures may include a formal warning, temporary suspension, or permanent expulsion of a Marxist Unity member. After the conclusion of this meeting, the Arbiter(s)will be responsible for communicating the group’s final decision to the offending member.
11. As a rule of thumb, final decisions regarding the discipline of a member should be made no later than two months after the original grievance is lodged.
12. Arbiters are not Marxist Unity Group’s paternalistic stewards. They will be carefully selected volunteers held accountable to the organization as a whole. By majority vote, Marxist Unity members may decide to recall either Arbiter at any general meeting.
13. As our faction develops, this process will presumably need modifications. Working in tandem with membership, the Central Committee will review the Code of Conduct at least once every year to examine potential updates
14. As DSA members, all members of Marxist Unity Group are also free to report any grievance to DSA.
15. The Arbiters have a duty to collect and retain informal conduct complaints to better identify repeat behavior which on its own does not amount to a formal grievance. Arbiter(s) would use their discretion, based on the retained information, to bring it to the membership body if conduct reaches a problematic pattern.
16. Sustained allegations of violence shall whenever possible be communicated in writing by Arbiter(s) to the appropriate DSA HGO(s), with identifying details of survivor(s) anonymized except with their explicit consent.
### Tareas y Perspectivas 2026
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/tareas-y-perspectivas-2026/
Last updated: 2026-07-03T17:44:59.000Z
####
## Índice:
1. [Introducción](#introducci%C3%B3n)
2. [El sistema político de EE. UU.](#el-sistema-pol%C3%ADtico-de-ee-uu)
3. [La construcción del partido](#la-construcci%C3%B3n-del-partido)
4. [Asuntos internacionales](#asuntos-internacionales)
5. [Estrategia electoral](#estrategia-electoral)
6. [Organización independiente de la clase trabajadora](#organizaci%C3%B3n-independiente-de-la-clase-trabajadora)
7. [Estrategia laboral](#estrategia-laboral)
---
# INTRODUCCIÓN
#### **Nuestra tarea es fusionar el socialismo y el movimiento obrero.**
Esta es la fórmula de la fusión, tan esencial hoy como cuando la identificaron los primeros movimientos socialistas de masas del siglo XIX. Buscamos poner fin al terrible reinado del capitalismo y al horror que inflige a diario a las personas y al planeta. Esta es la misión histórica de la clase trabajadora.
El capitalismo siembra las semillas de su propia destrucción, pero esto no significa que debemos esperar para que se descomponga por sí solo. Este sistema se basa en la explotación, y siempre oprimirá a la gente. No importa cómo se explote y brutalice a la clase trabajadora, la gente resistirá. Dentro de la clase trabajadora, habrá gente que luchará. Este es el movimiento obrero, la clase trabajadora en lucha contra los patrones y los capitalistas. Dentro del propio movimiento obrero, algunos son conscientes del socialismo como su objetivo final. Para convertir a la clase trabajadora en la fuerza que pueda cumplir su gran vocación, debemos organizarnos continuamente para expandir esta conciencia desde adentro hacia afuera.
La base de la estrategia marxista es fusionar los intereses cotidianos que inspiran a la clase trabajadora en lucha con el objetivo final del socialismo. Es esencial, pero no suficiente, organizarse únicamente por las reivindicaciones económicas de la clase trabajadora, como salarios más altos o mejores condiciones laborales. Nuestra organización debe conectar las reivindicaciones económicas con las políticas. Debemos establecer continuamente la conexión entre el lugar de trabajo antidemocrático y el estado antidemocrático.
En toda lucha —ya sea en el lugar de trabajo, por la justicia racial, la libertad reproductiva, los derechos de las personas trans, contra los crímenes del imperialismo, etc.—, nuestro papel es establecer el vínculo entre las injusticias y la falta de poder político de las masas trabajadoras. Mientras la clase dominante pueda simplemente ignorar o anular cualquier logro que alcancemos, luchar únicamente por reformas al sistema existente es, en el mejor de los casos, mantenerse a flote hasta que esas victorias sean revertidas. En nuestra organización, debemos dejar claro que la única manera de lograr victorias duraderas para la clase trabajadora es acabar con el dominio minoritario de los capitalistas establecido en la constitución esclavista.
En cada uno de nuestros congresos, los miembros del Grupo de Unidad Marxista redactan, debaten, y votan sobre un documento de “tareas y perspectivas” para ayudar a establecer un camino hacia este objetivo general. Las siguientes tesis presentan un análisis estratégico detallado del estado actual de la política nacional, internacional e intraorganizacional. Son el resultado de un proceso continuo de reflexión colectiva sobre el camino a seguir y representan áreas de coincidencia política más o menos sustanciales. Como tales, constituyen un importante punto de referencia a medida que avanzamos en la lucha política a corto plazo. En 2026, el Grupo de Unidad Marxista estamos emitiendo nuestras primeras directrices. Les pedimos a todos nuestros miembros y simpatizantes que den prioridad a dos tareas en cada espacio donde organicemos para ayudar a impulsar el objetivo de una república verdaderamente democrática en los EE. UU.:
- Agitar a todos los niveles por la necesidad de un Programa que pueda unir al movimiento obrero y a los movimientos actuales contra el imperialismo y la opresión estatal.
- Apoyar a toda la organización encaminada a que el DSA elija un bloque coherente en el Congreso, como una forma de dar voz a la mayoría cada vez mayor que se opone al militarismo.
---
# EL SISTEMA POLÍTICO DE EE. UU.
1\. En su primer año, la administración de Trump ha llevado a la ruina a casi todos los estratos de la clase trabajadora estadounidense. Ha vaciado a la administración pública, debilitando y desmantelando todas las agencias del Estado, salvo las más represivas. Impuso aranceles que parecieran fueron diseñados para llevar a la economía a una recesión. Ha erosionado drásticamente las apariencias de libertad política, libertad de prensa y libertad de organización, y ha emprendido una ofensiva constante contra los trabajadores migrantes y queer. Nuestro momento político se caracteriza por un Estado abiertamente reaccionario, tanto a nivel nacional como internacional, que no se disimula en absoluto. Incluso los supuestos llamamientos nativistas y populistas a favor de alimentos más baratos han quedado descartados desde hace tiempo, en favor de convertir al Estado en una máquina de regalos para las arcas de la clase capitalista, particularmente en los sectores de la gran tecnología, el sector inmobiliario, las finanzas, las criptomonedas y las industrias de seguridad y armamento. Aunque la popularidad del Partido Republicano está disminuyendo rápidamente, la tiranía seguirá estando a la orden del día hasta que se frena definitivamente el avance bipartidista hacia el autoritarismo.
2\. Han surgido dos dinámicas que empujan a la izquierda a formar coaliciones amplias —una especie de «frente popular desde abajo». Por un lado, los ataques de la administración de Trump han arruinado y destruido innumerables vidas, lo que ha generado una urgencia masiva por construir una oposición. Esto está impulsando a sectores de la clase trabajadora que antes no participaban a subir al escenario político, creando nuevas organizaciones y transformando las antiguas. Al mismo tiempo, los líderes del Partido Demócrata percibieron las elecciones de 2024 como una señal de apoyo orgánico al trumpismo, lo que generó una brecha entre los dirigentes del partido y su base, cada vez más alienada. Estos factores son en parte responsables de la victoria de Zohran Mamdani en las elecciones para alcalde de la Ciudad de Nueva York, lo que demostró que los socialistas pueden actuar como una fuerza unificadora contra la dictadura de una manera en la que los Demócratas no han podido hacerlo.
3\. Si bien este frente popular parece ser una oportunidad para que la DSA amplíe su base de apoyo, está dividido por un desacuerdo fundamental: si Trump representa una aberración respecto a una visión Whig de un orden político estadounidense imperfecto pero fundamentalmente progresista, o bien una manifestación de la naturaleza intrínsecamente autocrática de un sistema político antidemocrático diseñado por esclavistas. Las ONG progresistas de «afiliación masiva», desde las más recientes, como No Kings y 50501, hasta las más consolidadas, como Indivisible, que se remontan al primer mandato de Trump, han adoptado el liberalismo patriótico, movilizando imágenes y un lenguaje propios de la Revolución Estadounidense contra la administración de Trump. La pugna entre la defensa del orden constitucional y la lucha por una nueva república será el conflicto definitorio de este nuevo movimiento por la democracia.
4\. El programa «Los trabajadores Merecen Más» de la DSA establece que nuestro objetivo es «poner a los trabajadores al mando del gobierno mediante una nueva constitución democrática que establezca derechos civiles, políticos y democráticos para todos». Al mismo tiempo, nuestro trabajo electoral concreto se centra en elegir a políticos, intentar aprobar reformas transformadoras y «tomar el poder» dentro del sistema existente. Para la izquierda revolucionaria, la existencia de la oligarquía estadounidense ha servido históricamente como justificación para la abstención total de la política; mientras que el movimiento progresista se hace ilusiones de que el 99 % puede lograr un mundo más humano a través de la legislación.
5\. Desde su fundación, Estados Unidos ha sido una oligarquía colonial, no una democracia. Su órgano legislativo está dividido entre una cámara baja poco representativa y con casi nulo poder, y una cámara alta aún menos representativa, diseñada para representar los intereses de las élites rurales. Su poder ejecutivo cuenta con amplios poderes despóticos que se han acumulado a lo largo de siglos, y nombra a los jefes del poder judicial de por vida. En todos los niveles se imponen restricciones a la capacidad del pueblo para gobernar la sociedad a través de sus representantes electos. Y estas estructuras se replican a nivel estatal y local, lo que limita gravemente nuestra capacidad para asumir el control político incluso a la escala más pequeña. Estos poderes, combinados con el carácter territorial del Senado, le dan al proceso legislativo un sesgo reaccionario que refleja la política de la pequeña burguesía blanca, heredera de los colonos pequeños propietarios. Si un proyecto de ley logra pasar por ambas Cámaras, debe enfrentar «controles» adicionales por parte de las otras ramas del gobierno. El presidente puede además vetar un proyecto de ley, lo que requiere una mayoría de dos tercios en ambas Cámaras para anular el veto. Siguiendo el precedente del caso Marbury contra Madison (1803), el poder judicial, encabezado por la Corte Suprema, puede ejercer su llamado “derecho de revisión judicial” para declarar «inconstitucional» cualquier ley dentro de los Estados Unidos. El poder judicial es, en última instancia, un órgano sin poder. No tiene la capacidad de gobernar un país por sí solo, por lo que los períodos de aparente «gobierno judicial» son, en realidad, siempre el dominio de su propio mecanismo de aplicación. Desde la década de 1930, independientemente de si los tribunales se consideraban liberales o conservadores, cada tribunal ha fortalecido sistemáticamente al Poder Ejecutivo.
6\. La Gran Depresión destruyó el sistema político que había prevalecido durante toda la Era Dorada. El Segundo New Deal, por el que lucharon los sectores radicales del movimiento obrero y que fue administrado por un frente formado por la administración de Roosevelt y los líderes de las industrias, resolvió la crisis económica mediante la creación de un Estado administrativo cada vez más grande, integrado en el poder ejecutivo. A medida que la recuperación económica dio paso a la expansión militar, el Poder Ejecutivo se fue fortaleciendo cada vez más, hasta que el 16 de julio de 1945 la Presidencia obtuvo el mayor poder destructivo jamás conocido por el hombre, un poder que Estados Unidos utilizó contra la población de Hiroshima y Nagasaki. Desde la década de 1950, la Presidencia de Estados Unidos ha tenido el poder de destruir toda la vida en la Tierra, y no puede calificarse más que de imperial.
7\. La presidencia fue ampliando gradualmente sus poderes a lo largo de la Guerra Fría, creando un estado de inteligencia nacional. La Guerra Global contra el Terrorismo fortaleció aún más ese estado de inteligencia y consolidó las órdenes ejecutivas como un medio eficaz para la formulación de políticas. Desde el surgimiento del derechista Tea Party, el poder legislativo ha estado tan estancado que la mayor parte de la formulación de políticas desde 2010 ha sido llevada a cabo por las agencias reguladoras del poder ejecutivo, en lugar de mediante la legislación de los órganos electos de los EE. UU. Incluso esto ha sido objeto de ataques bajo la nueva administración de Trump y, posteriormente, bajo la Corte de Roberts, ya que el Partido Republicano busca desmantelar todos los aspectos administrativos del gobierno federal, dejándonos con el objetivo paradójico de un Estado «mínimo» de vigilante nocturno con un ejército de un trillón de dólares y una vasta fuerza paramilitar.
8\. El sistema constitucional vigente niega el derecho al voto universal e igualitario, tanto a través de métodos ilegales —como la violación de la Ley de Derechos Electorales— como mediante mecanismos más arraigados, entre los que se incluyen la privación del derecho al voto a los condenados por delitos graves, la distribución desproporcionada de escaños en el Senado, los Colegios Electorales y el poder judicial federal no elegido. Mientras el sistema constitucional siga negando el sufragio universal e igualitario, todos los demás derechos, incluidas la libertad de reunión y de expresión, seguirán siendo vulnerables. La clase trabajadora necesita un sistema político democrático para consolidar sus victorias y lograr nuevas reformas, entre ellas la reducción del gasto militar, salarios más altos y una atención médica universal. La democracia es también el camino hacia la socialización de la economía y hacia avances más sustanciales hacia el comunismo.
9\. La falta de democracia se hace aún más evidente en los diversos territorios y entidades políticas semicoloniales bajo la jurisdicción de Estados Unidos. Washington, D.C. es la capital del país y ofrece mayores derechos democráticos que la mayor parte de Estados Unidos, ya que tanto los reclusos como los residentes no ciudadanos tienen derecho al voto; sin embargo, la Constitución excluye a D.C. de la condición de estado, y la limitada autonomía que otorga la Ley de Autonomía Local se ve amenazada por el gobierno federal. La fachada de autonomía de D.C. queda al descubierto por la ocupación federal directa de tropas de la Guardia Nacional, cuya presencia se remonta a casi seis meses, junto con una represión menos visible pero más insidiosa llevada a cabo en todo el país por el ICE y las agencias federales. Los territorios de EE. UU., que son prácticamente colonias, se encuentran en una situación aún peor: Puerto Rico, por un lado, sufre apagones y, por otro, es una base de operaciones para el imperialismo estadounidense en el Caribe y América Latina.
10\. Las victorias a nivel estatal no son sustituto de una constitución federal democrática. Todos los proyectos denominados «Socialista de Alcantarilla» se topan, en última instancia, con los límites estrictos que imponen los poderes estatales y federales. En Jackson, Mississippi, la lucha paciente de generaciones de activistas, que culminó en Cooperation Jackson, condujo a la victoria de Chokwe Lumumba en 2013 y de su hijo en 2017, con el objetivo de lograr salarios más altos y mejores servicios municipales. Sin embargo, el estado de Mississippi impidió que Jackson pudiera aumentar su salario mínimo. Incluso la ciudad de Nueva York depende de fondos estatales y nacionales para funcionar. Si bien la agenda de reformas de Zohran Mamdani es inspiradora, se enfrentará a obstáculos a nivel estatal y federal que no pueden superarse dentro del orden constitucional vigente. El poder político a nivel nacional no se puede conquistar poco a poco. Por eso necesitamos un partido socialista organizado a nivel nacional que luche por conquistar el poder nacional a través de una república socialista democrática.
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# LA CONSTRUCCIÓN DEL PARTIDO
11\. La estrategia revolucionaria gira en torno al partido político de los trabajadores, motor de la acción política de la clase trabajadora. El partido debe garantizar a todos los miembros la igualdad de derechos de participación en el proceso democrático, congresos regulares de la membresía soberana, elecciones abiertas de liderazgo en los congresos, organizaciones locales del partido organizadas en torno a una membresía soberana y la libre organización de facciones. Estas votaciones y la obligación estructural de los órganos administrativos y de liderazgo hacia la membresía general son la forma en que el movimiento socialista se educa en la práctica.
12\. La base de la democracia partidista es la libertad de información, asociación y debate. Una organización donde la toma de decisiones recae únicamente en el liderazgo o en camarillas puede implicar la aprobación automática de los miembros para dar la impresión de democracia, pero es solo una fachada. En todos los niveles de nuestra organización, los miembros deben tener la oportunidad de debatir y tomar decisiones sobre las cuestiones más cruciales y controvertidas de nuestro movimiento. El camino hacia una organización que mantenga una sana diversidad política y se mantenga unida en torno a objetivos programáticos no consiste en ocultar las principales cuestiones que nos dividen ni suprimir la disidencia para parecer unificados. Tenemos que ser honestos y claros acerca de nuestros desacuerdos dentro de la organización, y es igualmente nuestra responsabilidad como individuos y como facción practicar el desacuerdo y la crítica de manera fraternal y amistosa.
13\. Construir el partido requiere necesariamente luchar por el valor de la gobernanza deliberativa y democrática contra el gobierno de expertos o el gobierno informal de una camarilla. Mientras que los defensores de la "democracia digital" en DSA, como Groundwork, se han justificado con la frase "un miembro, un voto", la adopción de las encuestas como método de toma de decisiones del partido margina por completo la deliberación y a la militancia, desviando a los agentes de nuestra democracia de las reuniones donde los miembros se reúnen para elaborar estrategias, debatir y sintetizar posiciones, convirtiéndolos en meros cómplices individuales. La democracia digital ofrece atractivas promesas de apertura horizontal y una forma de adivinar alguna verdadera voluntad de sus miembros. Esto reproduce el mismo problema que se presenta con la democracia directa en general, y eliminar la deliberación y el debate a favor de los referendos en línea simplemente entrega el control a quienes determinan la naturaleza y la redacción de las encuestas. En lugar de brindar a los miembros la experiencia de la toma de decisiones colectiva, este camino les ofrece una opción binaria que los aliena, una mera fachada para ratificar la voluntad de un liderazgo arraigado.
14\. Dado que las asociaciones obreras se componen principalmente de miembros que dedican su tiempo limitado fuera del trabajo asalariado, necesitamos tanto un grupo de miembros que puedan dedicarse al trabajo práctico en nombre de todo el colectivo a tiempo completo, como desarrollar una infraestructura que alivie las exigencias de la reproducción social para la clase trabajadora bajo el capitalismo. Los requisitos exigidos para participar en la DSA han facilitado hasta ahora que sean principalmente los profesionales más jóvenes y sin hijos quienes construyan nuestra organización, lo que ha limitado la capacidad del partido para integrarse con un sector más amplio de la clase trabajadora. Priorizamos la lucha por un liderazgo político remunerado junto al personal, no en sustitución de este, para garantizar que los representantes de los miembros, elegidos democráticamente, se encuentren entre quienes pueden dedicarse de lleno al partido. Además, desarrollar infraestructura como servicios de cuidado infantil en las reuniones permite al partido retener mejor a sus miembros y sentar las bases para una cultura de clase trabajadora socialista democrática multigeneracional.
15\. Los congresos del partido deben ser el espacio para una discusión política incisiva y esclarecedora, donde los miembros puedan definir sus posiciones sobre las tareas, la estrategia y las tácticas del partido. Las Convenciones del DSA, los "congresos del partido" de nuestra organización, han sido históricamente un escenario de pequeñas disputas sobre procedimiento pero, a lo largo de cuatro años, los miembros de diversas facciones o caucuses han trabajado gradualmente para convertirlo en un órgano más deliberativo.
16\. Esta iniciativa pone de manifiesto una tendencia más amplia dentro de la DSA: el desarrollo de un «sistema de caucuses» basado en un conjunto de facciones políticas en constante evolución. La relación entre el partido y sus facciones es una característica importante de la política socialista de masas. El partido puede unirse en torno a tareas, pero estas tareas siempre implicarán diferentes estrategias para cumplirlas, dado que en cualquier escala habrá diferencias entre regiones y escalas de tiempo. Además, en el trabajo conjunto siempre surgirán diferentes orientaciones debido a las distintas creencias y experiencias de quienes lo realizan. Todas estas tendencias y posiciones representan tendencias reales en el movimiento obrero que deben deliberarse a través de la democracia partidaria, actuando y percibiéndose como facciones. Las facciones practican sus estrategias y tácticas mientras participan en el debate interno y la polémica entre las tendencias que representan. Este proceso democrático informa las decisiones del movimiento y de la clase. Luchar por el autogobierno de la clase trabajadora debe significar la creación de una membresía masiva que tenga las herramientas y la experiencia para practicar este proceso democrático. Por lo tanto, los debates sobre tendencias dentro del partido deben ser públicos y facilitados por diversos órganos del partido y de las facciones, creando una conexión entre los resultados prácticos de su trabajo y sus diversas tácticas y estrategias.
17\. Esta lucha abierta de tendencias permite que la política del movimiento obrero se manifieste como bloques visibles dentro del partido. Las facciones del DSA también han desempeñado papeles diversos, aunque limitados, en el discurso público. Solo gracias a sus facciones, el partido se convierte en un instrumento democrático de las masas trabajadoras, mientras que sólo gracias al partido, las facciones no se convierten en sectas. Esta dialéctica entre facción y partido es clave para la formación de la conciencia política de la clase trabajadora, y no menos aún de la conciencia política revolucionaria.
18\. Cuando se sofoca la democracia organizacional, inevitablemente surgen escisiones. Esto ha resultado en la codificación de las escisiones como estrategia, mediante ultimátums emitidos por facciones minoritarias o utilizando la pureza política para justificar depuraciones sistemáticas. Esto conlleva ramificaciones políticas significativas. Actuar como si las facciones no pudieran trabajar juntas dificulta la cooperación práctica entre diferentes tendencias estratégicas que, por lo demás, comparten las mismas tareas, y niega una relación democrática con el movimiento obrero. Al negar el derecho de las facciones a existir en su seno, estos grupos mismos se convierten en facciones dentro del movimiento más amplio.
19\. DSA, aunque a menudo imperfecto, ha demostrado ser la base contemporánea más sólida para un partido de masas de la clase trabajadora. Por el contrario, la ecología de facciones huérfanas de la izquierda de revistas teóricas excéntricas, comités monotemáticos y microorganizaciones ha resultado menos exitosa. En el mejor de los casos, estos *enfant terribles* pueden albergar activistas especializados y producir formaciones ideológicas únicas y generadoras. En el peor, los estrictos criterios de membresía y la censura interna "disciplinada" dan paso al arribismo y a la subordinación de los miembros comprometidos a los caprichos y abusos de camarillas descontroladas, lo que resulta en agotamiento y escándalos explosivos y desacreditadores. Reconociendo que la izquierda existente no puede ser eludida, junto con el trabajo de masas, DSA debe plantearse como una alternativa a los trabajadores y socialistas avanzados, nuevos y viejos, para cumplir su papel histórico como núcleo de un partido socialista de masas. Externamente, DSA debe participar en coaliciones de principios y en el trabajo de frentes unidos, estando dispuesto a criticar pública y honestamente a nuestros socios para promover el partidismo de masas. Internamente, a través de instituciones social-republicanas y democrático-centralistas, DSA debe demostrar una cultura organizacional y una práctica política que proteja a nuestros miembros de la intimidación o el reproche como antídoto contra el autoritarismo que se encuentra en sectores de la izquierda existente.
20\. En ausencia de una fuerza organizada visible que justifique el riesgo de alienar a los elementos sociales burgueses de los cuales la clase obrera puede depender, los trabajadores operarán según los términos que les ha proporcionado el marco político capitalista. Los capitalistas explotarán estos prejuicios políticos burgueses para asegurar la hegemonía sobre las instituciones obreras, hasta el punto de no lograr proteger los intereses de los trabajadores organizados en ellas. Esto lleva a un sector de la clase obrera a rechazar unilateralmente la participación política. Otro sector comenzará su análisis político desde el valor que percibe en los limitados derechos y concesiones que disfruta, empleando una lógica de "reducción de daños" votando por partidos de izquierda-burguesa en lugar de organizarse en defensa de las conquistas existentes. Ambos exigirán pruebas prácticas de la alternativa política en los términos burgueses con los que entienden la política, y corresponde a los marxistas demostrar su alternativa. En un partido desarrollado, las facciones representan tendencias estratégicas, ya que el partido está unido sobre la base de la implementación de su programa. Vemos tres tendencias principales: la derecha, la izquierda y el centro.
21\. Siguiendo una lógica similar a la de la “reducción de daños”, la estrategia de la derecha es organizar un partido cuya actividad esté orientada exclusivamente a asegurar reformas en interés de la clase trabajadora, existiendo como una opción de “a la izquierda de la izquierda burguesa”. Este enfoque práctico exclusivo en las reformas lleva a la derecha a abogar por la formación de coaliciones interclasistas para lograrlas lo antes posible, lo que requiere la disposición a operar como socio de coalición. En su forma más productiva, esta estrategia implica un movimiento obrero agrupado en torno a un liderazgo político reformista "militante" que se apoya en los movimientos de masas para convertirse en un socio principal de la coalición. Esto conlleva el beneficio de demostrar la capacidad de la clase obrera para organizarse en función de sus intereses y arrebatar demandas a la clase capitalista a través de su propio Estado, lo que a menudo surge de los deseos de la clase obrera de controlar las condiciones de sus vidas. Pero mientras que la derecha se apoya en los movimientos de masas para asegurar un programa reformista en la práctica, su coalicionismo hace que, en términos de su propia estrategia, sean independientes del movimiento obrero y organicen su partido de una manera que refleje las coaliciones que desean.
22\. Las concesiones programáticas inherentes a la estrategia del coalicionismo conducen a una toma prematura del poder político, independientemente de la fuerza del movimiento obrero. Las consecuencias de esta toma prematura en última instancia decepcionan a la clase y desorganizan el movimiento. Estas concesiones comienzan con la renuncia a una transformación de la forma de Estado, teorizada como la "imposibilidad de la revolución". En la práctica, esto se manifiesta como una gestión burocrática del movimiento obrero para desalentar y frenar cualquier oleada revolucionaria hasta que llegue el momento "perfecto". El autogobierno de la clase obrera deja de ser una posibilidad política como resultado de esta práctica. Este abandono del autogobierno como objetivo programático elimina la amenaza a largo plazo que plantea el movimiento obrero, permitiendo la concesión de otras demandas, ya sea mediante la presión de las coaliciones o por la fuerza. Un resultado infame de este problema estratégico es la entrada masiva de socialistas de derecha en gobiernos de guerra durante la Primera Guerra Mundial y los fallidos gobiernos de coalición que le siguieron durante el período de entreguerras. Otro ejemplo es la caída del gobierno de la Unidad Popular, liderado por los socialistas, en Chile debido a la alianza de la mayoría parlamentaria burguesa con la fuerza militar respaldada por la CIA. Esta derrota repercutió en la clase obrera internacional, llegando incluso a motivar la política de cogobierno pacífico del Partido Comunista Italiano con la Democracia Cristiana.
23\. El movimiento socialista en Estados Unidos no ha llegado a este punto. El aburguesamiento de las legislaturas estadounidenses, causado por los estrictos obstáculos para entrar en ellas, ha debilitado la política de la clase trabajadora y, por ende, a la derecha. La derecha del DSA, en torno a Groundwork y el Caucus de la Mayoría Socialista, defiende y practica constantemente la entrada del DSA como socio menor de coalición con los Demócratas progresistas, quienes en gran medida no han logrado imponer su agenda de reformas. La "gobernanza" que involucra a los socialistas se ha reducido de la formación de un gobierno con el partido obrero como socio principal (como elegir un presidente socialista) a la aspiración a la hegemonía en el ámbito de las ONG progresistas al negociar proyectos de ley con el ala centrista del Partido Demócrata. Esto nos coloca actualmente en la posición de socio menor de una coalición progresista que, a su vez, es socio menor de la corriente principal del Partido Demócrata. Esta manifestación de liquidacionismo dentro del DSA representa un punto de tensión extremo entre la dependencia práctica del partido del movimiento obrero y su independencia.
24\. Una respuesta común a los fracasos políticos de la derecha es reconocer las limitaciones estructurales del Estado capitalista, considerando las intervenciones en él como desconectadas o incluso antagónicas de la estrategia revolucionaria, a menos que el partido pueda exigir su caída. Éste es el punto de partida de la estrategia de la izquierda. Siguiendo este principio, la izquierda evita el Estado y, en cambio, empuja al movimiento obrero hacia la conquista del poder político desde fuera de la esfera de acción política, independientemente de los sectores que desean intervenir en las elecciones o formar gobiernos. Con este fin, la izquierda utilizará tácticas como la acción directa que no requiere una participación masiva y que busca demostrar su estrategia a través de un daño real al capital o al Estado, o una huelga general que conceptualmente desencadene la caída del Estado y “entregue” el poder político a la clase obrera. Una postura más avanzada, representada en el DSA por el Caucus Comunista, reconoce la conexión necesaria entre la organización independiente de la clase obrera y la acción política efectiva. Sin embargo, siguiendo las conclusiones estratégicas de la izquierda, esta tendencia argumenta que la clase obrera debe “formarse como clase” (léase: organizarse) antes de la formación de un partido y la determinación de su programa. Esta postura, en efecto, reorienta su práctica hacia una forma más organizada de la estrategia de izquierda.
25\. La izquierda tiene razón al identificar las limitaciones estructurales que constituyen el carácter de clase capitalista del Estado, evitando la orientación de la derecha hacia él. Sin embargo, esta orientación también deja al partido sin la preparación necesaria para abordar las cuestiones de autoridad política que plantea el Estado. Siguiendo su orientación, el partido se ve además privado de una base práctica para organizar a la clase obrera como una fuerza política de masas unificada a través de la democracia partidista. Tanto la derecha como la izquierda implican una gestión burocrática de la revolución, con la derecha gestionada desde dentro del Estado y la izquierda desde fuera. Para la izquierda, esto puede conducir a una espiral descendente de sectarismo: una tendencia hacia una base expansiva para la abstención, que es como la izquierda define la oposición al Estado. El punto final de la espiral es simplemente el ciclo de sectas, con tácticas rígidas, una unidad teórica elaborada y un liderazgo burocrático para imponerlo mediante escisiones, abusos y depuraciones. Como resultado, grandes sectores de la izquierda terminan fuera del partido. Por el contrario, la debilidad estratégica de la izquierda también lleva a que sus miembros se viren hacia la derecha cuando la estrategia de la izquierda se frustra, ya que ambos lados ven las intervenciones en el Estado como desconectadas de la estrategia revolucionaria.
26\. La estrategia del centro se basa en el reconocimiento de que el poder de la clase obrera deriva de su capacidad de organizarse colectivamente y de la necesidad de hacerlo para alcanzar objetivos parciales. Reconocemos que esta necesidad se comparte entre las luchas en las bases, las luchas por reformas, las luchas de la clase obrera por el autogobierno en la forma de una república democrática a nivel nacional y la lucha por los intereses internacionales de la clase. Partiendo de esto, el centro busca orientar al partido en torno a los siguientes principios estratégicos: 1) utilizar la presencia del partido en las legislaturas y en sus campañas electorales para fortalecer el movimiento organizado circundante en torno a un programa revolucionario, tanto mediante iniciativas de reforma anticoalicionistas como mediante la agitación; 2) negarse a formar un gobierno hasta que el movimiento obrero esté organizado y suficientemente consciente de la necesidad del autogobierno democrático como para que sea posible la conquista del poder político, la revolucionización del Estado y la consiguiente autoemancipación de la mayoría.
27\. La forma específica de programa que defendemos, el programa mínimo-máximo, se divide en dos secciones. El programa mínimo representa las condiciones mínimas para que el partido asuma el poder sobre la base descrita anteriormente. Consiste en un conjunto de demandas que, de implementarse plenamente, permiten a la clase obrera autogobernarse. Algunos objetivos de un programa mínimo podrían ser posibles bajo el capitalismo, pero si se logran todas las demandas, el Estado se transformaría en una república democrática. El programa máximo describe los objetivos comunistas finales del partido, así como el desarrollo del capitalismo y las condiciones que enfrentan el partido y la clase obrera. Desde nuestra fundación, el GUM (Grupo de Unidad Marxista) ha defendido la necesidad de un programa de mínimos y máximos. Los socialistas no podemos conformarnos con la esperanza de que el curso de los acontecimientos lleve a los trabajadores exactamente a lo que nosotros creemos. Rechazamos ocultar nuestras opiniones y objetivos.
28\. Si bien es cierto que la tendencia de centro fundamenta a la izquierda y la derecha en el partido, esto es un efecto de su estrategia. Centrarse en la unidad por encima de todo solo sirve para ocultar el desacuerdo político, provocando una división a espaldas de los miembros del partido. En el peor de los casos, privilegia a la derecha cuando esta se encuentra en el lado equivocado de las barricadas. La unidad no es un "medio dorado" mecanicista entre la izquierda y la derecha, logrado mediante el equilibrio adecuado de decisiones entre ellas, como se observa en la práctica de los miembros de la facción Pan y Rosas (Bread & Roses) en cuestiones políticas divisivas. Más bien, la práctica política del centro revolucionario es lo que fundamenta y unifica al partido hasta el momento de la revolución. Sólo a través de esta práctica emerge un partido que puede arrebatar reformas a la clase capitalista y conquistar el poder político. Esto permite que todos los niveles del partido se conviertan en espacios productivos de cooperación y competencia entre las tendencias de izquierda, centro y derecha para el cumplimiento del programa del partido. A partir de aquí, describiremos las implicaciones y mandatos específicos de la estrategia del centro tal como buscamos llevarla a cabo dentro de DSA.
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# ASUNTOS INTERNACIONALES
29\. En 1991, con la caída de la Unión Soviética, el mundo quedó sometido a un sistema unipolar basado en el Consenso de Washington, en el que el capital estadounidense y europeo pudo administrar los flujos del libre comercio de tal manera que la producción industrial recayera en gran medida en el Sur Global y, en particular, en China. Esto permitió una división global del trabajo, en la que los países de la OTAN pasaron a dedicarse a la manufactura de alta gama y a los servicios, mientras que el Sur Global se proletarizaba.
30\. Desde la crisis financiera de 2008, Occidente se ha enfrentado a una triple crisis: la disminución de las tasas de productividad, una crisis de legitimidad y una crisis de hegemonía. Millones de personas en todo Occidente se enfrentan a deterioros en sus medios de vida. Esto provocó una crisis de legitimidad en la UE y en Estados Unidos, así como en los estados periféricos, lo que dio lugar al Movimiento de las Plazas en el Mediterráneo, que se convirtió en la Primavera Árabe y en Occupy Wall Street. Al mismo tiempo, la República Popular China, cuya adaptación del sistema soviético permite una mejor planificación del capital, ha comenzado a superar la producción de Occidente y va camino de superar a Estados Unidos en términos de poder duro en algún momento de los próximos veinte años.
31\. La deslocalización de la producción hacia Asia Oriental también ha generado una gran cantidad de capital financiero en esos mismos países, lo que ha impulsado el desplazamiento hacia el este del sistema capitalista mundial, alejándolo de las relaciones transatlánticas y orientándolo hacia una red comercial centrada en el Pacífico. Esto socavó aún más el Consenso de Washington, allanando el camino para que las potencias emergentes emprendieran iniciativas revisionistas; entre ellas se encuentra la Iniciativa de la Franja y la Ruta, que compite con el Fondo Monetario Internacional de EE. UU. en los flujos de inversión extranjera directa hacia los países en desarrollo, y la alianza BRICS para socavar la hegemonía del dólar estadounidense.
32\. Estados Unidos ha pasado los últimos veinte años involucrado en guerras terrestres por todo el Medio Oriente, en un intento por asegurar la región como zona de extracción de petróleo y centro neurálgico del comercio mundial. Esto ha fortalecido las relaciones entre EE. UU. y las potencias reaccionarias de la región, incluidas las monarquías absolutas de los Emiratos Árabes Unidos y Arabia Saudita; sin embargo, las exigencias de una contrainsurgencia que se ha prolongado durante veinte años y la oposición a la guerra han llevado a un ejército estadounidense diseñado principalmente para protegerse de las bajas. Cada vez más, la fuerza de combate del poder estadounidense ha recaído en grupos de mercenarios, «contratistas» y aliados locales, mientras que el ejército bajo el mandato de Obama se centró en «liderar desde atrás», con inversiones en satélites, guerra con drones y otras tecnologías de apoyo, a la vez que Estados Unidos se enfocaba en imponer disciplina al mundo a través de nuestro control de las instituciones internacionales y nuestra capacidad para excluir de ellas a los «Estados rebeldes». Trump y Biden han intentado volver a un modelo de «competidores de igual nivel» en el ámbito militar y medidas más agresivas para mantener a raya a los Estados adversarios. Este giro del poder «blando» al «duro» es en sí mismo un indicio del declive imperial, ya que los Estados ahora pueden salirse del sistema de instituciones internacionales que Estados Unidos ha establecido —el Banco Mundial, el FMI, la OMC— sin enfrentarse a una exclusión total del mundo. Además, las acciones imprudentes de ambas administraciones de Trump y la continuación por parte de Biden de la política arancelaria de Trump han hecho que la participación en las instituciones lideradas por Estados Unidos sea mucho menos ventajosa de lo que solía ser.
33\. El ejemplo más claro del declive del orden mundial estadounidense ha sido la guerra en Ucrania, en la que el revisionismo ruso del orden postsoviético logró convertirse en un conflicto interestatal a gran escala entre Rusia y Ucrania, dejando atrás el anterior escenario de guerra por poderes establecido por los movimientos separatistas de habla rusa. Esto demuestra la debilidad de la capacidad de Estados Unidos para mantener la hegemonía establecida tras el colapso de la URSS, así como la voluntad de las potencias emergentes para sacar provecho de la vacilación del intervencionismo occidental. Mientras que algunos miembros de la burguesía occidental han percibido esto como una peligrosa inestabilidad global (por ejemplo, Alessandro Orsini y Tucker Carlson), otros, por el contrario, lo han interpretado como una señal para una mayor militarización, abogando por la necesidad de un renovado esfuerzo militar de la OTAN como forma de mantener este viejo orden. En cualquier caso, la militarización se ha convertido en la nueva tendencia entre los Estados capitalistas occidentales, incluida la «pacifista» Unión Europea.
34\. El contundente lema de Von Der Leyen —«Si quieres la paz, prepárate para la guerra»— es emblemático de la nueva postura de la UE respecto a la militarización. Los cambios relámpagos en la Constitución alemana dieron luz verde a niveles históricos de gasto militar; esta medida, junto con los numerosos programas nuevos en materia de educación y contratación militar que se están arraigando en todo el continente, revela un gran giro europeísta en cuanto a la opinión sobre la Pax Americana. El llamado de Von Der Leyen solo se ha visto reforzado por el deterioro de las relaciones con el aliado al occidente de Europa, Estados Unidos, que ha venido tomando medidas cada vez más hostiles contra la Unión —imponiendo aranceles elevados y criticando a la Unión en su última Estrategia de Seguridad Nacional—, lo que ha llevado a muchos periodistas, políticos y generales a creer que la dependencia europea de la presencia militar estadounidense para la seguridad continental ya no es beneficioso para la UE. No se han quedado solo en palabras al viento; el plan «Readiness 2030» de la UE (anteriormente conocido también como «Rearm Europe») ha destinado 800 mil millones de euros a un programa de cinco partes destinado a fortalecer las fuerzas armadas europeas y la industria de defensa del continente.
35\. Este aumento en el gasto militar afectará a toda la sociedad. Como señala Vik Chechi-Ribeiro, el enfoque «seguronomico» del gobierno de Starmer consiste en utilizar el aumento del gasto militar para integrar aún más a las fuerzas armadas en todos los ámbitos de la sociedad británica y, con suerte, resolver la crisis económica en la que se encuentra Gran Bretaña. Esto llevará a una expansión del 30 % en el Cuerpo de Cadetes, integrado por reservistas en edad de secundaria, y a la creación de seis nuevas escuelas técnicas para atender a este creciente complejo militar-industrial. Estos hechos ponen de manifiesto el peligroso atractivo de la militarización: para los líderes de los Estados de todo el mundo, el aumento del gasto militar se considera una forma de resolver, potencialmente, la crisis del descenso de las ganancias, y la mayor integración de las fuerzas armadas en la sociedad civil se ve como una forma de resolver la crisis de legitimidad que enfrentan los Estados occidentales.
36\. El declive de la hegemonía estadounidense, las acciones cada vez más violentas de la administración de Trump en la escena mundial y el aumento de los gastos militares relacionados con la guerra entre Rusia y Ucrania están provocando una carrera armamentista global en cadena, ya que los actores estatales se ven obligados a aumentar su gasto militar para mantenerse al nivel del gasto militar cada vez mayor de sus rivales, lo que da lugar a carreras armamentistas regionales como las de India y Pakistán o Argelia y Marruecos. Esto también ha dado lugar a conflictos fronterizos, como el que se produjo este año entre Tailandia y Camboya. Esto ha incrementado el gasto militar mundial en 300 mil millones de dólares solo en 2025, con un crecimiento aún mayor previsto para cada año de esta década. Esto tiene consecuencias existenciales: cada dólar que se gasta en aviones, tanques y armas es un dólar que no se gasta en hospitales, escuelas e iniciativas para evitar los peores efectos del cambio climático. La militarización, como respuesta a la crisis de legitimidad, también plantea la amenaza constante de que los Estados utilicen a sus fuerzas armadas contra sus propias poblaciones. También deberíamos estar tremendamente preocupados por un sistema mundial que se asemeja cada vez más al de la década de 1910, donde en los Estados, cada vez más armados y temerosos de sus propias poblaciones, corren el riesgo de verse arrastrados a la guerra a raíz de cualquier crisis local. Una vez más, las potencias imperialistas se asemejan a la tragedia de los sonámbulos: gigantescos colosos de capacidad bélica, tan ajenos a su propia naturaleza potencialmente catastrófica, que incluso sin querer un conflicto a gran escala de inmediato, es muy posible que acaben «entrando como sonámbulos» en uno. El hecho de que nos enfrentemos nuevamente a una crisis de este tipo, tras las promesas de la «poshistoria» neoliberal, demuestra la enorme insuficiencia del capitalismo como medio para ordenar el sistema mundial.
37\. La incapacidad de la clase política burguesa internacional para garantizar un orden mundial estable se pone de manifiesto una vez más en el comportamiento de los actores estatales revisionistas, quienes, a pesar de actuar en contra de la hegemonía estadounidense, no cuentan con una alternativa viable al capitalismo global. Esto queda claro en las ideas rusas y «pequeñoimperialistas» de un orden mundial soberanista propuestas por sus alianzas conservadoras transnacionales, que en la práctica emulan las antiguas ideas realistas del equilibrio de poder, lo cual, como lo demuestra la sangrienta historia de la Europa del siglo XIX, no es una solución eficaz para la crisis del sistema mundial. Del mismo modo, la vaga multipolaridad propuesta por las visiones chinas de un orden posestadounidense tampoco inspira mayor confianza en cuanto a cómo superar los problemas sistémicos del imperialismo capitalista, algo que queda de manifiesto en sus acciones durante la guerra de exterminio de Israel.
38\. La lucha por la liberación total de Palestina del colonialismo de asentamiento sionista y del imperialismo estadounidense sigue siendo una tarea democrática fundamental de nuestro momento actual. La colonia de asentamiento de Israel es un Estado de supremacía judía que busca destruir la presencia del pueblo indígena palestino, segregarlo y negarle sus derechos y libertades —sobre todo el derecho al sufragio universal e igualitario— a través del escandaloso sistema de apartheid. Así como reconocemos que Estados Unidos no es una democracia y que una nueva constitución democrática debe poner en primer plano el derecho a la autodeterminación nacional de los pueblos indígenas y colonizados, nos solidarizamos incondicionalmente con el pueblo palestino en su lucha por la liberación. Romper con las «ilusiones constitucionales» aquí en nuestro país debe ir de la mano con la agitación y la organización en torno al deber internacionalista de los socialistas de desmantelar todos los sistemas tiránicos y opresivos.
39\. A raíz de la fuga de la prisión de Gaza en octubre de 2023, la entidad sionista y Estados Unidos han asesinado a hasta 680 000 palestinos en el genocidio de Gaza. Desde octubre de 2025 está vigente un supuesto alto el fuego, que Israel ya ha violado en innumerables ocasiones. Sin embargo, esto no significa que el genocidio haya cesado. Israel sigue controlando el 50 % de la Franja de Gaza, donde ha establecido 48 puestos militares, interrumpiendo o impidiendo la distribución de ayuda a los palestinos y destruyendo sistemáticamente propiedades palestinas y la construcción de redes de carreteras que conducen a las bases y asentamientos sionistas fuera de Gaza. En otras palabras, Israel no tiene intención alguna de irse. Mientras tanto, funcionarios estadounidenses e israelíes han estado buscando diversos destinos para reubicar a los palestinos desplazados por la fuerza de Gaza, incluido el pequeño estado separatista de Somalilandia, aislado internacionalmente, ahora reconocido por primera vez por el Estado sionista. Al mismo tiempo, Tel Aviv está ansioso por reanudar el genocidio con toda su intensidad y está buscando la forma de hacerlo. A pesar del ridículo «alto el fuego», los objetivos coloniales de Israel siguen siendo los mismos que desde 1948: la extirpación y la limpieza étnica de los palestinos de Palestina.
40\. La «relación especial» entre Estados Unidos e Israel, y su persistencia a pesar de los efectos aparentemente perjudiciales de las acciones de este último sobre los intereses del primero, viene determinada por una amplia variedad de factores, pero en última instancia se reduce a una coincidencia de intereses, por muy incompleta e inestable que pueda ser esa coincidencia en ocasiones. Esto no quiere decir que Israel sirva como un «portaaviones» del imperio estadounidense, ni que sus acciones siempre o de inmediato concuerden con los intereses de su patrocinador imperial. Más bien se trata de que Estados Unidos (y la clase dominante occidental en general) apoya a Israel porque no puede permitirse no hacerlo, ya que la destrucción de la colonia de colonos israelí sería demasiado costosa para sus propios intereses como para que pudiera tolerarla. Abandonar a Israel equivaldría a arrancar el núcleo de la estructura de integración económica y política liderada por Estados Unidos en la región, construida con gran esfuerzo como baluarte contra el declive de la hegemonía estadounidense en el centro neurálgico más importante de el sistema de acumulación basado en el petróleo que sustenta la configuración actual del orden mundial imperialista. También significaría interrumpir el circuito de reciclaje del petrodólar que sostiene el sistema financiero estadounidense y proporciona una base de clientes fundamental para el complejo militar-industrial. Por último, significaría reconocer la ilegitimidad de los aparatos legales e ideológicos profundamente entrelazados que sostienen y estructuran la Nakba en curso, la normalización de las relaciones entre Israel y los Estados árabes, el estado de seguridad interna de EE. UU. y la intervención imperial en la era de la «guerra global contra el terrorismo». La dinámica que se refuerza mutuamente, creada por la interacción de estos factores, garantiza que EE. UU. siga profundamente comprometido con la existencia continua de la colonia de colonos sionistas, a pesar de las consecuencias negativas y desestabilizadoras más inmediatas de las acciones de esta última.
41\. Simultáneamente, a nivel mundial, Israel se ha convertido en un Estado paria a los ojos de la opinión pública global. Los últimos dos años de matanzas genocidas bien documentadas han puesto al descubierto ante el mundo la realidad del proyecto sionista y han desacreditado aún más al imperialismo estadounidense. Se ha desarrollado un movimiento internacional masivo de solidaridad con Palestina, que ha llevado a millones de personas a las calles, ha ejercido presión concreta sobre las clases dominantes de diversos países en torno a la cuestión de Palestina y ha empleado una amplia gama de tácticas para apoyar al pueblo palestino. Como resultado, la feroz represión a la que siempre han estado sometidos los activistas y las organizaciones palestinas se ha intensificado considerablemente. Los profundos y inextricables vínculos entre la alianza militar entre Estados Unidos e Israel y el estado de vigilancia civil nos tildan, tanto en privado como en público, de terroristas nacionales y antisemitas, creando así un clima de aceptación para que se intensifique la violencia y la represión a manos de nuestro ejército policial, entrenado por las Fuerzas de Defensa de Israel (IDF). Por muy bienvenido que haya sido este movimiento antisionista global, es más que evidente que se necesita más, especialmente ahora que los oportunistas políticos tanto de la extrema derecha como de la izquierda liberal intentan canalizar la indignación en torno a Palestina hacia sus propios proyectos reaccionarios. La situación exige que trabajemos para construir la hegemonía proletaria en la lucha global por la democracia. Esto significa reconocer y articular claramente la íntima conexión entre la lucha por la democracia en nuestro propio país y la lucha por la democracia en todo el mundo, de la cual la lucha por la liberación de Palestina es el corazón palpitante. La centralidad jurídico-ideológica y político-económica del sionismo y su manifestación en la Nakba que aún persiste, en la configuración actual del orden mundial imperialista, convierte a la liberación palestina en un punto de apoyo para la transformación revolucionaria global y la autoemancipación democrática del proletariado mundial; y los socialistas deben tomar la iniciativa para desarrollar la claridad y la organización necesarias para su realización.
42\. Nuestra principal tarea internacional es crear un movimiento democrático, liderado por los trabajadores, en favor de la paz y en contra de la militarización. Tenemos la oportunidad histórica de construir una nueva Internacional gracias a la interconexión de las cadenas de suministro globales, incluso entre las potencias imperialistas que compiten entre sí, lo que nos obliga a organizarnos a la misma escala a la que el capitalismo nos organiza. Esta nueva Internacional es una cuestión urgente si queremos coordinar la lucha por la paz.
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# ESTRATEGIA ELECTORAL
43\. Más allá de generalidades, el desarrollo de una estrategia electoral marxista en Estados Unidos se ha estancado en un sistema electoral antidemocrático. La Constitución dicta la estructura fundamental del gobierno federal y la separación de sus poderes en tres ramas independientes: legislativa, ejecutiva y judicial. El poder legislativo se divide en dos órganos: la Cámara de Representantes, con escaños asignados a los estados de forma proporcional a su población, pero divididos entre 435 distritos uninominales cada vez más poblados desde mediados del siglo XX, y el Senado, con escaños asignados equitativamente entre estados con poblaciones desiguales y elegidos por mandatos escalonados. El ejecutivo está encabezado por un presidente, elegido indirectamente a través de un Colegio Electoral, que asigna delegados por estado según el número total de escaños que poseen tanto en el Senado como en la Cámara de Representantes, quienes votan en bloque por el ganador en su respectivo estado. La estructura de toma de decisiones y el sistema electoral resultantes han restringido cada vez más la acción política socialista durante los últimos 100 años.
44\. Este sistema electoral antidemocrático condiciona un sistema de toma de decisiones igualmente antidemocrático dentro del estado capitalista. El Senado, elegido antidemocráticamente, y no la Cámara de Representantes, tiene las facultades de asesoramiento y aprobación sobre tratados presidenciales, juicios políticos, nombramientos para el gabinete y jueces de la Corte Suprema. Estos poderes, combinados con la naturaleza territorial del Senado, dan al proceso legislativo un sesgo reaccionario que refleja la política de la pequeña burguesía blanca, heredera de los colonos terratenientes. Si un proyecto de ley puede ser aprobado por ambas Cámaras, debe enfrentar más “controles” de las otras ramas del gobierno. Siguiendo el precedente de *Marbury v. Madison* (1803), el poder judicial, encabezado por la Corte Suprema, puede ejercer su llamado derecho de revisión judicial para declarar “inconstitucional” cualquier ley dentro de los Estados Unidos. El presidente puede, además, vetar un proyecto de ley, requiriendo el voto de dos tercios de ambas Cámaras para anular el veto.
45\. La Décima Enmienda sirve además para reservar explícitamente a los Estados todas las demás funciones no detalladas en la Constitución. Estos estados, decididos arbitrariamente para dividir "justamente" el poder de los colonos entre las fuerzas más y menos esclavistas en los comienzos de la república, reciben una amplia supervisión sobre "sus propios" asuntos. A medida que avanzaba el desarrollo capitalista, las divisiones entre lo urbano y lo rural crecieron, pero los límites de los estados, tan esenciales para la distribución del Senado, no cambiaron. El resultado es la división de las principales áreas industriales en distritos electorales fragmentados dentro de estados dominados por la gran agricultura y los grandes terratenientes. En la práctica, esto significa que antiguas reformas sociales y democráticas no logran la mayoría necesaria de la clase trabajadora en los distritos electorales y se ven socavadas por los intereses de los terratenientes, los capitalistas y sus élites políticas. Incluso en centros urbanos con mayoría obrera, obtener una mayoría en el gobierno municipal enfrenta muchos desafíos, como se vio en Jackson, Mississippi, y en varios gobiernos municipales de Texas. Los estados tienen discreción sobre el propio gobierno municipal, a menudo imponiendo limitaciones a los impuestos y a los grandes presupuestos de capital, y pueden fácilmente anular o delegar jurisdicción sobre los jefes del propio gobierno municipal.
46\. La condición jurídica de la DSA como organización 501(c)(4) le otorga flexibilidad para desenvolverse en un complejo sistema electoral que gira en torno a los comités de partidos políticos, de los cuales una organización 501(c)(4) debe operar independientemente para la acción política. Sin embargo, el trabajo electoral no puede ser el propósito principal de una organización 501(c)(4), cuyo propósito legal es el "bienestar social". En cambio, el trabajo legal de campaña debe estar separado en una entidad jurídica independiente: un Comité de Acción Política (PAC). Este divorcio del 501(c)(4) de la acción política continúa en la nominación formal de los candidatos del partido, que debe ocurrir a través de elecciones “primarias” administradas por el gobierno, mientras que el registro de miembros del partido generalmente también ocurre a través del gobierno. Los estados, por su parte, tienen la libertad de diseñar sus sistemas electorales a su discreción. Pueden distribuir distritos, estructurar las primarias, establecer requisitos de acceso a la boleta electoral y estructurar la propia boleta electoral con pocas restricciones, impidiendo solo las disposiciones más absurdas. Esto ha creado una red desigual de sistemas electorales antidemocráticos en todo el país que dividen y conquistan los intentos de la clase social de actuar políticamente. En efecto, este sistema divorcia formalmente la libertad de asociación de la clase trabajadora de la acción política organizada a través de un partido.
47\. Los desafíos que plantea nuestro sistema electoral han generado múltiples orientaciones para abordarlos. El partido sustituto, la estrategia electoral de organizar un partido en el sentido marxista sin utilizar necesariamente una lista electoral correspondiente, es la postura hegemónica dentro del DSA. La tendencia de la "ruptura limpia" aboga por una lista electoral legal como condición mínima para presentar un candidato en nombre del DSA. Si bien reconocemos la importancia de identificarnos externamente como independientes y distintos de los partidos Demócrata y Republicano, la ruptura limpia prioriza la lista electoral, no el programa ni la organización del partido, como la distinción clave. Al igual que en el ejemplo del Partido Verde, esto resta importancia al papel del programa marxista y a su papel en la unión de los movimientos económicos y políticos locales en un partido-movimiento de clase a nivel nacional.
48\. La postura liquidacionista de DSA, descrita en *The Agitator*, del Caucus de la Mayoría Socialista, como la "permanencia sucia", asume esta primacía, pero la invierte. En lugar de ver esta supuesta identidad con el Partido Demócrata como un problema a superar, la tendencia de la "permanencia sucia" argumenta que debemos aprender a trabajar como parte de una facción de izquierda más amplia del Partido Demócrata, correspondiente al ámbito de las ONG progresistas. Siguiendo la postura del "socio menor, dos veces distanciado", la tendencia aboga por organizar al actual partido sustituto DSA como el principal impulsor de esta facción, que ganará influencia y reformas del centro del Partido Demócrata gracias a su demostrable desempeño electoral como los "progresistas consistentes". Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) será la figura más probable de esta facción si continúa con su posible candidatura presidencial para 2028, tras haber alcanzado un ascenso dentro del Partido Demócrata al abandonar muchos de los principios sobre los que construyó una coalición para llegar al cargo.
49\. A grandes rasgos, entre estos dos extremos se sitúa la tendencia de la "ruptura sucia", donde la independencia operativa respecto al Partido Demócrata se convertirá gradualmente en independencia formal, ya sea porque los centristas abandonen un Partido Demócrata que hayamos conquistado o porque nos expulsen. Aunque su nombre sugiere una síntesis productiva, tanto los liquidacionistas como los que defienden la ruptura radical han señalado correctamente la falta de movimiento de sus defensores. Subyacente a ella se encuentra un amplio conjunto de posiciones tácticas y electoral-estratégicas que no logran formar una orientación práctica coherente hacia un objetivo, por lo demás compartido, de convertir a la clase obrera en un actor político independiente. Lo más sorprendente es la frecuente pregunta de sus defensores: "¿Cómo nos separamos del Partido Demócrata?". La postura de MUG se puede describir mejor como una unidad entre un "partido sustituto en la forma" y una "ruptura limpia en el contenido". Creemos que la manera de dejar de ser un socio menor de la facción progresista del Partido Demócrata es reconocer que DSA es un partido en el sentido marxista, en virtud de su estructura democrática y su consiguiente independencia operativa. En consecuencia, no tiene ninguna obligación política necesaria con el Partido Demócrata. Nuestro programa no se reduce a la agitación que realizamos para despertar a la base obrera capturada por los Demócratas.
50\. La capitulación de la "permanencia sucia" no es la solución para abordar nuestro sistema político antidemocrático, ni tampoco lo es la rebelión miope de la "ruptura limpia". Más bien, debemos llevar nuestra organización y programa independientes a cualquier contienda donde podamos presentar candidatos, ya sea en las listas electorales Demócratas, independientes o de terceros partidos. Durante la campaña, se debe esperar que estos candidatos agiten contra el sistema político antidemocrático, condenando la presidencia imperial, la Corte Suprema y el Senado. También deben promover el objetivo a largo plazo de una constitución democrática. Si resultan elegidos, la DSA debe instar a los socialistas en el poder a que utilicen sus cargos para impulsar la lucha por la democracia. Tomando como referencia la tradición de los partidos socialistas históricos, esto podría traducirse en la presentación de proyectos de ley que impongan la representación proporcional en la Cámara de Representantes, en negarse a votar a favor de los presupuestos destinados al estado policial, al ejército o al poder judicial en cualquier nivel de gobierno, o en incluir cláusulas de «no sujeto a revisión judicial» en las leyes de reforma impulsadas por el pueblo para poner la cuestión del sistema judicial antidemocrático en primera línea de las luchas más amplias por la libertad. El papel de un socialista en un cargo público elegido debería ser trazar una línea divisoria lo más clara posible entre los partidos capitalistas de la Constitución y el partido de la clase trabajadora y la democracia.
51\. El sistema político de Estados Unidos no es neutral; por el contrario, es un escenario de intenso conflicto de clases. Los socialistas democráticos deben exigir un sistema electoral democrático basado en el sufragio universal e igualitario, la representación proporcional y los distritos plurinominales. Por un lado, es pedante y reduccionista considerar el partidismo como el mero deseo de una entidad jurídica de tercer partido. Por otro lado, no subestimamos cómo el actual sistema de mayoría simple y de «el ganador se lleva todo», combinado con una versión extrema de federalismo desorganiza la acción política de la clase obrera. Los socialistas democráticos deberíamos proponer el partido de masas y un sistema electoral democrático construido en torno a él como pilares fundamentales de nuestra visión de una república democrática y luchar por una ley electoral única a nivel nacional que organice las elecciones sobre esta base.
52\. Las campañas electorales son una función específica del partido obrero, pero lo que las hace únicas es su capacidad para conectar con los diversos movimientos e instituciones de la clase trabajadora. En el terreno, un "partido sustituto" se basa en el despliegue masivo de sus miembros, más allá del cuadro que desarrolla la campaña, para llegar a los hogares obreros con la política socialista. Este despliegue, de al menos a miles de hogares, sólo es posible cuando la campaña expresa la política de sus miembros, la cual sólo puede discernirse a través de la democracia. Una campaña democrática presupone una infraestructura integral gestionada por miembros del DSA y en sintonía con la política de la organización (secciones o nacional) que la gestiona. Por el contrario, la opción política que presentan las campañas electorales del socialismo democrático es el programa del partido y el carácter democrático de sus operaciones hasta el campo. Esta cualidad de la organización socialista democrática en conexión con el programa del partido debe desempeñar un papel clave en la agitación de la campaña para los esfuerzos electorales del DSA.
53\. Para que estos esfuerzos formen parte del proyecto partidario a largo plazo, su continuidad en los cargos electivos debe reflejar también la política de la militancia. Esto requiere una organización disciplinada de los funcionarios electos para quienes el partido organiza campañas. Sin embargo, la disciplina no surge de la amenaza de una retractación de su respaldo, una revocación ni de organizar una campaña contra un político en funciones renegado. Ambas representan fracasos del partido a la hora de elegir candidatos estratégicamente alineados que puedan trabajar con un cuerpo electoral más amplio para defender el programa del partido, lo que genera tendencias abstencionistas y revocatorias. Más bien, la disciplina surge del cultivo de una cultura abierta de crítica, donde la militancia y sus organismos sean capaces de canalizar el descontento ante el comportamiento inescrupuloso de los electos. Esto se puede hacer con la ayuda de los comités de Socialists in Office (SIO) que organizan a los funcionarios electos para llevar a cabo las políticas programáticas decididas por los miembros, con una relación democrática y transparente con los miembros del partido.
54\. Para facilitar esta relación democrática, los funcionarios electos deben integrarse en la estructura del partido para participar democráticamente en los debates políticos como miembros iguales, no como líderes con los que no podemos discrepar ni como herramientas sin voluntad propia ni una política que pueda desarrollarse con el tiempo. De igual manera, los candidatos deben ingresar al proceso de apoyo preparados para trabajar como miembros individuales de iniciativas de organización colectiva hacia el parlamentarismo revolucionario en nombre del programa del partido. Esto implica un nivel de formación política que el candidato ya debe poseer o que debe comprometerse a mantener como parte de su deber como socialista en el cargo.
55\. Una amenaza para la naturaleza democrática del programa electoral de la DSA son las conferencias de estrategia celebradas para los funcionarios electos de la DSA, fuera del control de sus miembros. A pesar de la conexión que sugiere su nombre, el Fondo de la DSA (DSA Fund) es una organización legalmente independiente de la DSA. La superposición histórica entre las organizaciones se ha diluido con el tiempo, y la junta directiva, que se autoperpetúa, no tiene la obligación de acatar las decisiones democráticas de los miembros de la DSA. El Fondo de la DSA ha estado organizando retiros para los miembros en ejercicio sobre estrategia electoral y gobernanza, incluso invitando a funcionarios electos que, aunque sean miembros, no cuentan con el respaldo de sus secciones. Esto difumina las distinciones sobre cuales funcionarios electos han recibido la aprobación democrática de los miembros de la DSA. Las decisiones sobre estrategia electoral y quién es un funcionario electo de la DSA deben corresponder exclusivamente a los miembros de la DSA. El Fondo de la DSA debe reorientarse, dejando de ser una fachada para el sectarismo de la derecha de la DSA para convertirse en un mecanismo adecuado de recaudación de fondos para un partido de masas. Las actividades del Fondo DSA, incluidos, entre otros, eventos y gastos, deben subordinarse al mandato democrático de los miembros, o debe dejar de existir.
56\. Llevar nuestra visión del partido al trabajo electoral comienza necesariamente y ocurre principalmente a nivel de la sección. Sin embargo, la labor electoral de DSA ha enfrentado repetidas crisis, donde secciones como las de Filadelfia, Los Ángeles y la Ciudad de Nueva York no han respondido públicamente como sección ante la conducta inescrupulosa de los funcionarios electos. Incluso en casos como el de Nithya Raman, donde tanto una parte significativa de sus miembros como la mayoría del cuadro electoral de todas las tendencias sienten que el liderazgo nacional debería intervenir, la DSA nacional tiene pocas herramientas establecidas para hacerlo.
57\. Crear los vínculos nacionales necesarios entre los organizadores electorales para abordar este problema, con reformas como la abolición de la división de respaldo nacional/local, requiere que los organizadores electorales locales se consideren parte de un partido político nacional. Esto depende de un aumento drástico en la capacidad de la Comisión Electoral Nacional (NEC). El año pasado, MUG y nuestros aliados, tanto en la NPC como en la NEC, lograron abrir la NEC a una membresía amplia, en lugar de un modelo de cuadros más selectivo. Esta reforma posibilitó la expansión de la capacidad de la NEC, pero debemos reconocer que aún queda mucho por hacer para hacer realidad esta posibilidad. En la práctica, esto significa trabajar para integrar a los cientos de miembros de la NEC en proyectos prácticos, como el apoyo nacional específico para proyectos como la campaña de Zohran Mamdani; programas formales de capacitación y mentoría que reemplacen las relaciones informales basadas en las facciones; desarrollar procesos comunes para el trabajo electoral y las campañas que se alineen con nuestra política electoral nacional para los secciones, a fin de lograr coherencia en la práctica a nivel nacional/local; fortalecer la capacidad nacional de investigación en torno a cuestiones legislativas y de cumplimiento, y grupos de apoyo para que organizadores electorales en condiciones similares puedan discutir cómo organizarse con éxito y construir vínculos más profundos a nivel nacional.
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# ORGANIZACIÓN INDEPENDIENTE DE LA CLASE TRABAJADORA
58\. En DSA, los miembros del MUG dirigen grupos de lectura, campañas para la legislatura estatal, sentadas, huelgas de alquiler, coros, iniciativas electorales y grupos para la reforma sindical. Estamos construyendo una cultura alternativa en forma de espacios democráticos que crean el punto de partida de la política. Pero importa cómo hacemos política en las instituciones de la clase trabajadora. No creemos en hacer política en las instituciones de masas exclusivamente a través de cuestiones del mínimo común denominador que sean «amplia y profundamente sentidas». En este marco, nuestras victorias no se limitan a poner carne y patatas en el plato «para» la clase trabajadora, sino que amplían los círculos de concientización y conciencia política que sustentan un partido. Mediante la participación en huelgas de alquiler, los inquilinos no sólo consiguen un alquiler más bajo y unas condiciones de vida más seguras, sino que, con el colectivo de sus vecinos, reprenden la relación opresiva entre propietario e inquilino. Se convierten en la encarnación de esa visión experiencial alternativa.
59\. Desde la desindustrialización y las revueltas fiscales de los años 70, las ciudades dependen cada vez más de la reurbanización y la recalificación financiadas con exenciones fiscales para aumentar el valor de la propiedad y la base impositiva. Las ciudades están obligadas, mediante presupuestos equilibrados y topes fiscales, a financiarse mediante tasas regresivas, recortes presupuestarios y el espejismo de que el desarrollo inmobiliario catalizará una base impositiva más rica. A medida que la marea del levantamiento de George Floyd retrocede, las ciudades liberales se vuelcan ahora hacia una política de revanchismo urbano, promoviendo «soluciones» para los sin techo como una mayor carceralización, institucionalización, barridos y deportaciones. Al mismo tiempo, hay un esfuerzo concertado para crear un consenso interideológico sobre la promoción de la construcción de nuevas viviendas privadas a precio de mercado como «solución» a la crisis de la vivienda. El mercado debe ser libre, el pueblo debe ser disciplinado. En estos marcos, la organización de la clase trabajadora está ausente y los inquilinos son víctimas a las que hay que ayudar con leves «protecciones» mientras el capital moldea y controla sus barrios. Nuestra visión ve a los inquilinos como aquellos que no tienen control sobre sus hogares, y a los sindicatos de inquilinos como organismos para luchar por el control y la soberanía de la comunidad.
60\. Ante esta situación, la tarea de los sindicalistas socialistas de inquilinos es garantizar que el movimiento militante de inquilinos esté «unido por la unión y guiado por el conocimiento». Esto significa superar la aversión comprensible, pero equivocada, que existe entre muchos en nuestros sindicatos (y entre nuestras propias filas) a llevar a cabo campañas legislativas y electorales o a desafiar de cualquier otra forma el dominio de los propietarios-desarrolladores inmobiliarios en el ámbito estatal. Significa desarrollar un programa socialista coherente en torno a una política de vivienda que busque vincular la lucha por abordar las preocupaciones inmediatas más apremiantes y generalizadas de los inquilinos con el horizonte futuro de la conquista del poder político y la abolición de la relación de renta —un programa capaz de cuestionar el lugar hegemónico del fundamentalismo de mercado y el revanchismo urbano, tanto dentro de nuestro movimiento como en la conciencia del público en general. Por último, significa fortalecer lo local, los vínculos regionales y nacionales entre nuestras organizaciones en torno a un programa de este tipo y el desarrollo de órganos deliberativos y de coordinación a escalas cada vez mayores, órganos que involucren tanto a los líderes como a las bases del movimiento en esferas cada vez más amplias de lucha política y en niveles cada vez mayores de coherencia organizativa y estratégica. No basta con unirnos y apoyar a los inquilinos en sus organizaciones de lucha y luchas; como socialistas, es nuestra tarea *liderar* —aportar la claridad y los recursos organizativos necesarios para dar cohesión a esas organizaciones y elevar esas luchas al nivel de una organización y una lucha a escala nacional, capaces de enfrentar directamente y superar el poder de los terratenientes y los desarrolladores inmobiliarios desde sus cimientos en el Estado y el orden constitucional.
61\. Con el fin de llevar a cabo estas tareas, renovamos nuestro llamado, ya expresado en el documento «Tareas y Perspectivas» del año pasado, a la revitalización de la Comisión de Justicia de Vivienda (HJC) y le sumamos un llamado a una lucha más decidida, siguiendo las líneas aquí expuestas, dentro de nuestros sindicatos y secciones locales del DSA. Para convertir a la HJC en una fuerza capaz de unificar la lucha a nivel nacional, ampliar su oferta de apoyo organizativo y capacitación, y construir una unidad programática en todo el movimiento, se necesitan más organizadores comprometidos que le den prioridad frente a otras tareas, aunque esto implique un distanciamiento relativo del trabajo local durante un tiempo. Los organizadores socialistas de inquilinos deberían reunirse con sus compañeros de las distintas secciones locales y sindicatos para definir una división del trabajo que les permita dedicar tiempo y recursos al trabajo nacional sin ejercer una presión excesiva sobre esos proyectos locales. Las tareas de fortalecer nuestras organizaciones nacionales y locales pueden y deben ser complementarias, pero solo podrán serlo al máximo si dedicamos el tiempo y el esfuerzo necesarios a nivel nacional para construir la estructura que se requiere para dar mayor coherencia y ampliar nuestro trabajo local. Esto significa que el trabajo a nivel nacional debe ser una prioridad relativa para el próximo año si queremos ver que nuestros esfuerzos locales den todos sus frutos.
62\. Al mismo tiempo, para que el HJC pueda desempeñar el papel de clarificación y unificación del que hemos estado hablando aquí, no basta con simplemente aumentar la capacidad para su labor actual, sino que es necesario ampliar el alcance de esta labor en dos direcciones. La primera es hacia una mayor labor de educación política, agitación y propaganda, y el desarrollo de materiales que las secciones y los organizadores puedan utilizar para hacer lo mismo. La segunda es hacia la creación de un foro para las discusiones y debates estratégicos y programáticos que, en la actualidad, o bien no se están llevando a cabo al nivel que deberían, o bien se desarrollan de manera aislada y dispersa, sin una amplia visibilidad ni una participación recíproca. Una publicación podría ser una forma de abordar muchas de estas inquietudes al mismo tiempo, pero en este caso las formas no son tan importantes como el contenido, siempre y cuando las formas que se adopten estén centralizadas, sean accesibles y estén orientadas a contrarrestar la creciente ola de fundamentalismo de mercado, a fomentar el desarrollo del movimiento en su conjunto y a elaborar un programa socialista de vivienda en torno al cual dicho movimiento pueda unirse.
63\. En nuestros proyectos locales de organización de inquilinos, debemos centrarnos en fortalecer los vínculos entre organizaciones más allá de las fronteras geográficas, ampliar el alcance de nuestro trabajo para incluir tácticas políticas adecuadas e introducir consideraciones programáticas para el debate y la discusión. Además, no debemos rehuir identificarnos abiertamente como miembros de DSA al llevar a cabo nuestro trabajo dentro de nuestras organizaciones independientes y destacando la importancia de construir un partido socialista y de luchar por la democracia política para hacer realidad cualquier programa centrado en los inquilinos. Ya es hora de dejar de lado cualquier reticencia que aún nos quede a la hora de derribar las barreras entre nuestro trabajo y la forma en que nos vemos a nosotros mismos como miembros de la DSA y, como organizadores de inquilinos, trabajando activamente para incorporar a los inquilinos de base no solo a la propia DSA, sino también al proyecto de convertirla en un vehículo eficaz y democrático para la autoemancipación de la clase trabajadora.
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# ESTRATEGIA LABORAL
64.La historia del movimiento obrero en Estados Unidos no puede ni debe tratarse por separado de la historia de este país como colonia de colonos europeos y como potencia esclavista, ni de su condición activa como corazón palpitante de un vasto imperio global. La debilidad del movimiento obrero estadounidense -caracterizado hoy por una masa suelta de trabajadores atomizados no sólo desorganizados, sino *mal*organizados por el racismo, el chovinismo nacional y el individualismo pequeñoburgués- puede rastrearse a través de los cimientos materiales que han sentado estas historias. Si nuestro objetivo es unir al movimiento obrero con el movimiento socialista, nuestra estrategia obrera debe estar armada con un programa que pueda reconstituir el movimiento obrero estadounidense, por primera vez en su historia, sobre la base de la independencia de clase, la autodeterminación Negra e indígena y el internacionalismo.
65\. Desde la aprobación de la Ley Nacional de Relaciones Laborales (NLRA) en 1935, el trabajo ha estado mediado por el Estado. Esto ha garantizado su estabilidad, pero con la condición de vincular a los sindicatos a la reglamentación federal. Sin embargo, la ley no cubrió todos los sectores por igual; se excluyó a las y los trabajadores domésticos y agrícolas y a los «contratistas independientes». La Ley del Trabajo Ferroviario (1926) somete a los trabajadores de los ferrocarriles y las compañías aéreas a una supervisión más directa, que somete la negociación a un mediador designado por el gobierno y restringe aún más la capacidad de hacer huelga legalmente. También están restringidos los trabajadores públicos, incluidas las maestras, que se enfrentan a restricciones a la huelga en muchos estados. Este marco legal, desigualmente distribuido entre la clase trabajadora, supone un incentivo para que los sindicatos se unan a grandes coaliciones de políticos «pro-obreros». Para los dirigentes sindicales, esto significa codearse con diversos funcionarios del gobierno a cambio de escasas muestras de apoyo o respuestas legislativas a cuestiones de organización.
66\. Por supuesto, este enfoque de la política surgió en una época diferente, con condiciones drásticamente distintas. El recrudecimiento de las luchas obreras hasta 1936, ayudado por políticos con una desconocida mezcla de simpatía y miedo, condujo a la creación de la legislación laboral moderna, con los sindicatos apoyando en general este cambio hacia la legalidad. Esto supuso un cambio significativo respecto a la antigua política de la AFL de limitarse a organizar los oficios y oponerse a cualquier intervención o concesión gubernamental. En términos más generales, representaba la esperanza de que la mediación estatal pudiera conducir a una forma de democracia industrial a través de la presión externa de los trabajadores, incluso sin la presencia de un partido obrero políticamente independiente, dada la política de «frente popular» del CPUSA. Esta ilusión sigue coloreando la relación del movimiento obrero con el Estado hoy en día, a pesar de la Ley Taft-Hartley (1947), los juicios macartistas y las crisis económicas como el Volcker Shock.
67\. Desde finales de la década de 1970, la desindustrialización ha supuesto cambios transformadores en el proceso laboral, la exportación de la fabricación a gran escala y el desplazamiento hacia el sector de servicios han alterado la composición de la clase. Tanto los sindicatos de oficio como los industriales han sufrido las consecuencias de estas presiones económicas y de las consiguientes decisiones políticas, y el número de afiliados ha disminuido drásticamente. Su solución a esta crisis de organización ha sido la fusión «desde arriba» y el abandono de la organización sectorial en favor de muchos sindicatos de organización «general». Los años 90 y principios de los 2000 representaron el apogeo de esta tendencia. El «monstruo púrpura» de Andy Stern devoró a los sindicatos más pequeños y unió sindicatos nacionales ultraburocráticos y afiliaciones como el 32BJ y el ya desaparecido Sindicato de Trabajadores de Servicios. El SEIU de Stern también creó la federación Change to Win (Cambiar para Ganar) en un proceso impulsado por las rencillas interpersonales y la reorganización corporativa del trabajo en un modelo profesionalizado de organización de personal. La culminación de la era de las «megafusiones» fue la efímera unión de UNITE (fabricación textil) y HERE (sector hostelero) con el fin de generalizar el sindicato, evitando la muerte de UNITE por la hemorragia de la industria textil y proporcionando a HERE una muy necesaria inyección de efectivo a través de las cuotas y el control del Amalgamated Bank de UNITE.
68\. Estas fusiones sindicales crearon asociaciones de sindicatos locales, con una estructura verticalista, que se extendieron por una amplia zona geográfica. En lugar de funcionar como asociaciones de base, están dirigidas por un sector profesional de personal sindical liberal. En lugar de depender del poder de las cifras sindicales, el personal opera en nombre del sindicato mediante campañas corporativas cuyo éxito se basa en ofrecer favores a los políticos. El estilo de "organización por acuerdo" de los nuevos megasindicatos los animó a presionar a los políticos entrantes de la era Obama para que apoyaran la Ley de Libre Elección de los Empleados (EFCA), que habría consagrado el acuerdo de verificación de tarjetas de membresía sindical y eludido el modelo electoral típico de la NLRB utilizado anteriormente. A pesar de un intenso cabildeo, la EFCA y su sucesora, la Ley PRO, no lograron aprobarse bajo múltiples administraciones del partido Demócrata. La federación Change to Win, que prometió organización masiva "desde arriba" mediante una administración competente y un gran gasto, no cumplió sus promesas y el SEIU, con el rabo entre las piernas, ha recurrido a la AFL-CIO para capear el temporal de la administración Trump.
69\. En general, los sindicatos de trabajadores de la construcción han pasado de abarcar obras municipales casi integrales a proyectos de alto costo en el sector inmobiliario comercial. En este contexto, los sindicatos patronales se manifiestan en su forma más reaccionaria: los agentes comerciales ofrecen mano de obra altamente cualificada a la dirección de proyectos, fomentando a menudo la construcción de proyectos espurios como hoteles, estadios y otros inmuebles comerciales con el objetivo de mantener el empleo. Para los sindicatos de servicios, estos acuerdos secretos suelen generar acuerdos de verificación de tarjetas de membresía sindical y pactos de caballeros que intercambian contratos precarios por paz laboral. Para los agentes contratados de los sindicatos de trabajadores de la construcción, existe poco interés en organizar nuevos trabajadores mediante acuerdos, o en la organización tradicional del trabajo eventual. Algunos gremios se están quedando atrás con los cambios tecnológicos, como los caldereros; otros (albañiles, techadores y pintores) se niegan a organizar trabajadores que no estén directamente controlados por el contrato del agente contratado.
70\. A diferencia de UNITE o UAW durante la transición en la industria ligera y pesada, no hay intentos de superar la irrelevancia o el provincianismo y fusionarse en sindicatos intersectoriales o expandirse a sindicatos de organización general. El problema de la afiliación a los oficios se ve agravado por los aprendizajes insulares, aunque estos se han abierto en general en la última década tras muchos años de reclutamientos pequeños y selectivos. Los sectores desaprovechados de los oficios de la construcción realizan la gran mayoría del trabajo: la contratación privada, los servicios públicos, la construcción a pequeña escala y la mayoría de las viviendas residenciales se realizan en gran medida al margen de los sindicatos. Este trabajo también está organizado predominantemente por sectores de la clase menos representados por los oficios de la construcción, especialmente la mano de obra inmigrante y negra. Estas masas de trabajadores, jóvenes y potencialmente revitalizantes para el movimiento obrero de la construcción, son descuidadas e ignoradas por los burócratas de la vieja escuela, relegándolas a los trabajos temporales más duros y explotadores de su sector.
71\. La tendencia predominante de los sindicatos existentes se deriva de la estrategia de los burócratas de la vieja escuela, que prioriza el cretinismo legislativo sobre la organización de las bases. Estos burócratas se basan en las fusiones, los favores políticos y los fondos existentes, ignorando la creciente masa de trabajadores no organizados, que ahora constituyen el 90% de la fuerza laboral estadounidense. Sin embargo, esto sólo resulta en fracasos y reveses para el movimiento laboral. Organizar a los no organizados en sindicatos debe ser una prioridad absoluta y una responsabilidad fundamental de todos los sindicatos existentes; sin embargo, carece de fuerza política para sus altos mandos. Esto se basa en una diferencia política fundamental entre los socialistas y los administradores sindicales liberales. Solo la coordinación partidista entre el ataque de nuestros funcionarios electos a la legislación laboral antidemocrática que divide a la clase trabajadora y el ataque de nuestros organizadores sindicales a la dictadura en el lugar de trabajo puede ofrecer un camino a seguir que implique el aumento de la densidad sindical. Incluso si ofrecemos esta vía como DSA, los organizadores sindicales deben identificarse con la organización y luchar por el apoyo sindical a este proyecto de partido; esta es la única manera de que esta tarea se convierta en una verdadera prioridad organizativa para los sindicatos. La otra opción es que el movimiento sindical continúe su espiral descendente hacia la irrelevancia, facilitando que la clase capitalista aísle a los existentes miembros de sindicatos y los enfrente contra los trabajadores no organizados. Las campañas de sindicalización de la UAW en el Sur de Estados Unidos son un paso positivo en esa dirección, al igual que otras campañas nacionales como las de los trabajadores de Starbucks y Amazon. A pesar de la disminución de sus números, los sindicatos poseen enormes recursos, más de 13 mil millones de dólares en activos líquidos en conjunto, para invertir en nuevas campañas de sindicalización, pero o bien los descuidan como si no fuera una cuestión existencial o bien los malgastan priorizando las campañas electorales "pro-sindicales" sobre la sindicalización de los trabajadores. Los socialistas declarados deberían promover y liderar nuevas campañas de sindicalización para demostrar solidaridad con las masas trabajadoras, conectando su lucha contra las dictaduras en el lugar de trabajo con la lucha de DSA contra la dictadura de la clase capitalista.
72\. En la última década, se ha producido una nueva ola de acción sindical, con importantes huelgas como la de los docentes en estados republicanos y la huelga Ponerse de Pie del UAW. Sin embargo, a pesar de este aumento de la militancia, las cifras brutas del movimiento obrero aún se encuentran en su punto más bajo: las elecciones sindicales de la NLRB pueden estar aumentando, pero el tamaño general de la unidad de negociación es pequeño. Algunos sectores del movimiento obrero parecen estar liderando el camino, especialmente Starbucks Workers United y las diversas campañas de organización de Amazon, que han experimentado un auge en los últimos cuatro años. El espíritu de "organización por acuerdo" para legislar las victorias laborales regresó brevemente bajo la administración Biden como apoyo a la Ley PRO, pero se extinguió rápidamente. Ahora, la mayor lucha en el horizonte parece estar relacionada con la propuesta de Shawn Fain de una "huelga general" en 2028, coordinada por una alineación masiva de contratos en todas las industrias. No hay evidencia de que realmente se esté organizando, a pesar de los grandes pronunciamientos.
73\. Solo un partido socialista independiente puede sentar las bases de un movimiento obrero independiente. Gracias a la dedicación de sus organizadores abiertamente afiliados en los sindicatos y en el lugar de trabajo, el partido establece vínculos prácticos inmediatos con los trabajadores organizados. Mediante el apoyo que ofrece mediante legislación, apoyo a huelgas y agitación que desarrolla una conciencia sindical, en sintonía con el programa, el partido facilita una vía entre estos vínculos prácticos y sus intervenciones políticas, incluyendo la conquista del poder político. Establecer estos vínculos prácticos requiere, en primer lugar, una orientación del partido hacia la organización en el lugar de trabajo, lo que a su vez implica una organización sistemática del partido en el lugar de trabajo. Esto no significa lanzarse a plantar una bandera roja con resoluciones o asambleas electorales socialistas, sino más bien la organización de los miembros del partido en los mismos sectores y lugares de trabajo para desarrollar tácticas, estrategias laborales y análisis que orienten sus intervenciones. Todo esto conduce a cómo el partido logra el apoyo de los sindicatos: a través de las bases. La "afiliación", tema de debate en el grupo Pan y Rosas (Bread & Roses), simplemente implica la aprobación automática de la dirección sindical y conlleva una violación de la política de "un miembro, un voto", tan fundamental para la democracia partidaria. En cambio, nuestro enfoque debe basarse en debates políticos con los trabajadores, derivados de los vínculos prácticos que forjamos a través de nuestra organización. El partido que construimos debe ser un partido socialista, unido por un programa para la conquista del poder político por parte de todo el proletariado internacional, no un partido laboral de sindicatos afiliados formalmente, dominado por intereses locales, economicistas o social-chovinistas.
74\. Dos estrategias sindicales predominan en el movimiento socialista: el enfoque sectario de la “izquierda” y el enfoque neutral de la derecha. La orientación sectaria se da en grupos "sindicales rojos", donde los socialistas se involucran en la agitación como parte de una campaña permanente de oposición pura dentro de sus sindicatos. Esto alcanza su punto álgido durante las campañas por los contratos, donde el "grupo rojo" busca provocar y mantener una huelga indefinidamente para catalizar el movimiento obrero. Sin embargo, estos suelen ser pequeños grupos de radicales y unas pocas bases frustradas que buscan movilizar a la clase desde afuera, no una organización democrática que busca obtener una mayoría. Esto está directamente relacionado con la concepción sectaria del partido: el "estado mayor de la revolución" capaz de gestionar a la masa de trabajadores a través de sus pequeños grupos profesionalizados durante un levantamiento revolucionario. Vemos esto en Teamsters Mobilize, que despegó junto con la lucha por el contrato de UPS de 2023, oponiéndose a O'Brien y al TDU.
75\. La postura de la derecha, el neutralismo, es la práctica actual de DSA en el movimiento obrero. En la práctica, se manifiesta como la tendencia a evitar las grandes divisiones políticas dentro de los sindicatos y, por extensión, a evitar un enfoque sistemático en ganar la adhesión de las bases al partido. En los debates estratégicos, esto se ejemplifica con figuras como Jeremy Gong, quien ve al movimiento obrero como un campo independiente y separado del partido que lo precede en términos de estrategia, a pesar de sus numerosas salvedades individuales. Sin la opción de una oposición socialista democrática, los trabajadores organizados a través de la estrategia de base se enfrentan a los callejones sin salida de la asfixia continua bajo el Partido Demócrata, las falsas promesas del Partido Republicano o un compromiso apolítico y sisífico de organizarse para recrear un New Deal.
76\. La alternativa no es intentar tomar el control del movimiento obrero como una minoría "militante" ni romper con las decisiones democráticas de las bases. En cambio, aprovechamos pacientemente cada lucha como una oportunidad para contrastar el programa y la práctica del Socialismo Democrático con todos los demás dentro del movimiento obrero, presentándonos como los luchadores más consecuentes de este último. Para promover la práctica del Socialismo Democrático en el movimiento obrero, necesitamos una Comisión Nacional del Trabajo (CNL) sólida. El estado actual de la CNL es disfuncional incluso para las funciones básicas de coordinación práctica y apoyo a la organización sindical de las secciones. Si bien está compuesta por cientos de organizadores obreros dedicados, su enfoque se centra principalmente en aspectos externos a la Comisión. Las políticas neutralistas desvían la atención práctica casi por completo de la construcción sistemática de conexiones orgánicas entre el partido y el lugar de trabajo, lo que lleva a descuidar organismos como la CNL. Para prosperar como organismo de apoyo y coordinación de nuestras luchas laborales, la CNL debe centrar su atención principal en la formación de secciones coordinadoras para los sectores e industrias en los que los miembros del DSA están organizando.
77\. Las secciones industriales del NLC deben ser el punto de partida de nuestras intervenciones políticas en el ámbito laboral. A través de estos grupos, los miembros de la DSA pueden estudiar la estructura y las prácticas de su sector, mapear los principales lugares de trabajo y evaluar el estado del sindicalismo para desarrollar intervenciones efectivas. Podemos brindar educación sobre la historia industrial y sindical, tanto en el taller como a través de reuniones al estilo de Notas Laborales (Labor Notes), y desarrollar literatura que aborde las prácticas y maniobras empresariales de los líderes empresariales. Los trabajadores pueden desarrollar políticas e intervenciones políticas utilizando la investigación y el conocimiento práctico. Más importante aún, esto prepara a la clase para desarrollar las habilidades y la experiencia necesarias para administrar la sociedad colectivamente. Con el apoyo del NLC, las secciones pueden apoyar el desarrollo de las secciones industriales mediante la creación de filiales en los centros de trabajo, animando a los miembros de las secciones a aceptar empleos en sectores estratégicos y coordinando intervenciones políticas en el ámbito laboral.
78\. Las tácticas variarán naturalmente entre sectores y lugares de trabajo. Los boletines laborales y la educación política pueden ayudar a desarrollar una cultura de base donde los trabajadores piensen más allá de la monotonía del trabajo y se enfoquen en el reino y la administración colectiva de la economía. Dependiendo de las circunstancias, podemos construir caucus amplios basados en la democracia y la militancia sindical, y presentar candidaturas para líderes dentro del caucus para desafiar el mal liderazgo sindical, o podemos intervenir en caucus existentes abogando por la acción política independiente. No basta con simplemente pintar de rojo a sindicatos vaciados. Nuestro objetivo es obtener el respaldo a la acción política organizada por el partido mediante reuniones de la base, no mediante la aprobación automática de la dirección. A través de nuestras intervenciones, construiremos un compromiso con el sindicalismo industrial y la organización de los no sindicalizados.
79\. Somos un pequeño grupo de socialistas que interviene en un movimiento obrero debilitado y a menudo ineficaz, en condiciones en las que amplios sectores de la clase trabajadora permanecen desorganizados. En muchos casos, nuestras tareas inmediatas son básicas: luchar por la existencia de un sindicato, por el derecho a acceder a nuestros contratos sindicales o por celebrar reuniones sindicales regulares. A medida que eduquemos, organicemos y luchemos contra la patronal, nuestro número crecerá. Las amplias asambleas sindicales organizadas sobre la base de la democracia sindical básica se verán eclipsadas por la expansión de las secciones industriales socialistas en sindicatos verdaderamente democráticos, a medida que los trabajadores se afilien al propio partido y asuman las reivindicaciones del socialismo democrático. Esta vanguardia de masas transformará sus sindicatos en órganos de lucha de clases, unidos por su partido y su programa para una nueva república. Esta fusión de ideas y lucha comienza con nuestra intervención como socialistas, que es, por necesidad, explícita y abiertamente política.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Podcast: Light & Airwaves
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/podcast-light-airwaves/
Last updated: 2026-09-09T01:25:15.000Z
## **Like Light & Air? Listen to Light & Airwaves wherever you listen to your Podcasts!**
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---
### Light & Airwaves
#### America at 250: The Ongoing Struggle for Democracy and Equal Rights with Aziz Rana
September 2, 2026 · 46:51
#### Siobhan McDonough on the Supreme Court, the Bill of Rights, and Creating Majorities
August 26, 2026 · 32:51
#### Which Way to a Partyist Labor Strategy in DSA?
August 19, 2026 · 2:06:45
#### Cliff Connolly on Visions of Democracy and DSA's Workers Deserve More Program
August 12, 2026 · 50:35
#### Dr. Gerald Horne on W. E. B. Du Bois and the Significance of Black Reconstruction
August 5, 2026 · 51:08
#### Jenna Grove on MUG's Origins, Abolitionism, and Fighting the Constitution
July 29, 2026 · 41:03
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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## Posts
### The State of the Union: Congressional Legislation, June-August 2026
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-state-of-the-union-congressional-legislation-june-august-2026/
Last updated: 2026-09-13T15:00:34.000Z
In this quarterly series, we will analyze important legislation that has recently become law, as well as future legislation to keep an eye out for. We will also go in-depth on particular laws that deserve more attention. This month, those bills are the 21st Century ROAD to Housing Act (H.R.6644), a bipartisan housing and development reform, and the SAVE America Act, Trump’s bid to gut voting rights and steal the Midterm elections, which has yet to become law. We will briefly describe each of the passed laws and discuss why Congress is so slow and seemingly always in recess. DSA’s incoming Congressional bench will need to leverage proactive strategy in order to navigate the gridlocked landscape of the American federal government.
### **Bills Become Law**
In the months of June through August, a grand total of seven pieces of legislation passed through both chambers of Congress and were signed into law by the President. [S.1003](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/1003?s=3&r=2&ref=marxistunity.com), “Lulu’s Law,” permits broadcasting wireless emergency alerts in the event of shark attacks. [S.254](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/254?s=3&r=3&ref=marxistunity.com), the “ARTIST Act,” loosens regulations on producing ivory products by Alaskan Natives. [H.R.3490](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/3490?s=3&r=5&ref=marxistunity.com) tasks the Government Accountability Office with starting an impact study on esophageal cancer and related healthcare spending for federal employees and retirees diagnosed with such cancer under the Federal Employees Health Benefits Program (FEHBP). [S.2393](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/2393?s=3&r=6&ref=marxistunity.com) allows the Department of Veterans Affairs to carry out major medical facility projects in St. Louis during FY2026\. Finally, [S.629](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/senate-bill/629?s=4&r=2&ref=marxistunity.com) expands relief eligibility for agricultural producers and owners of forest land impacted by natural disasters.
[S.2](https://rules.house.gov/bill/119/s-2?ref=marxistunity.com), the “Secure America Act” authorizes an additional $70 billion in funding for the Department of Homeland Security. This law further grants means and funds for hiring and training additional Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) Agents. This comes on the coattails of the Republican Party and Trump administration's program of mass deportation and domestic terrorism. And with the recent [Supreme Court ruling](https://www.npr.org/2026/06/25/nx-s1-5844292/supreme-court-syrian-haitian-tps?ref=marxistunity.com) that Temporary Protective Status for Haitian and Syrian refugees can be revoked, we should expect an increase in ICE terror in the coming year.
### **Hardly Working**
First we must explain why only seven laws were passed throughout the entire season. Congress takes two extended breaks during the summer, but this does not tell the whole story. Even taking recesses into account, we would still expect legislation to keep pace with previous sessions. Yet, the current Congress has been one of the slowest on record. When Republicans had a full trifecta during the 115th Congress, they produced 329 bills that became law. In the current 119th Congress, by comparison, Republicans have only legislated 106 bills into law.
There are a number of reasons for this ineffectiveness. First, the power of the executive branch since Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) has increased dramatically. This means more executive orders. Second, Congress’s bicameral structure increases the time it takes for a bill to become law and the likelihood it will fail. Even if one of the chambers agrees unanimously on a bill, the other chamber can effectively enforce a veto. Third, internal strife within the traditional political parties—particularly within the Republican Party—has given a small minority control over all legislative actions. As some may remember, at the start of the 118th Congress the House Speaker election went on for 15 ballots before Kevin McCarthy was elected by a slim majority. McCarthy was then unceremoniously retired in October 2023, and his successor, Mike Johnson, was elected after four ballots. The election of a Speaker has not been so contentious since 1923, when the election took a total of nine ballots.
If the Democrats take control of the legislative branch in 2029, they will face the same issues. Because gridlock is the norm, we should expect severe limitations for the prospects of our DSA cadre members and authentic progressives to enact their legislative goals. All elected socialists should understand how our constitutional system works. We should also consider how Socialists in Office (SIOs) might navigate a political system where inaction is the norm.
### **21st Century ROAD to Housing Act**
The price of a new home has hit an [all-time high](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/u-s-home-prices-hit-an-all-time-high-as-sales-slow-and-mortgage-rates-rise?ref=marxistunity.com). Property sales are slowing down. A massive [49% of Adults](https://fortune.com/2026/07/09/half-young-adults-live-home-financial-support-parents/?ref=marxistunity.com) under 30 are living with their parents. At a time like this, one would expect our government to have a solution. The Democratic Party establishment has its answer: the YIMBYism pushed by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson’s “Abundance” project. Guided by the logic of capital, Democrats in “safe” blue states with declining rates of home ownership are pushing for relaxed zoning laws and environmental protections. They want skyscrapers full of apartments, without care that this “solution” exacerbates the gentrification of historic neighborhoods and communities of color. The Democrats are chasing profits.
Congress’s bipartisan solution is the "21st Century ROAD to Housing Act." There are some positive aspects of this law that any socialist should hope to expand upon. First, the law caps the number of housing units that an individual landlord or a housing corporation can own at 350\. This is certainly a band-aid, but it provides an answer to a real problem: the more housing units a single lessor controls, the poorer the quality of those units tends to be. Second, the bill’s whole home repairs program allows low- and moderate-income homeowners and small landlords to obtain grants for essential repairs. This program has its origins in the “Whole-Home Repairs” law proposed by DSA Pennsylvania State Senator Nikil Saval.
But the Act also has severe downsides. First, it exempts infill housing developments (housing built on empty lots) from federal environmental review requirements, increasing the likelihood that a development will harm the surrounding ecosystem and community. Second, the law cuts federal funding for construction projects after a certain period of time. This means that the construction of new housing units will need to be faster. With tighter deadlines to construct new units, bosses will hound their workers and increase the likelihood of a workplace accident. These tight deadlines will put workers at risk and damage the quality of their work.
Socialists do not believe that building new housing should come at the expense of environmental regulation, safe building standards, and tenant control in order to further subsidize landlordism. As DSA’s recent [Workers Deserve More](https://program.dsausa.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) program states, we in DSA advocate for housing as a human right, public ownership of social housing, strict regulation of investment properties, universal rent control, and guaranteed right to counsel for all tenants, in addition to the strengthening of tenant unions.
### **Trump’s Pursuit of the SAVE America Act**
Trump is determined to pass the "[SAVE America Act](https://www.congress.gov/bill/119th-congress/house-bill/7296?ref=marxistunity.com)." He hasn’t faced any real hurdles in the House, where Republicans—having already passed the previous version of this bill, the SAVE Act—appear sympathetic. But he faces issues in the Senate.
Trump’s two main obstacles are the filibuster and Republican dissenters. The dissenters seem to be the usual bunch, including Senator Susan Collins of Maine, Senators Lisa Murkowski and Dan Sullivan of Alaska, and Senator Jon Husted of Ohio (an unexpected addition). Their ideological motivations for dissent may vary, but for the most part (except Murkowski), they each face competitive elections in November. They are trying to save their political careers. But the filibuster is the real issue for Trump. Senate Majority Leader John Thune firmly believes he doesn’t have the 51 votes needed to activate the “nuclear option” and end the filibuster. As of the first week of August, the Save America Act has stalled in the Senate.
Why is it so important for Trump to pass the SAVE America Act as soon as possible? The answer is simple: Republicans want to steal elections, including the upcoming midterms. If it becomes law, it would be the greatest attack on voting rights since the introduction of Jim Crow laws in the South. Its draconian features would disenfranchise an astounding number of people, particularly affecting Black and minority communities’ ability to vote.
First, the SAVE Act would create a [de facto poll tax](https://naacp.org/actions/tell-congress-vote-no-save-act?ref=marxistunity.com). Henceforth, all voters would need to present a valid form of identification, such as a passport or driver’s license. Only people who can pay for and obtain an ID would be able to vote. Document fees are expensive. It costs at least $165 to apply for a valid passport, not to mention the time and labor needed to pass through other bureaucratic hoops. Married women with a new last name, college students living out of state, and transgender people would all need to update their forms of identification in order to be able to vote.
The SAVE Act would also require that states hand over their voter rolls to the Department of Homeland Security so that it can run information through its [citizenship verification tool.](https://www.brennancenter.org/our-work/analysis-opinion/new-save-act-bills-would-still-block-millions-americans-voting?ref=marxistunity.com) It would also end universal mail-in voting, limiting suffrage in up to eight states and the District of Columbia. As Trump's campaign against voting rights heats up, the undemocratic features of our political system appear in starker relief. Socialists will need to take the lead to protect and expand the limited political rights granted to workers in the United States.
### **Workers Deserve More**
DSA’s new program offers various alternatives to some of the legislation presented in this piece, including alternative solutions to the affordable housing crisis; the protection of immigrants’ rights; the expansion, protection, and extension of voting rights in general and for all permanent US residents and incarcerated people. Most importantly, the program presents a blueprint for an entirely new constitutional system.
Without Workers Deserve More as a minimum program, our incoming Socialists in Office (SIOs) will be left out in the wilderness and without a concrete basis from which to advocate for the emancipation of the working class. The minimum program is what will help our SIOs articulate demands for the betterment of workers. But we must remember: The working class as a whole must be at the vanguard of the struggle for democracy and socialism, not only our elected officials. As [Marx and Engels](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1879/09/17.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) once said, “The emancipation of the working class must be the work of the working class itself.” Our presence in Congress is a necessary but insufficient beachhead for a wholesale assault on our existing system of government.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The Wobblies, a play in two acts
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-wobblies-a-play-in-two-acts/
Last updated: 2026-09-07T19:04:09.000Z
As you read this, concentration camps are going up all over this country. Detention centers, to detain over [65,000 immigrants](https://tracreports.org/immigration/quickfacts/?ref=marxistunity.com). They will then be shipped off to our political prison in El Salvador, or locations in Africa, or anywhere in the world, with the point precisely being the cruelty to the person. While this is happening, our president Donald Trump has actualized his consistent call for the arrest of his political enemies, from the[ Prairieland 19 ](https://www.marxistunity.com/stand-with-the-prairieland-19/)arrested for organizing a protest against ICE, to the [15 arrested in Minnesota ](https://abcnews.com/US/wireStory/documents-show-federal-surveillance-operation-minnesota-targeted-progressive-135630659?ref=marxistunity.com)connected to protesting ICE, to the [Olympic swimmer who revealed ](https://abcnews.com/US/klete-keller-sentencing-jan-6-capitol-riot/story?id=105310848&ref=marxistunity.com)Trump’s reflecting pool was falling apart. Each one of these peoples’ lives, as well as the lives of their families, friends, and loved ones, are being needlessly ruined by a president who thinks he can lock up the organic disapproval people have of his regime.
This is not the first time this has happened. This Labor Day, we are re-publishing *The Wobblies* in full, to show the how the history the labor movement has always been a series of encounters between the organization of labor on the one hand and the agents of capital and the state on the other. *The Wobblies* was published simultaneous to an oral history and [documentary](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K7fDSzQcIuE&t=1082s&ref=marxistunity.com) on the subject, showing the history of the labor movement centered around the trial of William Haywood and the International Workers of the World by the US government at the end of the First World War. The play itself is a hoot, almost perfectly made for a DSA member, with a musical segment and a prop-work segment detailing the labor theory of value, as well as so much baseball history. But more than that, the play illustrates something we all are slowly forced to understand as socialists: whenever workers start winning, the state shows up in force.
Individuals or whole groups are arrested and kept on trial, or not given a trial, as long as it takes. Every political prisoner is a threat to the rest of us-- a warning that if you stand up, if you fight for your fellow man, you will be locked up, your struggle will be dismantled, your life will be ruined.
Those political prisoners then place a constraint on the rest of us. We saw this in the Colorado labor wars, where a referendum enforcing an eight hour day was put down by the state Supreme Court and then ignored by legislators and successfully beaten out of the miners by company thugs. We see this later in the Lawrence strike, where three organizers were held in jail long after the strike was over, forcing the IWW to raise tens of thousands of dollars and threaten further action to get them out as their gains in the Lawrence textile industry were slowly washed away. This is not even to mention the tens of thousands of unionists who lost their lives over the 19th and 20th century to strikebreakers, Pinkertons, industry police, state troopers. Every political prisoner is a limit on all of our freedom.
We also see, throughout the play, William Haywood desperately trying to work within the bounds of the system created by all of these imprisonments. He goes to men being suppressed by the mercenaries of the Colorado copper companies and begs them not to use militant action. He tries to avoid the issue of World War 1 even while he was on trial because of it. He did this because political imprisonment makes one into a victim, because he knew that if all of these things could prevent the state from taking even a handful of lives away from us it might be worth it. He was wrong, but we end the play without an idea of who was right. If state repression were a solved problem, we would live in a very different world. The questions raised by these events a century ago, by this play from 50 years ago, can only be answered by us, here and now.
\-J Allen, 9.7.26
# **The Wobblies, Act One**
**by Stewart Bird and Deborah Shaffer**
*Cast of Characters*
**THE HEROES**
Big Bill Haywood—The stubborn, proud, agitational, agitating, loud mouth, larger than life and pretty tall too, founding member and leader of the IWW.
J.T. “Red” Doran—Workers Professor of Economics of the IWW, author of several notable pamphlets and articles including “[On the Road to Power](https://revolutionsnewsstand.com/2023/05/10/on-the-road-to-power-by-jt-red-doran-from-the-voice-of-the-people-new-orleans-vol-2-no-31-august-7-1913/?ref=marxistunity.com)” about the possibilities of organizing electrical workers.
George Francis Vanderveer—Bleeding heart ‘counsel of the damned’, got his start defending the[ civil liberties of Seattle’s mob](https://revolutionsnewsstand.com/2023/05/10/on-the-road-to-power-by-jt-red-doran-from-the-voice-of-the-people-new-orleans-vol-2-no-31-august-7-1913/?ref=marxistunity.com).
Clarence Darrow--Founder of the ACLU, who during his career defended Eugene Debs, labor organizers, racial justice organizers, and the theory of evolution
THE INTERNATIONAL WORKERS OF THE WORLD—At its peak.
THE WORKING CLASS OF THE WORLD—In all its ingenuity and idiocy
**THE JUDGE**
Kenesaw Mountain Landis—Named after the battle of Kennesaw Mountain, the first commissioner of baseball and the levier of the heaviest fine ever given to a US company in 1909, $29,240,000 to Standard Oil for price fixing. By 1918 Standard Oil had been acquitted of the fine. Later goes on to clean up baseball, ending some level of graft and ensuring it would remain segregated into the 1950s.
**THE VILLAINS**
Frank K Nebeker—Attorney for the railroads, prominent member of the Democratic National Committee
J. Edgar Hoover—Hard working wunderkind who, now at 24, was the youngest man ever selected to haunt all friends of freedom and socialism in this country
THE EMPIRE OF CAPITAL—In all its cruelty
### **Scene One: Cook County Courthouse, Chicago, Ill. 1918.**
*(A scrim covers the stage at the apron. As the house lights go down a slideshow is projected on the scrim. The soundtrack is synchronized with the slides. The slides begin with working conditions and union organizing 1900-1918\. The music is ragtime; it changes to George M. Cohan and we see recruiting posters, soldiers marching, troop ships and scenes of the war in Europe. The music changes to IWW songs and we see pictures of workers, lumberjacks, farm hands, children in textile mills, organizers, demonstrators, picket lines, police troops and arrests. Finally we see newspaper headlines; the following voiceover is heard on the soundtrack. The slides continue of jail scenes, Chicago 1918, and headlines about the trial. The last slide is a rendering of the set.)*
**Jailer**: What’s your name?
**IWW Voice 1**: Sam Scarlet.
**Jailer**: What’s your religion?
**IWW Voice 1**: The IWW.
**Jailer**: That ain’t no religion.
**IWW voice 1**: It’s the only one I got.
**Jailer**: Who’s your next of kin?
**IWW Voice 2:** Don’t have any.
**Jailer:** Well, who’s your best friend?
**IWW Voice 2:** Big Bill Haywood.
**Jailer**: He’s in here with you. He can’t help you.
**IWW voice 2:** He’s still my best friend.
**Jailer:** What’s your nationality?
**IWW voice 1:** None.
**Jailer:** Well, what country are you a citizen of?
**IWW voice 1:** I’m a citizen of industry.
**Jailer:** Where is your home?
**IWW voice 2:** Cook County Jail.
**Jailer:** Before that?
**IWW voice 2:** County jail, Cleveland, Ohio.
**Jailer:** And before that?
**IWW voice 2:** City Jail, Akron, Ohio.
**Jailer:** Look, are you a citizen?
**IWW voice 2:** No, I’m an Industrial Worker of the World.
*(We hear a jail door slam shut. The slide on the scrim fades and the lights come up behind the scrim. We see Nebeker and Venderveer flanking a prospective juror. The juror does not answer but turns to each attorney as he speaks)*
**Vanderveer:** Do you believe in slavery? That is, do you believe in chattel slavery, where the boss owns the worker, body and soul?
**Nebeker**: Do you believe in the wage system and the social system as it is now organized?
**Vanderveer**: Do you agree that most prostitution is caused because women in industry do not get living wages? Do you recognize the right of people to rebel against this injustice?
**Nebeker:** Have you any sympathy with any organization that seeks to overthrow the institutions of this country or to violate its laws?
**Vanderveer:** Do you believe in the right of the people to govern themselves and to have a voice in this government?
**Nebeker:** Do you believe that free speech gives anyone the right to advocate the breaking of the law?
**Vanderveer:** Do you believe that industry should make the laws for people to live by?
**Nebeke**r: Were you in favor of the declaration of war against the Imperial German Government?
**Vanderveer:** Well, were you?
*(The JUROR states first at one lawyer and then at the other, afraid to give any response)*
**Nebeker:** I accept him.
**Vanderveer:** So do I.
*(Judge Landis who had been watching the proceeding from the perch on the bench bangs his gavel. He is very mobile, frequently moving around the courtroom, sitting within the prosecutor the defense and the jury. He removes his robes on Nebeker’s next line and we see him in suspenders and shirt sleeves during the rest of the trial. The scrim opens.)*
**Landis:** The federal district court of the First District, Chicago, Illinois, this day April first, 1918 is now in session. The case of the United States vs. William D. Haywood, et al. Having heard the reading of the charges...Mr.Nebeker? ...proceed.
**Nebeker**: May it please the court, gentlemen of the jury, this is not a flippant trial, this is not a minor trial, this is not the trial of a patriotic labor union, for the IWW can in no way be considered a labor union. It is in fact a criminal conspiracy which has obstructed the prosecution of the war against Imperial Germany. We shall prove that the IWW...
**Landis**: Mr.Nebeker, could you speak up please?
**Nebeker**: WE SHALL PROVE that the IWW is guilty of these things, gentlemen of the jury. Beyond the shadow of a doubt...Now the first charge let me enumerate...
*(Nebeker continues in pantomime; the narrator enters. He is a middle-aged reporter; whenever he enters the set action continues in pantomime and he speaks to the audience.)*
**Narrator:** Beyond the shadow of a doubt, you know it’s funny what you remember and what you forget. Now I usually can’t remember dates for nothing, anything to do with numbers, but can remember everyone one of Walter Johnson’s 56 consecutive scoreless innings in 1913 and Hippo Vaughn’s earner run average for 1917, an incredible 1.74; you all remember Hippo, he was probably the greatest and certainly the biggest pitcher in baseball. I watched him pitch for the Cubs against Boston, he had a screwball that looked like a figure eight.
But ask me today’s date or when Arch Duke Ferdinand was assassinated or even why, I couldn’t tell ya. Now for me that’s a liability, I’m a reporter, cover sports and politics. Sports are a lot more exciting...except when the Wobblies were involved, they were like a fine baseball team, a lot of spirit, a lot of hussle, a lot of guts.
....and everyone remembers Ty Cobb, they can tell you all his statistics, there are people who can tell you his batting average for 1911, 420, or how many bases he stole in 1915 (96), but who remembers that one eyed giant over there, Bill Haywood, to me he was just as great; it’s a shame he didn’t go into baseball, besides knocking the cover off the ball, there would’ve been one hell of a player’s union.
It’s a good thing the trial didn’t overlap with the World Series, ‘cause Judge Landis had a private box right behind first base, Wrigley Field, and he would have adjourned the trial for sure. There he sits, a small man on a huge bench, a wasted man with untidy hair, the face of Andrew Jackson, three years dead. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, named for a great civil war battle. It was Landis who fined Standard Oil 39,000,000 for taking kick-backs from the railroads. Of course, none of it was ever paid. He conducted this trial, like most of his trials, with the formality of a bar-room brawl.
Yeah! It’s funny what you remember. I’ll never forget that the day this trial started, One April 1918, April Fool’s Day; you should have seen that courtroom, I doubt if there’s been a sight like it. One hundred and one men, lumberjacks, harvest hands, miners poets, and they all believe the wealth of the land belongs to him who creates it and that’s what got them in trouble. It was like an all-star team of radicals. It was more like a convention than a trial, half the time, I didn’t know who was trying who.
*(Nebeker picks up at the end of the speech and is addressing the jury, the narrator exits)*
**Nebeke**r: ...and so, gentlemen of the jury, having proven these things to you, I shall expect, I shall demand a verdict of guilty on each and every charge for each and every defendant, for we are locked in a Great War in Europe and to allow this kind of treason at home shall surely prove to our great disadvantage in the trenches of France, I thank you.
**Landis**: Thank you, counselor....Mr.Vanderveer? Does the defense wish to present an opening argument now?
**Vanderveer**: Yes we do, thank you, Your Honor. Let me open by saying that this case is unusual. It is supposed to be a case against William Dudley Haywood and a great number of other men that you’ve probably never heard of by name...100 other men, to be exact. Yet, in reality, this is not so. In reality, it is the purpose of the prosecution to destroy the union with which these men are connected. In simple terms, let me tell you what the defendants are charged with: conspiring to hamper the war efforts...conspiring...I’m curious to see how our esteemed prosecutor will prove this, since most of these men had not even met prior to their arrest. The prosecutor will also tell you the IWW is conspiring to destroy our government, but that is not so either. I want you to keep your mind on this one point, on the question of whether or not the purpose of this organization is to destroy the government or merely to change an industrial system which ought to be independent of our government...which ought to be under the control of the workers. We now live in what is considered the wealthiest nation in the world. But it is a nation in which 2% of the people own over 2/3 of all of its wealth. A nation in which 8/10 workers are utterly unable to support their families and educate their children on a plane of civic decency. Why is this, you might ask? Might it be because the monopolies and trusts are able to hoard huge profits for themselves and yet not pay a living wage?
**Nebeker**: I object, your honor. General industrial conditions are not involved in this case at all. Whatever those conditions are, they are based upon the law.
**Landis**: Overruled. Continue, Mr.Vanderveer.
**Vanderveer:** Thank you, Your Honor...a nation in which one man, reputed to be worth a billion dollars, owns more of the wealth of this country than two and a half million of the poorer families.
**Nebeker**: I object! How can the court allow counsel to defame one of the leading citizens of our country?
**Landis**: Sustained. Please stick to the issue, counselor.
**Vanderveer:** Of course...I’ll close by answering the charge that I’m certain the prosecution will return to again and again, in many guises. The charges that the IWW is not patriotic. Now if patriotism means to wave flags from the housetops and then profiteer, if patriotism means one must believe in war as the best way of settling things....that the wholesale slaughter of people is right...then the IWW is unpatriotic. But if patriotism is the belief in the people of the nation and the hope for their betterment, and the willingness of the people to work and fight and die for that betterment, then the IWW is patriotic without peer. These men are guilty of nothing more thna belonging to a labor union, a labor union that recognizes that this war is not being fought to keep the world safe for democracy but merely to expand industrial markets; men are dying right now, will continue to die simply to make the rich, richer....the IWW believes that if all workers recognized that, they would refuse to fight and there could be no war. Thank you.
**Landis**: Prepare to call your first witness, Mr.Vanderveer.
*(Vanderveer moves to the defense table)*
**Haywood:** Nice going, Van.
**Doran:** Yeah, great....
**Vanderveer**: Well, it’s a start.
**Doran**: Towards what? When you start something you gotta be going somewhere.
**Haywood**: What the hell are you talking about now?
**Doran**: I’m talking about a silent defense, no talking, not a word...let’s at least try to keep our self respect.
**Haywood**: Doran, you couldn’t keep your mouth shut for 5 minutes.
**Doran**: If you participate in it, you’re party to it, right?
**Vanderveer**: Don’t worry Red, just stick to the defense strategy.
**Doran**: Look, I’m tired of this defense strategy crap. You got me to cut my hair, shave off my beard, I’m sitting here in somebody else’s suit...
**Haywood:** What’s a matter, you don’t like the cut, maybe we can take it in a little.... (indicating around Red’s neck)
**Doran**: What a joke...you know this whole thing’s being run from Washington
**Haywood**: Would you rather have it run from Wall Street?
**Doran**: That’s one hell of a choice.
**Vanderveer**: Listen, you guys, we got no problems, why half the gallery is filled with my creditors, waiting for me to win this case so they can get paid.
**Doran**: I hope you know where the backdoor is...sap.
*(Vanderveer shakes his head and walks to the exhibits. Landis now in shirt sleeves and suspenders comes over to the defense table)*
**Landis**: How you guys doing?
*(Doran is like stone, continuing to read his paper)*
**Haywood**: Hey judge, about this circus parade with the grub....
**Landis**: (in a congenial, helpful manner) Listen William, I’m gonna cut that out, there’s no need for you fellows to be marched through the streets in shackles just to get lunch. We don’t need to put on a show for those lunatics out there. From now on you eat at the courthouse. And if there are any complaints about the food or anything else, just tell Vanderveer and I will personally take care of it.
**Haywood**: That’s mighty considerate, Judge.
**Landis**: Don’t mention it. (Looking at Doran) Who’s throwing for Boston today? DOORen.
*(Doran hands Landis the paper)*
**Doran**: DoorANN, judge, it’s DoorANN. (to Haywood) Where are you and your friend lunching today, Bill?
**Haywood**: Ach! Get off my back, DOORen!
*(Vanderveer returns to table)*
**Vanderveer**: Well, you ready Bill? You’re on next.
*(Haywood gives him a thumbs up sign but doesn’t look that good)*
**Vanderveer**: What’s a matter Bill? Don’t tell me Red’s getting to you?
**Haywood**: Well if you'd been in a cell with him for eight months...he’s got his head stuck in the sand.
**Doran**: You’re the ostrich, sap....I know a necktie party when I see one.
**Haywood**: The problem with you, Doran, is that you can only see things one way, and right now it’s the wrong way.
**Vanderveer**: I call William D. Haywood, for the defense.
*(Haywood moves to the stand)*
**Doran**: Wrong way for who, you or us?
*(Haywood hesitates but continues to the witness chair. Haywood is sworn in and takes the stand)*
**Vanderveer**: Your name is William D. Haywood?
**Haywood**: Yes, sir.
**Vanderveer**: How old are you?
**Haywood**: Forty Nine.
**Vanderveer**: You are now General Secretary of the Industrial Workers of the World?
**Haywood**: Yes, sir.
**Vanderveer**: How long have you occupied that position?
**Haywood**: Three years.
**Vanderveer**: What line of work have you followed, Mr. Haywood?
**Haywood**: Mining, principally.
**Vanderveer**: At what age did you start out in the world to make your own living?
**Haywood**: You mean when I first began working?
**Vanderveer**: Yes.
**Haywood**: Well, I was still living at home then. I was a little less than nine years old.
**Landis**: How old were you, Mister Haywood?
**Haywood**: Nine years old.
**Landis**: Excuse me, what is your background, I mean what did your father do for a living?
**Haywood**: He was a pony express rider, but he died when I was very young.
(Landis motions to Vanderveer to continue)
**Vanderveer**: What kind of work did you do then, when you were nine years old?
Haywood: I was helping my step-father in the mine.
**Vanderveer**: In what way?
**Haywood**: Twisting drill, carrying steel and water, blowing the bellows.
**Landis**: Excuse me again, but how did you lose that eye, William? I’m curious about that.
**Haywood**: I was working at the Couer d’Alene, copper mine, 12 hour shift. We were going down in the cage to the shaft house floor, the cable pulled loose and dropped us forty feet down the shaft, a pick went through the eye. But I was lucky, two men died. We found out later the company had neglected the usual precautions and the hoist engine brakes were out of order.
**Landis**: Thank you William, go ahead.
**Vanderveer**: Where was I, Bill?
**Haywood**: You were asking me where I worked when I was nine.
**Vanderveer**: Oh yes, what other work did you do as a young man?
**Haywood**: When I was eleven, I was bound out to work on a farm. My main job was driving a yoke of oxen. I was only a kid, I guess I wasn’t going fast enough. The farmer picked up a bull whip and struck me without saying a word. I ran straight to the house, gathered my belongings, and started for home. I guess you could call that my first strike.
**Vanderveer**: When did you first get involved with unions?
**Haywood**: When I first went to work in the mines, on my own, I met the older miner in the camp, he was a member of the Knights of Labor, his name was....uh....
**Doran**: Pat Reynolds.
**Haywood**: Yeah, Pat Reynolds, well he pointed out that the man eating with us, the boss, was not the real owner of the mine. The owners lived in California while the men who did all the work and made the mines of value were there in the wilderness of Nevada. I soon learned that it was necessary for working men to organize for mutual protection and that’s what I’ve been doing ever since.
**Vanderveer**: What’s the first union you joined?
**Haywood**: The Western Federation of Miners.
**Vanderveer**: While you were a member of the Western Federation of Miners, did you go through any strikes in the mining industry?
**Haywood**: While I was on the executive board, there were a number of strikes.
(Narrator enters)
**Narrator**: You can say that again, the Western Federations of Miners, more like a war. Damn, they were my first big assignment out of New York City. I got off a stage coach in Cripple Creek, Colorado...started asking questions and wound up in the can...that’s where I first met Big Bill, we hit it off right away....he sort of broke me in you might say, I’d never seen a strike, close up, before. I always figured it was picket lines and negotiation....but the Western Federation set me straight about that...these guys were at war and I do mean war and everybody that was invited came, including the militia....
The militia, if you all think about the militia as a peace keeping organization, you don’t know nothing about Colorado in 1903\. No sir...the militia was busy....destroying union halls....loading strikers on the trains, shipping them out into the wilderness and dumping them. Of course, the strikers didn’t always go along peaceable...they liked living in town, you know, with their families....
The war was over the 8 hour work day, the Colorado legislature had passed an 8 hour work law but unfortunately the governor, the mine owners, and the militia didn’t agree....and that’s the way I wrote it, and the New York American reported it, on page 18....I got a wire from the editor saying he wasn’t interested in politics, said he wanted headlines...
(Narrator exits)
**Haywood**: (Speaking primarily to the judge, who is standing near to the witness box)....Well we had been playing cards for a couple hours and suddenly as I was about to leave I noticed all of us had something in common, all five of us only had one eye. Ha ha ha...
**Vanderveer**: That’s all for now, your witness.
**Landis**: There will be a five minute recess. Mr.Nebeker, I’d like to speak to you please.
(Haywood leaves the stand, he, Vanderveer, and Doran come together in the center of the court room; all others exit)
**Vanderveer**: Bill, I thought you lost that eye when you were a kid, playing with a jack knife.
**Haywood**: Who told you that?
**Vanderveer**: Well, I think you did.
**Haywood**: No, you musta heard that from one of the boys...maybe Doran told you that.
**Vanderveer**: No, you told me Bill.
**Doran**: Yeah! Why don’t you tell the truth! Everybody knows you lost it in a fight in some whorehouse in Wichita.
(Doran exits)
**Haywood**: Don’t start ugly rumors. I only lost the one eye. You know how bad conditions are in the mines, it musta been in a mining accident...Doran, wait a minute.
*(Haywood exits)*
**Vanderveer**: Bill, you’re on the stand, under oath, you can’t be telling stories...
*(Vanderveer exits)*
## **SCENE TWO – Outside the Silver Nugget Saloon, Colorado, 1903**
**Tussy**: I’m getting tired of this strike, I’ll tell you that. We ain’t gettin’ no where but poor.
**Hooten**: Well, we ain’t going back to work ‘til the law is obeyed and the law says 8 hours.
**Tussy**: Ain’t nobody talking about going back to work. We’re talking about doing something for ourselves.
**Hooten**: Tussy, you know what Bill said about talk like that!
**Tussy**: ...he’s been in Denver for too damn long. He start forgettin’ what it’s like out here.
*(Haywood enters)*
**Haywood**: Howdy, boys.
**Tussy**: Bill, Bill, how you doin’? Come on over here, what happened at the meeting, we been waitin...
**Haywood**: Negotiating committee met with all the mine owners’ people today...had an agreement hammered out to go back to work...8 hours...$3.50...but McNeill wouldn’t go along...pressured all the others into backing him up, so we’re gonna’ have to stay out a little longer.
**Tussy**: McNeill, you know he’s shippin’ so many scabs in here...every day...he had to have extra cattle cars put on. But don’t you worry about nothin’ Bill, we know how to handle him and his scabs...
**Haywood**: You know there are times, we got to put up with scabs; there’s times we get too hungry, we even got to do a little scabbing ourselves.
**Tussy**: Yeah! But there aint’ never no time when we have to put up with no spies. Me and Hoot caught us a spy today, cracked his skull and ran him out of town....hehehe
**Haywood**: Who was he, what was his name?
**Tussy**: Never did catch his name....hehehe
**Haywood**: Well, I guess we get can get away with a little rough stuff with a two-bit spiy....
**Tussy**: Yeah, that two-bit McNeill is gonna see a little of it too, hehehe
*(haywood is suddenly very serious, grabbing Tussy)*
**Haywood**: What does that mean, Tussy?
*(Tussy realizes he has slipped)*
**Tussy**: Well...uh....I just heard some of the boys are planning on bushwacking him.
**Haywood**: Some of the boys, huh? Well you find some fo the boys and you TELL them why we lose strikes, because some idiot started shooting when he should have been thinking...if the governor sends the troops in here I’m commin’ looking for YOU, TUSSY!
**Hooten**: Bill, we can’t be watching all our people all the time.
**Haywood**: Hoot, you know better than anyone, you were in the bull pens, if the troops come here, we lose this trike...try and get that through his head.
*(Haywood exits)*
**Hooten**: You know he’s right, Tussy.
**Tussy**: Yeah! Maybe...but if he aint’ maybe it’s time we let the cat loose
*(showing three sticks of dynamite)*
**Hooten**: You remember what he said about the troops...
**Tussy**: I remember, I aint’ stupid, but I’m gettin’ damn tired of being kicked around. If things don’t get better soon...
*(Tussy exits. Hooten shakes his head, looks in the direction that Haywood exited and then in the direction that Tussy exited)*
**Hooten**: Tussy...Tussy...
*(Hooten exits, trying to catch up with Tussy).*
## **SCENE THREE –**
**Narrator**: Well, it wasn’t long before my editor got all the headlines he wanted...it was called the Colorado Civil War, half the mines in the state were blown up ... even an ex-governor was killed...the mine owners tried to pin the whole thing on Bill...they hired the Pinkertons to kidnap him, shipped him off to Boise, Idaho for trial. That was in 1907, this time I was working for the New York Call, papers from all over the world were there, couldn’t get near the telegraph office...miners came from all over the west...more pinkertons than you could shake a stick at...now Haywood had been in and out of jails all over the west...but this time he was in real trouble nad he knew it, so the Western Federation sent to Chicago for Clarence Darrow...best defense in the country....odds makers made it 4/1, state of Idaho.
*(Narrator exits, Darrow exits)*
**Darrow**: I don’t know, Bill, things are gettin’ tough...
**Haywood**: Cheer up, Clarence, we’re the ones who are gonna hang.
**Darrow**: I dunno, Bill, the pressure must be gettin’ to me. They got two goons following me around, they open my mail, tap my phone...
**Haywood**: Clarence, look, I’ll get some of the boys to pay a little visit...
**Darrow**: No, don’t both.
**Haywood**: No trouble at all...
**Darrow**: NO, please...I’m putting you on the stand tomorrow, but I don’t want any rough stuff, no politics, no nothing. Just sit and answer my questions, you can understand that...
**Haywood**: Listen, Darrow...
**Darrow**: I don’t want to hear it, Bill, this is a murder trial, get that through your head...you weren’t arrested for loitering this time.
**Haywood**: Listen Darrow, this is a political trial, that’s why I wanted Debs here, that’s why I wanted to get this out in the open to the workers.
**Darrow**: Debs? Look at this: “Arouse ye slaves, the crisis has come...if they attempt to murder Haywood, a million revolutionaries will meet them with guns”...do you think we can win in Boise, Idaho, with that, is that what you want to pin your defense on?
**Haywood**: You were hired to be my lawyer, not my mentor! There are important political issues here, that you are not dealing with. They are trying to destroy the Western Federation. There is a conspiracy between the mine owners and the state officials to get rid of us, that’s what you pin the defense on.
**Darrow**: Is that what you want? Cause if you do you’ll drag the whole federation down with you...
**Haywood**: I want Debs...
**Darrow**: You got him. There’s a train leaving for Chicago at 7 o’clock, I checked the timetable. Make up your mind...
*(Haywood submits)*
**Darrow**: I got some papers I want you to look over
*(Lights focus on Darrow, he speaks to the audience)*
**Darrow**: There’s no doubt that Haywood is completely innocent in the Steunenberg killing, but what I’ve come to realize is that I don’t like Bill Haywood. He believes in force and has used force. I’m certain he is guilty of many acts of violence against property rather than persons, crimes well provoked, but nonetheless crimes which will lead the labor movement down the wrong path.
*(pause)*
And he’s so damn sure of himself. Once he said, “I”d like to blast every mine owner out of the State of Colorado.” and it’s certain he would if he could. I can’t go along with that. I’m a pacifist, I won’t tolerate violence.
**Haywood** (angry and speaking to the audience): Darrow’s a brilliant lawyer and we stand side by side in that court room, but we really don’t see eye to eye. Someone I do see eye to eye with is Gene Debs, one of the greatest socialists in this country. I wanted Debs here, I wanted rallies, I wanted mass meetings, I wanted a vigil ringing the court house, Debs could do all that and more, you can talk with that man, he listens and he understands the worker’s struggle. That’s why I wanted him here, I have searched my mind for Darrow’s objections to Debs. Maybe he just wants all the limelight for himself.
*(Darrow is speaking to the jury, but he speaks to the audience)*
**Darrow**: I want to speak to you plainly. Mr. Haywood is not my greatest concern. Wherever men have looked upward and onward, forgotten their selfishness, struggles for humanity, worked for the poor and the weak, they have been sacrificed. They have been sacrificed in the prisons, on the scaffold, in the flame...if you kill him your act will be applauded by many; if you decree his death, among the spiders of Wall street will go up paeans of praise. In almost every corner of the world, where men wish to get rid of agitators and disturbers, you will receive blessing and praise that you have killed him...but if you free him, out on our broad prairies where men toil with their hands, out on the broad oceans, where men are sailing the ships,s throughout our mills and factories, down deep under the earth, thousands of men, of women, of children, weary with care and toil, will silently thank you, as I do now..
*(Darrow exits)*
## **SCENE FOUR**
*(Narrator enters)*
**Narrator**: Bill was acquitted, but that was Boise, Idaho in 1907, not here in Chicago in 1918... Darrow believes the problem with this case was that Haywood was running the defense, why Darrow even offered to help, said he helped write the Espionage act in Washington, he should have known the loopholes, but Bill turned him down, can you beat that?
*(Narrator exits, during the narrator’s speech the court room was filling up, Landis raps his gavel.)*
**Landis**: Let’s get going, Mr. Nebeker
**Nebeker**: Your honor, before proceeding with the cross examination of this witness I would likt to read some of the songs the IWW uses to advocate violence. This organization sinks to the lowest levels by taking Christian hymns and American patriotic songs and by changing the words for their own sinister ends. Possibly the worst of all is their use of songs to advocate sabotage, as in this one “I have a job once threshing wheat, worked sixteen hours with hands and feet...”
(the ensemble enters and picks up the tune of the song Nebeker is reading. They sing the song to the audience while Nebeker continues to read in pantomime.)
**Ensemble**: (to the tune of “Ta ra ra boom de ay”)
I had a job once threshing wheat, worked sixteen hours with hands and feet,
And when the moon was shining bright, they kept me working all the night.
One moonlight night, I hate to tell, I accidentally slipped and fell,
My pitchfork went right in between some cog wheels of that thresh machine
Ta ra ra boom de ay
It made a noise that way, and wheels and bolts and hay, went bullying every way.
That stingy rube said, “Well, a thousand gone to hell”
But I did sleep that night. I needed it all right.
But still that rube was pretty wise, these things did open up his eyes
He said “there must be something wrong, I think I work my men too long”
He cut the hours and raise the pay, gave ham and eggs for every day
Now gets his men from union hall, and has no accidents at all
Ta ra ra boom de ay
That rube is feeling gay, he learned his lesson quick, just through a simple trick
For fixing rotten jobs, and fixing greedy slobs, this is the only way
Ta ra ra boom de ay
(The ensemble crosses on the song and resumes their places in the jury box)
**Nebeker**: this is the only way, ta ra ra boom de ay” I think that I will have the rest of the songs read into the record later, and get on with the cross-examination of Mr.Haywood.
(Nebeker motions to Haywood to take the stand, he does)
**Nebeker**: Now, Mr.Haywood, it seems that labor disturbances and violence have followed you throughout your infamous career...and not just with the IWW, but even earlier with the Western Federation of Miners. You were involved with the Cripple Creek Strike, weren’t you Mr.Haywood?
**Haywood**: Yes, I was there.
**Nebeker**: When the miners decided to take over the mines?
**Haywood**: They didn’t try to take over the mines. THey just walked out. Those men were working twelve hours a day, in total violation of the eight hour law.
**Nebeker**: Come now, Mr.Haywood, weren’t the authorities aware of this condition?
**Haywood**: OH yes, indeed.
**Nebeker**: Was the law inoperative, or...why else wouldn’t they prosecute the officials?
**Haywood**: You’re the attorney for the justice department, did you ever hear of a mine owner being prosecuted for violation of a law that protects a miner?
**Nebeker**: Well, anyway, there was trouble between the mine owners of Colorado and the Western Federation of Miners?
**Haywood**: Yes, there was.
**Nebeker**: Trouble began, the trouble began around the time you landed in Colorado in 1901, didn’t it?
**Haywood**: No, the trouble began long before that, in 1880, the first strike was in Leadville, and there was a strike in Cripple Creek.
**Nebeker**: Well...
**Haywood**: There was also the Leadville strike of 1896\.
**Nebeker**: Yes, but...
**Haywood**: There was also the mill strike of 1899.
**Nebeker**: (Unable to get in a word)
**Haywood**: All those strikes had taken place before I came to Colorado.
**Nebeker**: But things did start to really pick up as soon as you did get there, didn’t they? Who was the governor of Idaho at the time of the Couer D’Alene trouble?
**Haywood**: Steunenberg...governor Steunenberg.
**Nebeker**: Did anything happen to Governor Steunenberg?
**Haywood**: He was blown up.
**Nebeker**: Blown up? Could you be a little more specific?
**Haywood**: Well, from what I was told, he was coming out of the house and when he opened the gate of his picket fence there was an explosion and he was killed.
**Nebeker**: you were indicted for that murder, weren’t you?
**Vanderveer**: I object, Haywood was acquitted of all connection with that crime.
**Landis**: Sustained
**Vanderveer**: Jesus Christ...
**Landis**: Continue, Mr.Nebeker.
**Nebeker**: So, Governor Steunenberg was, as you say, BLOWN UP after his stand against the Western Federation...is that right?
**Haywood**: That happened years after the Couer D’Alene fight.
**Nebeker**: How long after, Mr.Haywood?
**Haywood**: I don’t know...six years? About six years.
**Nebeker**: But isn’t one of the mottos of your organization, “We Never Forget”?
**Haywood**: Are you referring to the IWW?
**Nebeker**: The IWW.
**Haywood**: It was not even in existence at that time.
**Nebeker**: But isn’t one of the slogans of the IWW: “We Never Forget”?
**Haywood**: That was...that’s not a slogan...it’s sort of...the words have been used, but
**Nebeker**: Isn’t it in your papers, and in your pamphlets, and on the stickers, and in thousands of places in the literature and writings of your organization?
**Haywood**: Let me tell you where it was first used...
**Nebeker**: Just answer the question first!
**Haywood**: Yes, now let me tell you where it was first used.
**Haywood**: I first used it on a program for the funeral of Joe Hill, in 1915.
**Doran**: Amen!
**Nebeker**: the first time?
**Haywood**: Yes, the first time.
**Nebeker**: Are you sure, didn’t you use the phase when you were a member of the Western Federation of Miners?
**Haywood**: I don’t believe so, no.
**Nebeker**: No...well I say you did
(Nebeker picks up a newspaper from exhibit box)
**Nebeker**: WE NEVER FORGET, it was published in nineteen hundred and twelve.
(Nebeker hands newspaper to jury)
**Nebeker**: And isn’t it also true that the violence used and fostered by thr Western Federation of Miners developed into the very basis of the IWW?
**Vanderveer**: I object! That has nothing to do with...
**Landis**: Overruled.
**Vanderveer**: ...The Western Federation never did anything more violent than protect themselves, their families, and their jobs. Those miners were being...
**Nebeker**: Thank you, Mister Haywood.
**Haywood**: Judge, where the hell is he, I thought you wanted to hear this, judge?
**Landis** (seated behind Doran at the defense table) Yes, I do. Go ahead, William.
**Haywood**: You see, the miners were on strike in one section of Colorado and the mill workers were on strike in another. The mill men were scabbing in the mines and the miners were scabbing in the mills. They were destroying each other’s unions! That was the basis for the one big union.
**Nebeker**: That’s all very interesting, Mr.Haywood. However, I’m talking about the thousands of documented cases of violence and sabotage committed by the IWW and the WFM and all the other radicals you are associated with.
**Vanderveer**: I object! There is no evidence...
**Landis**: Overruled.
**Nebeker**: I’m talking about the blowing up of Governor Stuenenberg, the shooting of Mr.Frick, the blowing up of numerous mines and mills...the blowing up of the Los Angeles Times....isn’t this the kind of violence you advocate? Don’t you want to destroy the existing order of things and doesn’t that require violence? Don’t you believe in extremes, violent extremes, Mr.Haywood?
**Vanderveer**: I object.
**Haywood**: I’ll answer that, Van. **The IWW advocates violence of the most violent sort. Violence that consists of keeping our mouths shut and our hands in our pockets. In doing this and staying on strike we are committing the most violent of acts, cutting off our labor! It is the most violent act we can commit against the capitalist, for it hurts him in his bank account, the only heart he has.**
**Nebeker**: Thank you, Mister Haywood.
**Haywood**: But don’t get me wrong, we are against the blood in the streets kind of violence.Those actions come out of a feeling of impotence, and we wouldn’t be here today if we were impotent, would we Mr.Prosecutor?
(Haywood has taken control and Landis, seeing this, bangs his gavel several times)
**Landis**: Court’s adjourned til Monday morning at 9AM!
## **SCENE FIVE, CHICAGO, 1905**
(Narrator Enters)
**Narrator**: Nebeker was no fool to hear him talk ...thousands of cases of violence destroying the existing order...German gold in IWW pockets. It seems to me that this war has got people so worked up. They don't know what to think. Even Darrow, why he said “while pacifism as a principle was fine during the peace, it was not worth a hoot in hell during wartime.” But not bill, he's always been consistent. He always believed workers should not shoulder arms against each other. Bill didn't care if they were German or American to him, a worker was a worker. That was a cornerstone of the IWW founding convention at Brandt hall, right here in Chicago in 1905.
(Haywood has moved to the table, he has a piece of lumber which he uses as a gavel)
**Haywood**: Fellow workers, this is the continental Congress of the working class. It has been said that the purpose of this convention was to form an organization to rival Sam Gompers's A F of L. That is a mistake. We are here for the purpose of organizing a LABOR organization. There are A F of L locals that refuse to admit a colored man that refuse to admit foreigners that totally refuse to organize women or children that they have made America the land of the lost strike. Their high initiation fees, their caste system, and their partnership with capital. What we want to establish at this time is an organization that will open wide. Its doors to every man or woman who earns their livelihood by brain or muscle. I don't give a snap of my fingers whether skilled workers join this union or not. We don't need them. There are thirty five million workers in this country that aren't organized yet. And it doesn't make a damn of difference whether he is black or white, an American or a foreigner. I am still of the opinion that an American is just as good as a foreigner so long as they behave themself. Thank you. This is your convention, so make the most of it. Come on, boys!
(Ensemble enters and sings to the tune of the rambling wreck from Georgia tech)
**Ensemble**: We’re anarchists and socialists and dynamiters too
We’re the slaves of Wobbly delegates that tell us what to do;
There’s nothing we should kick about, we all got gall sublime,
But we’re bone and sinew of the land about election time.
We’re wild eyed hayseed, lazy shirks, agitators, knaves
We’re looters of the vaults of wealth and our speakers always rave
We’re a danger to the country and republic all the time
But we’re honest sturdy farmers at about election time
Yes we’re valiant hosts of labor at about election time
We’re the thinking toilers of the land about election time.
(Ensemble exits, stage is empty)
## **SCENE SIX**
(Hoover enters; he is standing around waiting. We hear Landis’ first line off stage as he enters)
**Landis**: Morning, Joe, Cubs are doing fine, looks like they’ll be in the series this year.
(Landis enters)
**Hoover**: Judge Landis! How do you do? My name’s Hoover, special assistant to Attorney General Palmer.
(Landis walks)
**Hoover**: Sure is hot in Chicago this time of year. Cubs look like a winner this time.
(Landis stops and looks at Hoover)
**Hoover**: I hear you’re a big fan.
**Landis**: Yeah, it looks like they’ll be in the series this year if their pitching holds out.
**Hoover**: When do you think it’ll be over?
**Landis**: The season? That usually runs into September.
**Hoover**: No, the trial.
**Landis**: That’s hard to say. It looks like they will be at each other’s throats for a couple of months yet.
**Hoover**: But it’s already July, that’s almost four months gone by. People in Washington are getting a little concerned that this might drag on for too long. The country is getting worked up over these traitors. Real scum, ya know.
**Landis**: Hoover, you got a lot to [learn...if](http://learn...if/?ref=marxistunity.com) Bill Haywood heard you, he’d kick your ass all the way back to Washington.
**Hoover**: Attorney General Palmer sent me out here to...
**Landis**: Now, just wait a minute! Palmer’s never presided over an IWW trial and I doubt if you’ve ever presided over anything. You see, this is my ball park, I’m the ump here, I make the calls.
**Hoover**: Look, Judge Landis, we have already replaced one prosecutor, it’s not out of the question to--
**Landis**: Now don’t say something stupid, Hoover!
(Hoover starts to exit)
**Landis**: HOOVER! Never underestimate people with a mission. Now I know what they’re capable of and what their weaknesses are and I’m going to give them plenty of rope. When you’re dealing with people with a cause you got to have respect.
**Hoover**: Respect? What kind of respect?
**Landis**: No, not respect...affection...you know? I’ve really come to like some of these guys. You know when a visiting team comes into a ball park and they’re hot, their pitcher has really got smoke on his fast ball and they’re ready to clear the bench at any moment, you can really appreciate a team like that.
(Hoover shakes his head)
**Hoover**: that’s all very interesting but...are you aware that the Bolsheviks have overthrown the Tsar and that there are revolutionaries all over our country with similar intentions? This is not quite a baseball game, Judge Landis.
**Landis**: Hoover, you’re hopeless. Just go home to Washington and tell Palmer everything’s under control.
**Hoover**: I’m not an errand boy; I was sent here with very clear instructions.
**Landis**: Good day, Mr. Hoover.
(Hoover exits. Narrator has been watching the end of the scene from the shadows)
**Narrator**: The truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth, so help me god...You know, the truth is a funny thing. Sometimes you have to dig for it and sometimes it hits you right in the face. I once worked for a socialist editor, he told me to never see a striker hit a scab, always see the scab hitting the striker. You see, there were seven or eight papers who’d always print it the other way, he thought he’d keep the balance. At least he was honest with me.
(Court is called to order as court room fills up)
**Landis**: Mr. Vanderveer, call your next witness.
**Vanderveer**: I call Mr. J.T. Doran for the defense
(Doran is sworn in and takes the stand)
**Vanderveer**: When did you come into the Industrial Workers of the World?
**Doran**: As soon as I discovered they were in existence.
**Vanderveer**: What was the reason for your going into the Industrial Workers of the World at that time?
**Nebeker**: I object, Your Honor, we have been through all this before, the defendant’s motivation is of no significance in this case.
**Vanderveer**: Your honor, the defendant is going to tell the jury first hand what the IWW advocates.
**Landis**: Sit down, Mr. Nebeker, let’s hear what he’s got to say.
(Landis gestures to continue)
**Vanderveer**: Tell me, Red, why did you join the IWW?
**Doran**: Well, I’d been around the country a good deal at my trade, and I found that conditions on the jobs were so poor that something had to be done.
**Vanderveer**: What is your trade, Red?
**Doran**: I earn my way as a mechanic, work on big engines, mining camps, lumber mills...but actually I’m a WPE.
**Vanderveer**: WPE?
**Doran**: Worker’s Professor of Economics.
**Vanderveer**: Now, I understand that you traveled around from camp to camp organizing, and made this presentation to educate the workers. When you wen to make your talk, what subjects did you talk on?
**Doran**: Well, I used what I’m pleased to call a chalk talk, using crude illustrations, a blackboard and a piece of chalk.
(Holding up a piece of chalk)
**Vanderveer**: The talk that you gave, was that substantially the same at the various places where you--
**Doran**: Always the same, that is, I did not recite it poll-parrot fashion, but the substance did not vary.
**Vanderveer**: you’re on, Mr. Doran
(Vanderveer hands blackboard to Doran. Doran moves to stage center, smiles at the audience, raises and lowers his eyebrows several times, tries to see the faces of the people in the audience, smiles, takes a deep breath)
**Doran**: Compadres, Copanes, Kung Yow Moon, fellow workers, you have heard a great deal about the IWW, and you know what people say about us. The sheets usually credit us with being a bunch of murderers, a lot of irresponsible dynamiters and agitators.
The IWW does not ask you as a working man to do a single solitary thing that you do not already do. We ask you to do in the interest of humanity in the interest of yourself and your wife and your babies just what you do in the interest of economic waste, the profit holders. Don't let me get away from you, you see. We, the IWW suggest something we suggest doing away with capitalism. Why? Because we find it objectionable. We suggest tearing it down, but we are not destructionists. We propose to tear it down, but we propose to put something in its place, and what is that thing we propose to put in its place? Socialism. Now don't get scared! Because before you can understand socialism, you have to understand capitalism. The system under which you now work. But before you can understand capitalism, you gotta understand surplus value. That's right, surplus value, surplus! So let's deal with surplus value. This here is a factory, a farm, a mine, a timber mill, any means of production.
(He draws a box on the board)
Each and everyone one of you walks in in the morning and out at night.
(He draws little lines going into the box and lines going out)
And what do you get for your hard labor, for your sweat, for your dreary days and tired nights?
(He turns the lines coming out of the box into small dollar signs)
Not much, ‘wages’ they call them, slave wages I say, a mere token, hardly enough to live on Now that factory or mine makes big money.
(He draws a huge dollar sign at the bottom of the board beneath the box)
On any day’s shift a worker produces say two dollars worth of goods. Thirty dollars go into overhead and materials...
(he draws a roof on the box and smoke coming out of the top)
Two dollars go to you...that leaves 168 dollars and what happens to those 168 dollars? That is, the unpaid wages, the profits, the SURPLUS VALUE. Who gets that surplus value? Not you or me. What happened to it? We must have lost it!
(He turns board, looking for the 168 dollars)
Under socialism, workers wouldn’t lose that surplus value, it would be theirs, yours, because you would own the mine. Now someone might say the capitalists own the mines and have a right to keep them. But let me tell you a story about gold mines. The absentee owner did not find the gold, he did not mine the gold, he did not mill the gold, but by some strange alchemy, he owns the gold--all the gold belongs to him. Now think about that.
**Nebeker**: This is a conspiracy to take from the owner what is constitutionally his and in the ownership of which the law supports him.
(During this interchange Doran erases drawing and draws a cartoon of Nebeker’s face and writes FOOL on it)
**Landis**: Please, Mr.Nebeker.
**Nebeker**: The wage system is established by law and all opposition to it is opposition to law.
**Landis**: Mister Doran has an interesting theory, Mr.Nebeker, you must admit. Although it is as irrelevant as the Holy Bible. Continue, mister Doran.
**Doran**: Now let’s look at this from another angle:
(flips the chalk board over, there is a pyramid drawn on the board.)
**Doran**: Now, this great mass of men and women on the bottom here, represented by this line, are the workers, their activities in any business are governed by another element known as the straw-boss element, they’re just like you and me, but they’ve been bought off, been bribed, for an extra half dollar...
(he pulls a half dollar from the ear of a jury member)
...and he looks out for the interests of the owners rather than himself
(Landis walks over to see better)
**Doran**: And then, supervising the activities of the straw-boss element is the foreman element, the push. Now it takes a little more to buy him off, maybe and extra dollar.
(Doran pulls a dollar out of Landis’ pocket)
Supervising the foreman is the general foreman, the superintendent, the manager, the general manager, and then the economic waste, the profit-holders, the bond-holders, the people who do not do anything, and that is where the surplus value goes. Capiche, Verstehen, Savvy, do you understand? I usually end by passing the hat, but considering the circumstances, I guess we can dispense with that today.
**Landis**: Yes, you can, Mr.Doran.
**Vanderveer**: Your witness.
(Nebeker pauses, Doran sits, uneasy)
**Nebeker**: How many times have you been arrested, Doran?
**Doran**: I’ve been persecuted and arrested a number of times, never tried.
**Nebeker**: Answer the question, how many times have you been arrested?
**Doran**: In Los Angeles they arrested me four or five times a week for months and never let me see a judge, Judge.
**Nebeker**: How many times have you been arrested?
**Doran**: I don’t know, lots of times on that kind of charge, I was never convicted of a felony in my life.
**Nebeker**: Have you been arrested a dozen times?
**Doran**: Yes, several dozen times, at least.
**Nebeker**: Could you repeat that?
**Doran**: Several dozen times.
**Nebeker**: In every case you were in the right and they were in the wrong, I suppose?
**Doran**: They never tried me.
**Nebeker**: Answer the question.
**Doran**: I don’t know, they never took it to a showdown; I presume I was right.
**Nebeker**: So, you have been persecuted by the Justice Department?
**Doran**: Yeah.
**Nebeker**: Are you telling this court there is a conspiracy in the United States Government to persecute Mr. JT Doran?
**Doran**: I say there is a capitalist conspiracy in this country to oppress the workers.
**Nebeker**: So what you are really saying is that justice as it is in this country is capitalist justice?
**Doran**: Yes.
**Nebker**: THere is no justice for the workers in the courts?
**Doran**: No.
**Nebeker**: That all the courts are what you would call capitalist courts?
**Doran**: Yes.
**Nebeker**: you don’t believe there is any justice to be had in this court, do you?
**Doran**: I don’t think I can get any justice from a Copper-Trust-dumb-lawyer-son-of-a-bitch like you.
**Nebeker**: (To Landis) Does this counsel have to put up with this lowlife?
(Doran goes for Nebeker, jumping over the railing)
**Doran**: You miserable bastard, you know this whole trial is a big frame up!
(Haywood restrains Doran; Vanderveer shaking his head walks off; Landis, enjoying himself, waves Nebeker back. Haywood tries to hold Doran)
**Doran**: Why don’t you just hang me right now, like you hung Frank Little. You son of a bitch, this ain’t no trial, this is a lynch mob. The working class and employing class have nothing in common. Bill, let go a me! Goddamn it...
Ralph Chaplain, Solidarity
# The Wobblies Act Two
## **SCENE ONE**
*(We are in a boxcar traveling towards the wheat fields, we have the sounds of a train coming to a stop, the sun is just rising, the scrim is closed)*
**Len**: Where are we, anyway
**Shorty**: Should be close to the North Dakota line by now.
*(Shorty looks out of the boxcar door, we hear off stage the voice of an IWW organizer)*
**IWW Organizer**: I’ll take this one, you two go down.
**Shorty:** Listen...
*(Hears whistling.)*
**Shorty**: Wobblies.
**Len**: Who?
**Shorty**: Wobblies, sshhh, maybe they won’t find us...cmon, let’s get out of here.
*(They start to gather their things. The IWW organizer enters.)*
**IWW Organizer**: Heading for the harvest, fellows? Guess you know you can’t ride no harvest bound freighters without you joining the IWW...I’m an IWW delegate. Now listen to me and listen close. Take this harvest. If we’re organized, we don’t have to work for no lousy three of four bucks a day, like some in Minnesota. In Dakota, we don’t work for less than six bucks...All right, you folks gonna join up, or get out and walk?
**Len:** How much is it?
**IWW:** One dollar. Red Card’s good for a year. You can ride on it anywhere.
**Len:** I’d like to join, but all I got is a few nickels.
**IWW:** Likely you got nothing in your stomach but gas, yet you suckers think you can beat the system without organizing.
*(IWW looks at Shorty)*
**Shorty**: I’m broke too.
**IWW**: Well, you could be flat at that. I know how it is. But wise up...I’m gonna let you ride this time. But first pay you get, you look up a Wobbly delegate and join, how about it?
**Len:** Sure thing, first pay.
**IWW:** (He hands them a paper) Here, read this, maybe it’ll take your minds off your stomachs. Good luck, fellas...
*(IWW organizer exits)*
**Shorty**: Well, we got away with it.
*(Shorty looks out to see where the IWW organizer went, glances at the paper, then sets it back down).*
**Len**: What do you think of all this?
**Shorty**: Of all what?
**Len:** What the Wob guy said and what’s in this sheet.
**Shorty**: Well, it ain’t crap.
*(They start to roll up their blankets)*
**Len**: You gonna join, like you said?
**Shorty**: Could be. How about you?
**Len**: Sure, first change, we oughta stick together, right?
**Shorty**: Go for it, but watch yourself. The Wobblies ain’t so strong as they make out. Don’t let the cops catch you with a red card, even the guys you work with. Don’t let on ‘til you’re real sure. I know. I been a union man. What they done to us when we went on strike was a shame.
**Len**: Yeah, I bet.
**Shorty**: They got the right idea about all being in one union--not one union scabbin on another like where I was...and they ain’t so strong about what we could do if we stuck together. We could tie up any job tighter than a cows ass at flytime. Tie up the whole works. But I tell you what. That ain’t ever gonna happen. You know why? Cause working men just won’t stick together, no sir, they never done it and they never will.
*(Len nods)*
**Len**: I wonder how come.
**Shorty**: Cmon, let’s scare up something to eat.
## **SCENE TWO**
(The following scene is a montage which combines old photos projected on the scrim with actors in front of and behind the scrim. THe slides constantly change as they illustrate the dialogue. Several lighting formats are used: projected photos can cover the entire scrim or just the left or right half, a tight spot behind the scrim can illuminate actors either through the blank scrim or through images projected on the scrim.)
**Voices**
“Guiseppi, did you get right pay?”
“No! What about you?”
“Short.”
“Short pay.”
“Cut the belts.”
“Leave, everyone leave, we walk out!”
“Strike, strike!”
*(workers behind to change, as the volume of the chants rise the volume of the factor noises decreases, we hear sounds of sabotage)*
*(MONTAGE of photos of picket lines, workers leaving factories, police, fire hoses.)*
*(Stage right, Elizabeth Gurley Flynn begins to speak, ,two workers appear and simultaneously translate her speech into Italian and Polish. Special light stage right allows us to see her through scrim with slide filling other half of scrim.)*
**FLYNN**: Fellow workers, the bosses refer to you as mill hands...farm hands, factory hands...a boss would feel insulted if you called him a hand, he’s a head...the trouble is he owns your head and your hands...but there is something you can do about that...STRIKE!
*(Lights and slides change, we see Wood through scrim, stage left)*
**William Wood**: Get back to work...get back to work! Listen to me. Be quiet and listen to me. Thank you. I’m William Wood. I am the owner of the American Woolen Company. So I guess I should know what's going on in Lawrence. There's been a misunderstanding. You have to understand there is no excessive profits coming to the textile manufacturers of Massachusetts. On the contrary, in many of these businesses, there are no profits at all. Many are in dire trouble. You used to work 56 hours a week. Now, the law says that women and children can only work 54 hours a week! To pay for fifty four hours work the wage is of fifty six would be the equivalent of an increase in wages the mills cannot afford to pay.
*(Lights and slide change back to Flynn at stage right)*
**Flynn**: Let me read you something. Net profits four million dollars, dividends three million, total surplus eleven million. Now does that sound like no profits at all? THat 54 hour law we passed to benefit you. But the companies saw a way to make it benefit them, by speeding up the machines. But we’re not going to stand for it, are we? Let’s make this the biggest textile strike in history. I’m Elizabeth Gurley Flynn from the Industrial Workers of the World. Eight hours of work, eight hours of play, eight hours of sleep, and eight dollars a day!
*(Full slide covers scrim. We here picket line song through scrim)*
*(Sang to the tune of “In the Gold Old Summer Time”)*
IN the good old picket line, in the good old picket line
The workers are from every place, from nearly every clime.
The Greeks and the poles are out so strong,
And the Germans all the time
But we want to see more Irish in the good old picket line.
IN the good old picket line, in the good old picket line,
We’ll put Mister Wood in overalls and sworn off drinking wine,
Then Gurley Flynn will be the boss,
Oh Gee, won’t that be fine
The strikers will wear diamonds in the good old picket line.
*(Lights go on small table, stage left, with woman seated at it, slides continue on scrim stage right illustrating her testimony)*
**Voice**: The House Committee of Rules hearing into the Strike at Lawrence, Massachusetts, will come to order.
*(Gavel raps.)*
**Congressman Berger**: What is your name, please?
**Shapley:** Dr. Elizabeth Shapley.
**Berger**: How do you come to have pertinent information for this committee?
**Shapley**: I am a social worker and have recently completed an investigation into Lawrence for the United States Labor Commissioner.
**Berger**: What have you found to be the working and living conditions around Lawrence?
**Shapley**: There are 22,000 textile employees, who average $8.76 for a full week’s work. Rents range from $1 to $6 a week for small tenement apartments which are fire traps.
**Berger**: Who owns the buildings?
**Shapley**: Most of the tenements are owned by the mills. Mill families find it necessary to take in borders in order to eat.
**Berger**: Well, with this additional income, do people have an adequate diet?
**Shapley**: If you call bread, molasses, and beans an adequate diet. Meat is certainly a luxury.
**Berger**: Who makes up the work force at these mills?
**Shapley**: Half of all the workers in the Lawrence Mills are young girls. A considerable number of the boys and girls die within the first two or three weeks after beginning work. Because of malnutrition, work strain, and occupational diseases. Thirty five out of every hundred mill workers die before they turn twenty-five years of age.
**Berger**: How many nationalities are there represented among the workers at Lawrence?
**Shapley**: Approximately sixteen.
**Berger**: Do they speak English?
**Shapley**: Oh, no. They’re all foreigners.
(Lights change back to stage right, where Haywood is standing)
**Haywood**: There are no foreigners here, to the working class there are no foreigners but the bosses. Do not let them divide you by sex, color, creed, or nationality. Billy Wood can lick one Pole, in fact, he can lick all the Poles, but Billy Wood cannot lick the (he ticks off the nationalities on his fingers) Poles, Italians, Irish, Jews, Lithuanians, when they stand together! And let’s not forget the A F of L, that’s the way the AFL organizes! (he raises the other hand and ticks off the trades on his fingers) by separating weavers, loom fixers, spinners, carders. This is the way the IWW organizes! (He clenches both fists) Together!
(Lights change back to small table, stage left, where we see Berger and Golden.)
**Berger**: Mr. Golden, you are the president of the United Textile Workers of the AF of L.
**Golden:** Yes, sir.
**Berger:** Mr.Golden, if these wage-earners had been American citizens, all of them speaking the English language, would this trouble have occurred?
**Golden**: I think, Mr. Chairman, the best answer to that is this: of the thousands of organized workers in the United Textile Workers in Massachusetts, we did not have a single one go out on strike.
**Berger:** Could you then tell us why your men are working and these people in Lawrence are on strike?
**Golden:** The United Textile workers would have negotiated, talked, sat down and worked out our differences. By now, you do not have a strike in Lawrence, you have a revolution there.
*(Lights go out, we see a slide that fills the scrim, and we have a song from behind the scrim. During song slides continue)*
A little talk with Golden,
Makes it right, all right
He’ll settle any strike
If there’s coin enough in sight
Just take him up to dine
And everything is fine
A little talk with Golden
Makes it right, all right
The preachers cops and money kings were working hand in hand
The boys in blue, with stars and stripes, were sent by Uncle Sam
Small things were looking blue, cause every striker knew
That weaving cloth with bayonets is very hard to do
A little talk with Golden
Makes it right, all right
(Lights come up on stage right, where we see Haywood standing)
**Haywood**: Golden now says you shouldn’t have gone out, but did he admit you to his union? No, the United Textile Workers has never organized the foreign-born and they oppose your strike now. And look at your children!
(Lights change back to small table, stage left)
**Berger**: Right this way, please.
(Girl comes in)
**Congressman Berger**: Thank you for coming.
**Camella Teoli**: You’re welcome.
**Berger**: What is your name?
**Teoli**: Camella Teoli...
**Berger**: And how old are you?
**Teoli**: Eight years
**Berger**: Where do you go to school?
**Teoli**: I don’t go to school, I’m through with school, I work.
**Berger**: You work, where do you work?
**Teoli**: In the woolen mill.
**Berger**: For the American Woolen company?
**Teoli**: Yes.
**Berger**: What sort of work do you do?
**Teoli**: My work is to take off empty bobbins and put full bobbins on.
**Berger**: Could you show the committee how you do that?
**Teoli**: Like this...
(She demonstrates)
**Berger**: And what are your hours? How long do you work?
**Teoli**: We work all day, ten hours every day.
**Berger**: How much do you get a week?
**Teoli**: About $6, if they don’t take anything our.
**Berger**: What do they take out?
**Teoli**: Well, if you make mistakes or something, or if you’re late or sick, or for water--they take out five cents a week for drinking water.
**Berger**: They do not furnish you with drinking water?
**Teoli**: No. They say it is spring water, but it’s not...it’s canal water.
**Berger**: Are you working now?
**Teoli**: No, I was hurt.
**Berger**: In the mill?
**Teoli**: Yes.
**Berger**: Can you tell the committee about that...how it happened?
**Teoli**: I got hurt in my head.
**Berger**: What part of your head?
**Teoli**: My head.
**Berger**: Well what happened?
**Teoli**: The machine pulled the scalp off.
**Berger**: The machine pulled your scalp off?
**Teoli**: I was in the hospital for seven months.
**Berger**: Are you one of the strikers?
**Teoli**: Yes sir, I’m one of the strikers.
(LIghts change back to stage right)
**Haywood**: I tell you that their little lives are woven into the woolen goods they weave. In those threads are twisted the tears and heartache of those little children. We have friends in other cities, they have offered to take care of our children until the strike is over. This is a good idea. The children will be better fed and clothed away from Lawrence. You talk among yourselves, speak with the delegates, we will vote on it tonight.
(Lights change back to small table, stage left)
**Berger**: We have heard a good deal about the beating of women and children who were trying to board the trains, did you see any of these outrages that have been spoken of here? Did you see any of these women that were clubbed?
**Teoli**: I did.
**Berger**: Tell me what you know about that.
**Teoli**: I saw one of the policemen grab a lady by the throat and hit her on the head.
**Berger**: What did he hit her with?
**Teoli**: A club.
**Berger**: A policeman’s billy?
**Teoli**: Yes sir, a good club.
**Berger**: Could you tell us what happened?
**Teoli**: They stopped us from getting on the train, then they started beating. I saw them take little kids and pick them up by the leg and throw them in the police wagon. One lady put up a fight and a policeman grabbed her by the neck and choked her until she was dead, I think.
**Berger**: thank you.
(all lights behind scrim go out, stage clears, lights come up, we see narrator in the court room, empty)
C.R. Smith's **The General Strike is the Key that fits the lock to freedom*, calling for the freeing of Ettor and Giovannitti, two organizers arrested during the Lawrence strike
## SCENE THREE
**Narrator**: Through all this the spirit of the strike held fast. On March 12, 1912, sixty three days after the workers walked off their jobs, the mighty American Woolen Company speaking for all Lawrence mills collapsed and capitulated.
(Scrim opens, the courtroom fills up)
**Narrator**: Bill said it was the women who won the strike. It was a singing strike, song overcame all language barriers, a new kind of strike. That got me thinking about my job security, during those sixty three days I worked (thirty seven for three different newspapers mind you)...well, you hang around those Wobblies long enough and they’ll turn your head around.
(A young man in Army uniform is on the stand. He is being questioned by Vanderveer)
**Vanderveer**: Your name is Otto Stolp?
**Stolp**: Yes sir.
**Vanderveer**: Where do you live?
**Stolp**: Why, I am in the army now, sir.
**Vanderveer**: Where are you stationed?
**Stolp**: Fort Benjamin Harrison.
**Vanderveer**: How many boys are out there in the camp with you?
**Stolp**: There are between twelve and eighteen thousand.
**Vanderveer**: And what class do they come from?
**Stolp**: Mostly all railroad men, where I’m from.
**Vanderveer**: Railroad men, you mean president’s sons, superintendent's sons?
**Stolp**: No sir, they are mostly all working men.
**Vanderveer**: Where do you call home?
**Stolp**: Well, I have been making my home around Seattle the last ten years.
**Vanderveer**: How old are you?
**Stolp**: Twenty nine, sir.
**Vanderveer**: And what line of work do you follow?
**Stolp**: I play the woods, sir.
**Vanderveer**: Play the woods?
**Stolp**: I worked in a lumber camp.
**Vandereer**: Any particular line of work?
**Stolp**: Brakeman on logging roads, sir.
**Vanderveer**: And when did you join the IWW?
**Stolp**: July 3, 1917 sir.
**Vanderveer**: And do you believe in the IWW?
**Stolp**: Yes sir.
**Vanderveer**: Do you mean to keep your membership in it?
**Stolp**: Why, yes sir.
**Vanderveer**: Good, that is all. Your witness.
**Nebeker**: When did you join the army, private Stolp?
**Stolp**: June 1, 1918.
**Nebeker**: And up to the time you enlisted in 1918, did you read what the IWW papers, *Industrial Worker* and *Solidarity*, had to say about the war?
**Stolp**: I didn’t see nothing in em against the war.
**Nebeker**: What?
**Stolp**: I didn’t read nothing against the war in the papers, sir.
**Nebeker**: Did you read anything about the war, in any of their publications?
**Stolp**: Very little, sir. Truthfully I’m not much of a reader.
**Nebeker**: But you have read IWW literature.
**Stolp**: I have read some of it, yes, Sir.
**Nebeker**: Have you read their books on sabotage?
**Stolp**: No, sir.
**Nebeker**: You wouldn’t practice sabotage against the army, would you private?
**Stolp**: I don’t know what it is, sir.
(Nebeker is taken aback by this, takes a moment)
**Nebeker**: Now, would you believe in the IWW if their official papers called this a capitalistic war and said that it was not the duty of working men to fight for this country in this war...would you still believe in and be with it?
**Stolp**: How’s that, sir?
**Nekeber**: Didn’t you follow the question, private? I’ll repeat it. If it were true that the IWW told you it was not the duty of working men to fight for this country in this war, would you still belong to it?
**Stolp**: THere’s nothing but working men fighting in this war that I know of, sir.
**Nebeker**: Now did you follow this question? If that were true, would you still believe in the IWW and adhere to it?
**Stolp**: Why, it isn’t true, Sir.
**Landis**: Talk so we can hear you, Private Stolp.
**Stolp**: I don’t know what he’s getting at, Sir. I never read nothing like that in the papers.
**Nebeker**: No, but I say if that were the case, if you could be shown that was the case, what would you do?
**Stolp**: Why, I would not stay with them then, no.
**Nebeker**: No further questions.
**Vanderveer**: Do you believe in war, Stolp?
**Stolp**: I believe in getting the Kaiser, sir.
**Vanderveer**: Well, that is so, but do you believe in war generally?
**Stolp**: No sir.
**Vanderveer**: Do you know of any ‘Wobblies’ who do not believe in getting the Kaiser?
**Stolp**: I do not, Sir.
**Vanderveer**: What is the attitude of the IWW about war generally?
**Stolp**: All I have ever talked with, want to go and get this war settled with, get the Kaiser.
**Vanderveer**: Have you ever given any thought to the subject of the causes of this war?
**Stolp**: I have not, sir.
**Vanderveer**: Do you know what remedy for war, what measures?
**Stolp**: No, I do not, sir.
**Vanderveer**: Thank you.
**Nebeker**: Your heart and soul is in this war?
**Stolp**: Yes, sir.
**Nebeker**: And you’re fighting loyally for your country, are you?
**Stolp**: Yes, sir.
**Nebeker**: And your heart and soul is with the IWW?
**Stolp**: Yes, sir.
**Nebker**: Are you fighting loyally for what?
**Stolp**: For both, sir.
**Nebeker**: You don’t know much about the IWW, don’t you?
**Stolp**: Well, I have belonged to them and I do now.
**Nebeker**: But, have you read much about them?
**Stolp**: I have not had the time, sir, to read before we got the eight hours, I was working all the time.
**Nebeker**: That is all.
**Vanderveer**: Do you know what the preamble says, that the working class and employing class have nothing in common?
**Stolp**: Yes sir, nothing in common.
**Vanderveer**: You know that as the cornerstone of the IWW?
**Stolp**: Yes, sir.
**Vanderveer**: Well now, what makes you believe it, what is there about it?
Stolp: I know they have nothing in common because of the way I have been pushed around throughout the country.
**Vanderveer**: You ever had an employer worry about the condition of your health or your morals?
**Stolp**: No sir, never did.
**Vanderveer**: Never know them worry about how the women of your working people get along?
**Stolp**: They don’t seem to care.
**Vanderveer**: Whether your babies live or die?
**Stolp**: They don’t care, no sir.
**Vanderveer**: Whether you become good citizens or bad citizens?
**Stolp**: No, sir.
**Vanderveer**: Whether you are educated or not?
**Stolp**: They never care.
**Vanderveer**: Are those the things that you refer to as the class war, the war for the betterment of those things?
**Stolp**: Yes sir, that’s what we want to do.
**Vanderveer**: Now, do you think it is loyal to this country to try to remedy those things?
**Stolp**: Yes, sir.
**Vanderveer**: That is all.
**Nebeker**: Just a question... is it your view that the employers as a class and as individuals have no common interest with you in this war?
**Stolp**: Why, they don’t seem to, no.
**Nebeker**: You do not know any who have enlisted?
**Stolp**: No, sir.
**Nebeker**: Have you been taught to believe that the sons of employers are not enlisting to fight the battles of their country?
**Stolp**: Taught... in school? No sir, it’s just that I don’t know of any, sir.
**Nebeker**: I think that’s all.
**Vanderveer**: You said a few moments ago that you thought the workers are fighting this war.
**Stolp**: Well, it’s true, sir.
**Vanderveer**: Any other IWWs?
**Stolp**: Why, yes sir! Plenty of em!
**Vanderveer**: Do you see any capitalists fighting it?
**Stolp**: I haven’t seen none, no sir.
**Vanderveer**: Well, how do you feel about people like that saying you and your brothers are unpatriotic?
**Stolp**: Well sir, what I feel is that... sometimes I just don’t seem fair... why they should put a uniform on their backs along with us, show their patriotism, get the Kaiser!
**Vanderveer**: Thank you Stolp, that’ll be all.
(Stolp looks at Nebeker, who waives him off. Stolp leaves the stand and goes to the defense table to shake hands with Haywood and Doran, then leaves. Landis calls Nebeker and Vanderveer to the bench)
**Haywood**: He’s all right, he really told em, now once this war’s over he’s gonna be a great brother...
**Doran**: He ain’t gonna live that long, Bill! “Get the Kaiser, Get the Kaiser”, it’s a load of crap. We should have taken a real stand against the war because they’re getting the war to stand on us!
**Haywood**: We couldn’t have, they would’ve destroyed us.
**Doran**: Just what the hell do you think this whole thing is? They’re gonna let us rot in here, at best! Better to go out in a blaze of glory, better to do what’s right, then this horse shit.
**Haywood**: We couldn’t stop the war, Red. The class war is our fight, not the world war, our job is to organize and prepare for the general strike...
**Doran**: When, Bill?! The general strike, the general strike (laughs) just when’s that supposed to happen, by the time we’re out on parole? Bunch of pie in the sky bullshit. I say now, let’s have em now! We have thousands of members, we could take down the whole country.
**Haywood**: We have to bide our time.
**Doran**: Look, Bill, ten million have died already. We got to do something, maybe we could at least save the life of that sap we put up on the witness stand.
**Haywood**: I don’t know...
**Doran**: We ain't got nothing anymore, you’re still living on past glories Haywood!
**Vanderveer**: Doran, cmon...
**Doran**: Look, we’re going under, and that patriotism Get the Kaiser talk is what’s gonna dig us there!
**Vanderveer**: Just lay off...
**Doran**: Lay off, you see what
**Vanderveer**: Do you wanna die in prison or not, Red?
(Doran exits in a huff, Vanderveer exits, Haywood sits alone, rises slowly and exits. The Narrator comes in and starts reading Doran’s paper)
## SCENE FOUR
**Narrator**: Armies clash at Verdun in the globe's greatest battle ...bonds buy bullets so you should buy bonds.... Oh, the daily casualty list! General Pershing reported the lowest for the week..98... Well, I guess that's low if your name ain’t on it. Seems to me, we just elected Wilson president to keep us out of this war. I sure am glad we didn't get the other one...What's his name? To date the American protective league working hand in hand with the Department of Justice just ferreted it out and brought to justice 3 million cases of disloyalty. I wonder how they missed me! And they are only one patriotic group, there's also the American Defense Society, the home defense league, the liberty league, the knights of liberty, the anti yellow dog league, the terrible threateners, the sedition slammers, and the boy spies of America
Hey! Ex-Governor Campbell is back in the news. Now he's the guy who showed up at this trial with a suitcase full of evidence proving the IWW is getting funds from Germany. He's been standing around with a suitcase waiting to be called as a witness. But today has suddenly announced that the famous suitcase has been broken into by an I.W.W posing as a Pullman Porter. Now, if you believe that, The Boy Spies of America sure has an opening for you!
(Narrator exits; Landis followed by Hoover enter talking)
**Landis**: (off stage) Morning, John. Yeah they’ll be in the series this year. (On stage to Hoover) Hoover, don’t you ever give up?
**Hoover**: People in Washington have been impressed with how you’ve dealt with radicals in the past.
**Landis**; Well, if they’re so impressed, what’re you doing here? I told you last time that I would handle this.
**Hoover**: Yes, but I thought we had an understanding.
**Landis**: What, exactly, do you think I can do for you, Mr. Hoover?
**Hoover**: I have conducted national raids on this group, I have two other trials planned, I had the post office cut off their mail service, I personally spoke to the Attorney General himself...
**Landis**: You’re a busy man, and you sell Liberty Bonds on the side, don’t you?
**Hoover**: Landis, this is serious, I have plans for...the Attorney General has plans for an even greater crackdown when this trial’s over.
**Landis**: Well, while you’re waiting, why don’t you enlist, go get the Kaiser and get this war over.
**Hoover**: Judge Landis, time is of the essence! We’ve got to get this over with.
(Landis is now at the bench, towering over Hoover)
**Landis**: Mr. Hoover, what exactly is your hurry?
**Hoover**: It’s very simple. The war might be over soon and people will quickly forget about all these reds in the country.
**Landis**: I appreciate what you’ve told me and we are all doing our parts. Good Day, Mr.Hoover.
**Hoover**: Good day, Judge Landis.
(Hoover exits, Doran enters)
**Doran**: Hiya, judge! Who’s your friend? Looks like a fed to me, but you can never really tell. I just wanted to tell you the boys really appreciate the fair trial you’ve given us, letting us speak our piece. You’ve been a regular Jake-cat.
**Landis**: A jake-cat?
**Doran**: A jakecat, like a good guy, you’re all right judge!
**Landis**: I understand. Thank you, “Red”.
(Court fills up, Landis bangs gavel)
**Landis**: Mr. Nebeker, I believe you were in the process of calling witnesses for re-cross examination.
**Nebeker**: Thank you, Your Honor. I call Mr. Doran for re-cross.
(Doran takes the stand)
**Nebeker**: Mr. Doran, were you at the IWW convention in 1916?
(Doran is silent)
**Nebeker**: Mr. Doran, did you vote on the war resolution at that convention?
(Doran is silent)
**Nebeker**: Tell me Mr. Doran, what’s your position on the war?
(Doran smiles at Landis)
**Nebeker**: Do you support the declaration of war against Imperial Germany?
(Doran is calm, smiling and silent)
**Nebeker**: Haven’t got much to say today, huh? Are you gonna answer any of my questions?
(Doran says nothing and smiles)
**Nebeker**: Your honor, I think this must be the Wobbly silent defense and I think it merits a citation for contempt.
**Landis**: Contempt? Come on, Mr.Nebeker, we have 101 defendants, let’s get someone up here and get on with it.
**Nebeker**: Very well, your honor, thank you for sharing the content of your mind Mister Doran, I call Mr. Haywood for re-cross
(Haywood takes the stand)
**Nebeker**: Mr. Haywood, let’s talk about something very specific, the literature of the IWW. We have confiscated tons of your literature all over the country. Let’s take a look at this copy of Industrial Worker. Now, here, where it says Meow at the head of this column, M-E-O-W, now is that intended to indicate the black sab-cat, the symbol of sabotage on the job?
**Haywood**: Well, some kind of cat, anyhow.
**Nebeker**: Well, what is the purpose of the black cat?
**Haywood**: You know, if you saw a black cat cross your path, you would think you were gonna have a little bad luck if you were superstitious.
**Nebeker**: If you were superstitious, huh? Don’t you plaster this symbol all over the fence posts and factory halls to terrorize employers into knuckling under your demands?
**Vanderveer**: I object!
**Landis**: Overruled.
(Haywood does not answer)
**Nebeker**: Let’s look at this issue of *Solidarity*...this article...dollar signs and Judge Landis, I suppose that implies that judge Landis is being bribed. Did you see this before it was printed?
**Haywood**: I odn’t think I’ve seen that, no.
**Nebeker**: you know this issue was found in IWW offices throughout the country?
**Vanderveer**: How could the witness know that, Mr. Nebeker?
**Nebeker**: I dunno, how could he, Mr. Vanderveer. I thought as general secretary of the IWW it was his job to know what was going on...and I’m certain that he did but I doubt this court will ever hear the truth about it from Mister Haywood. Mr. Haywood, are you still a member of the Western Federation of Miners?
**Haywood**: No.
**Nebeker**: Weren’t you thrown out of the Western Federation?
**Haywood**: Yes, on account of...
**Nebeker**: And weren’t you thrown out of the Socialist Party?
**Haywood**: Yes, we had differences over...
**Nebeker**: So you were thrown out of both organizations due to your insistence of a strategy of sabotage and disruption.
**Vanderveer**: I object!
**Landis**: Overruled, continue.
**Nebeker**: Yes, in fact, you’ve been thrown out of every labor organization you’ve ever joined; in fact, Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, said you were a destructive and violent agitator who doesn’t represent labor at all!
**Vanderveer**: I object to this, your honor!
**Landis**: Overruled.
**Nebeker**: Mr. Haywood, you pose as a labor leader, buy by now we should all recognize that as a falsehood. YOu are King Haywood, are you not? King Haywood and his ambassadors of destruction?
(motioning at Doran)
**Haywood**: (shrugs)
(Vanderveer tries to interrupt but is waved off by Landis)
**Nebeker**: You are a tyrannical sovereign, who sends his messengers across the country with orders to carry out strife and disorder, are you not?
**Haywood**: What was that?
**Nebeker**: Do you have a family, Mr. Haywood?
**Haywood**: Yes.
**Nebeker**: Are they in this courtroom?
**Haywood**: They are not.
**Nebeker**: Isn’t it a fact that you have a crippled wife confined to a wheelchair and two young girls, and that you’ve abandoned them and haven’t seen them in years?
**Vanderveer**: I object, Your Honor, this is character assasination-
**Landis**: Shut up, this is pertinent!
**Nebeker**: Well now, Mister Haywood, have you or have you not abandoned your family?
**Haywood**: I don’t see them as much as I’d like, I’m on the road a lot, but I continue to support them, in this society it’s not unusual for working men to--
**Nebeker**: Have you been supporting them from your prison salary the last year? Did you support them while you were involved in the salon crowd in New York?
**Vanderveer**: I object-
**Landis**: Shut it, Mister Vanderveer.
**Nebeker**: Ah, maybe all your wealthy women friends in Greenwich Village sent money to your family, is that the kind of support you are talking about?
**Haywood**: No, I receive a salary from the IWW.
**Nebeker**: Do you drink, Mister Haywood?
**Haywood**: I have on occasion, but my salary--
**Nebeker**: Come now Mister Haywood, you are a notorious drunkard are you not?
**Vanderveer**: I object!
**Landis**: One more outburst, and you will be found in contempt and thrown out of this courtroom! Sit DOWN, Mr. Vanderveer. Continue, Mr. Nebeker.
(Vanderveer remains standing, surprised)
Nebeker: You don’t believe in anything--
**Landis**: Sit DOWN, Mr. Vanderveer!
**Nebeker**: You don’t represent your country, your religious principles, your moral principles, the American way of life, and you certainly don’t represent labor. So what do you represent? Why, a real labor leader would do just what Samuel Gompers did, and mobilize labor in support of the war.
**Haywood**: What was that?
**Nebeker**: Patriotic unions like the A.F.L support the war whole heartedly, and in fact Sam Gompers said the war was in the interests of the labor movement.
(Haywood simply stares at Nebeker)
**Nebeker**: Finally, Mr. Haywood, perhaps you could answer the question this trial was convened to answer. Could you tell the jury, what exactly is the stance of the IWW on the war?
**Haywood**: Mr. Nebeker, we’ve been through this so many times...
**Nebeker**: Just answer the question.
**Doran**: Yeah, Bill, tell him about the war!
**Haywood**: I thought we made it clear that the IWW--as an organization--has not taken a position on the war. Our individual members may...haven’t we been through this already?
**Nebeker**: Mr. Haywood, we would like *your* position clarified. Would you answer the question?
**Doran**: the war, Bill! What about the draft, there were 98 casualties today (he’s being pulled into his seat by Vanderveer) Only 98!!!
(Landis raps gavel)
**Nebeker**: Mr. Haywood, are you going to answer my question? What was that, Mr. Haywood? Is this another silent defense? Your honor, perhaps you could instruct the witness?
**Landis**: William! William!
**Nebeker**: I think that’s sufficient, your Honor. I have no one else to call.
**Landis**: Are we ready for summations?
**Vanderveer**: Nothing has been proven, and I will not present a final summation. This isn’t a trial, it’s a hanging!
**Landis**: Mr. Nebeker, do you have a summation?
**Nebeker**: I certainly do. These people in this organization have set themselves against the law. There is only one solution they must be punished. They must be silenced so that they cannot poison the minds of others. We can offer no leniency. It is not the foundation of this court to contemplate the reasons behind their acts. The acts are a violation of the law that was written specifically to stop this kind of activity. We are not concerned with their motives or emotions. These things have no meaning they have violated the espionage laws. They have aided the enemy. They have worked against the best interests of our society. A man who's no right to revolution. Under the law.
**Landis**: Well, that depends on how many men he can get to agree with him
**Nebeker**: Thank you. Your honor now they are charged with having conspired to prevent by means of force. The execution of laws, we say that their use of the general strike was intended to cripple. The basic industries in one's intended to prevent this government from getting needed war materials. They wanted to extend the strike from the timber industry into the minds of the west than into the minds of the Midwest. Then, into Michigan, then finally into the coal fields of Pennsylvania evidence has been shown of that. Then, they wanted to extend it to the harvest fields. Evidence has been shown of that. And finally, when they were brazen in their confidence, they would have shut down the entire transportation shipping industry, railroads, teamsters, merchant, marine overseas trade. They would have destroyed the entire country. This government, which is all too slow. Dak'd finally wake up, found out what was going on. And raided the headquarters of this outfit all over the country. It put a stop to the scheme of this trial that made absolutely apparent. And now you, the members of this jury can put a final end to this plot by finding each. And every defendant guilty of all charges
**Landis**: gentlemen of the jury. This is a conspiracy trial and I will always instruct you on the meaning of conspiracy in order to reach a verdict. It is not necessary to you to find anyone guilty of committing. A specific act for the defendants are not charged with committing specific acts. The defendants are charged with conspiring to commit these acts. It does not matter if the acts are successful, or even if they were attempted. You must only determine if they plan to commit them. And that is what your verdict must be based on the jury will. Now withdraw an attempt to reach a verdict
(cast exits, Narrator enters)
**Narrator**: There were 40,000 pieces of evidence, 505 counts against 101 defendants and the jury was only out 55 minutes... it would take that long just to read the batting order.
(Jury returns. Landis returns in robes)
**Landis**: Have you reached a verdict?
**Jury foreman:** Yes we have, your honor.
**Landis**: The defendants will rise.
**Jury foreman**: We find the defendants guilty of all charges...
**Landis**: Having been found guilty by a jury of your peers, I sentence you as follows. William D. Haywood, twenty years. Mister Vanderveer, do you plan to appeal?
**Vanderveer**: Yes, of course we’ll appeal.
**Landis**: Then make that William D. Haywood, twenty years and 30,000 dollars fine. J.T. “Red” Doran, five years and 20,000 dollars fine...
(Landis continues to read sentences.)
**Narrator**: Well that’s the way it went... When the chicago white sox threw the world series in nineteen nineteen Kenesaw Mountain Landis finally reached the pinnacle of his career. He was named the first commissioner of baseball and told to clean up the league. Say it ain't so joe.
In June of twenty three, president Harding offered to commute the Wobbly sentences if they could would in no way encourage lawbreaking. They refused.
Nebeker, continued to prosecute for the justice department
Vanderveer continued to defend unpopular causes.
J Edgar Hoover went on to plan the palmer raids, and was eventually named the nation's top g man.
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn continued as an organizer and finally became a Communist, only in America!
Red Duran served five years in Leavenworth as a worker's professor of economics,
I saw bill after he got out of Leavenworth on bail. Between his ulcers and diabetes and the booze he was only a shadow of his former self. When the supreme court refused to hear her appeal bill facing twenty years skipped to the soviet union. He died a lonely broken man. A few years later and me, (checks watch) I've got to go see some reporters about a union...
(exit, black out)
Ralph Chaplain, The Hand that Will Rule the World
### The Party Must Lead
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-party-must-lead/
Last updated: 2026-09-06T03:33:24.000Z
I began my career as a middle school educator over fifteen years ago in a neighborhood school in the South Bronx. Water leaked from the ceiling into a trash can in the computer lab, where we held our first all-staff meeting. I entered the classroom during the high years of “education reform,” as Michael Bloomberg laid siege to our union—the United Federation of Teachers (UFT)—and endangered the lives of our Black and brown students through Stop and Frisk. When a highly resourced charter school was co-located on the floor below us a few years later, my students glimpsed the completely refurbished hallways and bathrooms and asked why the other school could afford to have such luxuries. My students were outraged when Trayvon Martin’s murderer was set free after his acquittal.
All of these struggles were deeply felt by the educators on my floor, but our disorganization was paralyzing. The spark of solidarity, the call to build power to fight back, was absent. Instead, a deep sense of resignation reigned as we struggled to get through each day, trying to do right by our students as mandated curriculums, Common Core standards, and state testing were imposed on us and our students.
Years later, inspired by the presidential run of Bernie Sanders and frustrated by how both Democrats and Republicans contributed to the pain inflicted on my students, I joined DSA. It was there that I was encouraged to get involved in my union; to see it as a space to build solidarity and the power to wage fights against tyrant principals, negligent school districts, and an entire system structured to rob so many children of a future.
The myriad struggles educators and families face are indeed both economic and political—from the structures of educational apartheid enforced by school funding mechanisms, to the drains on enrollment and funds in public school districts caused by charter schools, and now, [cyber charter schools](https://www.pa.gov/agencies/education/resources/policies-acts-and-laws/basic-education-circulars-becs/purdons-statutes/cyber-charter-schools?ref=marxistunity.com). In his [recent piece](https://communistcaucus.com/the-economic-is-political/?ref=marxistunity.com), “The Economic is the Political,” Communist Caucus comrade Zach W draws out these connections, arguing that the priority for socialist organizers in DSA should be to build economic power through independent working-class organizations, like teachers’ unions, as the weapon to deliver on our demands.
The dichotomy presented by the author, that pits building collective “coercive economic power” (or simply, strike power) against the partyist focus on the program, is a false one. The piece ignores the centrality of the merger formula to MUG’s politics, presents a strawman of MUG’s approach to labor organizing, and leaves open the question of who might fill the ranks of the well-rounded organizers the author calls for, and what might motivate them, in the struggle to abolish capitalism.
### **False Dichotomy**
Early in the piece, comrade Zach states that:
> The argument put forward by Communist Caucus is not quite, as comrades in Marxist Unity Group (MUG) have put it, that “the working class must be ‘formed as a class’ (read: organized) **before** the formation of a party and determination of its program” (emphasis added). This is not a question of sequence (first organization, then program/party), but a question of emphasis in our present historical moment.
Throughout the piece, the author uses the words “emphasis” and “priority” interchangeably. Without getting hung up on the semantics of whether having a priority implies a sequence, a driving argument is that the focus on a program is misguided given the disorganized conditions of the class. For example, two paragraphs later, the author argues that “...the most effective forms of political practice do not **begin** from a formal organization debating and arriving at the correct ideas. Instead, they **begin** from the day-to-day struggles of workers and tenants (emphasis added).”
We reject this chicken and egg conundrum. Our socialist ideas and program must be *connected with* day-to-day struggles. Engels first suggested this political project of merging the socialist and workers movements, which was then a key piece of the Manifesto he authored with Marx. It would later be described as the “merger formula,” [popularized](https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/histacc/5-wm-soc.html?ref=marxistunity.com) by 19th century Marxist theorist Karl Kautsky. The success of one movement was incumbent on the other. This was in contrast to the craft union pragmatism exemplified by Samuel Gompers and the then American Federation of Labor (AFL), and to the sectarian line of the Socialist Labor Party (SLP) under Daniel De Leon, which saw shop floor struggles for better wages as distractions from the goal of achieving socialism whole-cloth.
Material conditions have changed since this theory was first penned, but the truth remains the same; those committed to abolishing capitalism and its many oppressions must be on the front lines with workers, tenants, and oppressed people in all instances. Our task is to connect and bind these struggles together, to build and unite a fighting working class under a democratic mass political party.
The partyist approach to the shop floor is not about haranguing coworkers with “correct ideas” from the Manifesto, the Little Red Book, or the Workers Deserve More program. This caricature, raised on the floor at DSA’s National Convention in 2025 and littered throughout this piece, is plainly rejected by MUG and bears little resemblance to the organizing practice or politics of the many members of MUG organizing in our unions. From MUG’s 2026 [Task and Perspectives](https://www.marxistunity.com/2026-tasks-perspectives/):
> *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.*
As we can see, the reality is far from the caricature. Near the conclusion of his piece, the author writes, “DSA urgently needs to develop well-rounded organizers who can switch between these different levels of struggle and articulate the relationships between them, rather than activists trained to spread party gospel.” Ignoring the loaded terminology of activist versus organizer, I agree that we need to train well-rounded organizers. Training in DSA labor spaces ought to be the same as it ever was: establish yourself as a reliable and respectful coworker, bridge divisions among workers, direct ire towards the boss, empower and challenge others as workplace leaders, and build shop floor power.
But what happens when there is an important election or issue involving DSA? When your union leadership unilaterally endorses a candidate over the heads of the members? This was my situation when my local endorsed against DSA Congressional Candidate Chris Rabb in Philadelphia, which prompted negative reactions from a coworker. This led to a productive conversation about the disorganization of our leadership, and sparked interest in DSA. I believe this is the type of well-rounded organizer the author describes, but I also believe that in every serious opportunity possible, DSA members should be spreading the "gospel," *the good news*, **that there is a serious organization out there with the goal of uniting our separate struggles**.
As DSA explodes into public discourse with nightly news segments covering our program, every member should be ready to champion the idea that there is hope for a political alternative to the corporate duopoly, that there is hope for a better world in our lifetimes, and that it is up to each of us to fight for it on every terrain. These convictions, these political *ideas*, have driven a new wave of labor organizing. In his 2025 [book](https://www.ucpress.edu/books/we-are-the-union/paper?ref=marxistunity.com) *We Are the Union*, Eric Blanc devotes a whole chapter to the role of youth radicalization as a driving force. He writes, “Many new young organizers have come into labor via radical politics, and, as such, they’ve also begun pushing labor in a new political direction.”
This mirrors my own journey. I wanted to fight for a better world for myself and others. It was in DSA that I was encouraged to get involved in labor organizing and to find a role in fixing our rudderless union. My years in DSA have introduced me to countless others who, seeking political hope, were motivated to get involved in their workplace struggles, or decided to support new organizing through salting. The call of William Z Foster, that the Left must [take the lead](https://www.marxists.org/archive/foster/1926/organize-unorganized/index.htm?ref=marxistunity.com#the-left-wing-must-do-the-work) in organizing the unorganized, rings true a century later.
When the author writes, “We need to develop and recruit a large layer of skilled organizers within DSA who carry out work in other proletarian organizations” he is correct, but fails to identify what motivates many of our comrades to engage in this arduous spade work in the first place. The immediate fight against the boss is a key piece to be sure, but so too is the understanding that each struggle is a part of something bigger. This all-encompassing struggle can only be carried out by a strong party of the working class, organized on a national scale and defined by its shared program.
### **One Struggle**
Our shared political project does not only provide a clear “why” for the growing number of radical organizers building a new American labor movement, it also provides some guidance on the “how.” In addition to connecting new organizers to comrades with a wealth of experience who’ve been at it for decades, we are grounded in a legacy of organizing which is categorically opposed to the oppression and discrimination that rotted away the soul of the American labor movement. We reject the legacy of misleadership under Gompers, the AFL, and the near century of bureaucratic business unionism that has left American workers as disorganized as ever.
The author is correct when he writes, “The aim is to reconstitute a set of habits of rank-and-file-led class struggle that have been largely lost in the US.” But this begs this question, which set of habits? Anyone who has studied the high years of the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) should be aware that rank-and-file organization varied considerably within it. The [Partyist Labor Strategy](https://www.marxistunity.com/all-together-now/) seeks to reconstitute the best practices of communist-led unions from this era while avoiding some of their pitfalls.
As [documented](https://files.libcom.org/files/stepan-norris-judith-zeitlin-maurice--left-out-reds-and-americas-industrial-unions.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) by Judith Stepan-Norris and Maurice Zeitlin in their study *Left Out,* “...the Communist-led internationals stood out, by all measures, in the struggle for women’s rights…The pattern of principled and practical commitments to women’s equality revealed here…is replicated as well in our analysis of radicalism, democracy, and racial egalitarianism.” Sexism, racism, and all forms of oppression are absolutely reflected on the shop floor, but it was organizers driven by an ideological understanding of how capitalism related to these other modes of oppression that fought for their ideals and won results. We believe that ideas about our material reality matter a great deal, especially when counterposed to the dominant ideas of pragmatism, nationalism, and Zionism that have guided the politics of union leadership for decades.
Not every oppression is experienced directly on the shop floor, however. Our imperialist state tries its best to commit its most explicit violence out of sight and out of mind for the American worker. DSA’s strong stance against the ongoing genocide in Palestine drew many into our ranks, and spurred a response from organized labor. The author raises the UAW UC 2024 [strike](https://inthesetimes.com/article/uaw-4811-strike-ucla-university-of-california-israel-palestine-students-rafah-gaza?ref=marxistunity.com) over Palestine as an example of how “economic” demands can eventually give way to “political” ones. But if, as the author states earlier, “the most effective forms of political practice do not begin from…arriving at the correct ideas. Instead, they begin from the day-to-day struggles of workers and tenants” it is left unclear what mechanism will connect these day-to-day struggles to the struggle against the war machine. Organizers with a program that places us within a global struggle against the war-makers understand these connections, and can create the opportunities to make them clear to others as they build power on the shop floor.
### **Conclusion**
There is little disagreement between MUG and Communist Caucus about the importance of the shop floor, the importance of class-independent organizations, their role in reviving a lost culture of organizing, and the importance of building strike power. In fact, every socialist I have met in DSA understands that economic issues have political implications. The weakness of the argument lies in the rote dismissal of collective *political* organization. The author most clearly expresses this in his rejection of a party program, which he caricatures as the idea that:
> *The right demands articulated correctly will bring the class-conscious layers of the proletariat into the ranks of “the Party” to follow our correct ideas and leadership. This is an ultimately idealistic approach, which argues that ideas and slogans are what primarily drive history toward socialism.*
Almost two centuries since the Manifesto was written, and with many bold predictions of the imminence of socialism scattered in the graveyard of our movement since, it feels like hubris to suggest what might finally get us across the river to the promised land. Yet, we find ourselves at the threshold of history. We’ve built a precarious socialist movement that is growing, winning, and calling on us to push forward. The reality is, our ideas and politics, now crystalized as a program, have brought more people than ever towards socialism in the US. And we have shrewdly worked together to deliver wins that will bring in even more.
The dichotomy between ideas and action raised by the author can only fall away as we build a movement that can both properly think and act*.* I conclude with Marx arguing against such a division in 1844: “The weapon of criticism cannot, of course, replace criticism of the weapon, material force must be overthrown by material force; but theory also becomes a material force as soon as it has gripped the masses.”
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Abolition is a Minimum Program Demand
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/abolition-is-a-minimum-program-demand/
Last updated: 2026-09-06T03:34:01.000Z
> *Years ago, I recognized my kinship with all living beings, and I made up my mind that I was not one bit better than the meanest on earth. I said then, and I say now, that while there is a lower class, I am in it, and while there is a criminal element I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.*
— Eugene V. Debs, September 18, 1918.
“Woke 1” was not crazy.[\[1\]](#fn1) Abolition is not a mistaken rhetorical overreach of the unsophisticated masses that began in 2020\. It is the organic, righteous demand from millions of people to the relentless terrorism inflicted by the imperial police state.
If DSA intends to be a vehicle for Black liberation, where Black and other colonized peoples can participate fully, we cannot treat abolition as a hyperbole to distance ourselves from. Marxist Unity Group sees the abolitionist movement—from the general strike of the enslaved, through the prison rebellions of the 60s and 70s, to the Ferguson and George Floyd uprisings—as a primary struggle against the white supremacist capitalist system. Abolitionist demands were fundamental to socialist politics in the Paris Commune of 1871, when working-class Parisians seized control of the city, abolished the standing army and replaced it with a civic guard with internal democracy and direct accountability to the working class, recognizing these carceral systems as the [‘unfailing weapon’](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/may/05b.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) of the bourgeoisie. From Vladimir Lenin to [George Jackson](https://www.historyisaweapon.com/defcon1/soledadbro.html?ref=marxistunity.com), the socialist position on police and carceral power has always been and must always be rooted in abolition.
**Abolition needs to be explained through the minimum program demand: the working class cannot rule while a large part of it remains policed, caged, and chained.**
As Marxists in DSA, we fight for the revolutionary horizon of democracy and socialism, agitating for and popularizing the minimum program that we will implement immediately upon workers taking power. That horizon is impossible without the abolition of the carceral state. A minimum socialist program cannot and will not be shaped by chasing popular opinion polls; instead, the working class must carry out the minimum program to transform the political and economic structure of our state, from one based on slavery and exploitation to a worker’s republic advancing a fully liberated, classless society. There are many demands critical to the minimum program: like democratic reforms and universal housing, healthcare and food for all. Yet these demands are incomplete without the abolition of the capitalist carceral state, in the form of jails, police, prisons, and surveillance structures designed to protect private property, maintain ruling class power, and imprison those of us fighting for a free and beautiful world.
Who dragged students away as they studied in encampments and demanded a Free Palestine? Who shoots and kills environmental organizers and Indigenous people from Standing Rock to Cop City? Who enforces evictions, then throws away the intimate belongings of our neighbors forced out of their homes and into sleeping between the cracks beneath bridges? As socialists, we must commit to abolishing the instruments of exploitation as well as the instruments of enforcement.
Our comrades touting reactionary anti-abolitionist talking points misunderstand both the world we live in and the world we are fighting for. We refuse to be distracted or allow our demands to be limited by the hegemonic discourse of our enemies. As Critical Resistance explains, “*Abolition is both a practical organizing tool and a long-term goal.*”
Because abolition is more than a transitional demand, we have a duty to organize the working class to win the democratic mandate for this program holistically. If the working-class masses aren’t yet on our side to demand our minimum program, then we are not in the revolutionary situation required to institute it. The wins we celebrate most today, such as the abolition of chattel slavery, were once rejected and repressed by those in power, and many were even unpopular among the masses. But the fight for freedom is not a popularity contest, and we owe the power of our demands to all those who stayed the course despite their lack of popularity.
## **The State of the Crisis**
The carceral state is politically, ideologically, and morally indefensible. We live in a country that has a massively oversized police and prison population for a reason: to politically dominate and disempower millions of people in order to reproduce white supremacist ruling-class order and a political constituency economically bound to the carceral state. This system did not drop out of the sky; it was designed to crush the liberation struggles of Black people, and it has been hideously successful. The most “unserious” idea is believing we can achieve socialism and democracy while millions remain in chains.
Until we have a new set of rules that structure our society through a democratic constitution, we will continue to suffer in the hellscape slaveowners and capitalists architected for their benefit. As Derecka Purnell explains in her book Becoming Abolitionists, “*The people who chose the police were the same people who drafted the Constitution, who started the wars, who owned slaves, who possessed property, who had the most to lose if oppressed people ever decided to revolt: wealthy white men.*”
The struggle of generations before us and the lived experience of our comrades has led to an embrace of the abolition of policing and prisons as a whole. The scope of the social crisis and obvious demand is clarified in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program’s call for *fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.*
## **Abolition is a Minimum Program Demand**
From Fox News to AOC to DSA-Cadre Mayor [Mamdani](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/aug/13/aoc-mamdani-defund-police-prisons?ref=marxistunity.com) to some rank-and-file [members](https://wnyc.org/browse/shows/episode/simplecast/e4bbdc00-be45-4d0f-a09f-8d0e058ad40f?ref=marxistunity.com), people have characterized the demand to abolish police or prisons as “implausible,” “even for the long term.” But the issue with the Left’s typical “abolitionist” rhetoric has nothing to do with its unpopularity and everything to do with its presentation as a vague agitational slogan rather than an integral component of a revolutionary minimum program to transform our society. This has much in common with the Trotskyist concept of a “transitional demand:” a revolutionary reform that socialists should rally the masses behind today (a non-revolutionary moment), which, while popular or intuitive, is in actuality only achievable under a revolutionary situation. Simply put, a transitional program is a list of revolutionary slogans, with the people fighting for them expected to realize in time that in order to win the demands, a revolution needs to happen.
‘Abolition’ has been treated largely as a rhetorical critique of our policing system, where the end-demand goes somewhere between the complete abolition of all systems of carceral control and the level of policing present in white suburbs (which is a part of the same system that overpolices Black and brown neighborhoods). This lack of clarity as to how abolition can be achieved made sense in the context of a quickly evolving mass political movement, but rather than learning from and being in struggle with working-class abolitionists toward the development of a revolution, it has prompted the degeneration of “abolitionism” into a vibe, a vaguely held political brand.
Instead of a transitional program, Marxist Unity Group fights for the traditional Marxist minimum-maximum program, which lays out the minimum demands necessary for the working class to effectively govern ourselves and achieve the maximum program of communism: a stateless, classless society free of exploitation and oppression. This paradigm points us to demands that may seem more radical and extreme than some transitional demands, because the minimum-maximum program asks us not what’s popular, but what must be undertaken to dismantle the load bearing aspects of capitalist institutions that causes human and planetary suffering and replace them with a state controlled by the working class. For our minimum program, we believe DSA can afford to be more specific about what we mean when the working class institutes abolition of the carceral state. Our representatives, tribunes, and organizers should be equipped with the political education and loyalty to our program to name simply that we are committed to ending the carceral state and making sure we are addressing the root causes of violence instead of causing more violence.
It is also clear that this programmatic confusion arises in part from a lack of a positive vision for how exactly we are supposed to carry out abolition. That is to say: the police will not abolish themselves, any more than chattel slavery abolished itself during the Civil War. Then, it took the organization and arming of formerly enslaved Black people together with conscious political agitation to carry out abolition in this country. And it will take more than that to finish Reconstruction today.
That is why we in Marxist Unity Group recognize that the road to abolition requires the abolition of the separate class of police as well as the separate class of the imprisoned. This requires the creation of a democratic and popular militia—flowing from the working class and the oppressed’s organs of self-defense established under capitalism and defined by the right to bear arms, the sovereignty of the people, universal service and training, and a rigorous community control coexisting with the democratic rights of members. Further, Marxist Unity Group calls for the extension of labor and legal rights to the imprisoned.
A party that asks us to leave the demand for abolition back in 2020 is not a party serious about the liberation of Black, colonized, and working-class people. Any “socialism” that abandons this demand will have abandoned the working class whose liberation it’s meant to secure. So we remain steadfastly committed to an abolitionist future and will fight like hell for the working-class majority we need to implement our minimum program. Abolition of the carceral state is inseparable from the demand for a democratic socialist republic. As Assata Shakur and Karl Marx taught us “we have nothing to lose but our chains.”
---
1. Here we reject the racist, derisive recent use of the “Woke 1” to demean the rallying cries of the George Floyd and Breonna Taylor uprisings deployed by people like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez as explained throughout this piece. We further reject the general use of the term “woke” by conservatives, liberals, and so-called socialists alike, whose objective impact is to spread a mocking historical amnesia underpinned by a fear of the reality that Black liberation demands a revolution. The Black liberation struggle will continue to swell and erupt in this country until it is secured, and those demanding abolition of all structures that keep oppressed people in chains are the most clear-eyed of us all. [↩︎](#fnref1)
### The Political is Economic, Too
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-political-is-economic-too/
Last updated: 2026-08-29T22:01:43.000Z
> We are political beings, not for lack of trying to be otherwise.
There was a tenant meeting in Flatbush that I attended years ago. Afterward, as I stood outside with Pauline, an older Caribbean tenant unionist waiting for her Access-a-Ride, a DSA friend called my phone. I picked up— “What’s up, comrade?” I forget any of the details of that conversation, but I do remember clearly that after I hung up, Pauline looked at me with a big smile and said: “I used to hear everyone call each other *comrade* back in Trinidad. I haven’t heard it in so long.”
Last week, Communist Caucus (CC)’s Zach W. [published](https://communistcaucus.com/the-economic-is-political/?ref=marxistunity.com) “The Economic is Political.” In it, he lays out the caucus’ preference for “coercive class organization,” which they argue is more essential than political forms of struggle for “recomposing” the working class. Our comrades in Communist Caucus deride Marxist Unity Group for a fixation on “correct ideas” and high politics, and for focusing on the anachronism of a political party united around a socialist program in contrast to their own correct idea of economic class struggle. But to imagine our daily class struggle as separate from politics is to silo it off, and impose a particular parochialism onto workers that they never asked for.
We believe that the struggle for socialism and the day-to-day struggle for working class freedom and dignity are mutually reinforcing; they require one another. This is the “merger formula” which informs all of MUG’s political activity. That is, we must bring the grand struggle for socialism and democracy into each of our daily economic struggles, and bring the facts and weight, the roots and realities of immediate class struggles as they exist into our broad political horizon. This is how we combine the social democratic movement for the abolition of wage labor and democratic self-government with the most basic struggles of the working class to defend and advance its interests.
Our [program worship](https://cosmonautmag.com/2018/09/why-have-a-political-program-2/?ref=marxistunity.com), the Communist Caucus comrades argue, leads us to ignore the urgent work of proletarian organization and recomposition, and instead focus on internecine political debates in DSA. The truth of the matter is, rather, that the program is an irreplaceable tool for the recomposition of our class. We don’t overlook or spurn “coercive economic organization;” we merely recognize that these class struggle organizations, at root and at scale, must be brought into the all-sided struggle for human emancipation that is socialism.
What follows is first an elaboration of one example of the merger formula in motion within the New York City tenant movement, the organization of a Citywide Tenant Assembly. This brief anecdote is meant to respond to the criticism that “partyism” somehow entails leaving behind class struggle. Moreover, it demonstrates that the opposite is true–that we need an “organization of organizers,” with clear programmatic unity and direction, to recompose the working class and struggle towards class unity.
I then engage directly with Comrade Zach’s article. The main theses of my critique are 1) that thinking and doing are part of the same process; 2) that proletarians are political beings with political initiatives and ideas; 3) that the various terrains of struggle (the state, production, reproduction, culture) are part of the same interpenetrating and mutually-conditioning struggle; and finally 4) that our concept of socialism, from which our practical activity flows, is the development of all-sided working-class self-governance, or rank-and-file democratic participation and control in and over every sphere of political and economic life.
### **A Union of Unions**
In May 2025, a few members of Marxist Unity Group helped organize New York City’s first Citywide Tenant Assembly. Participation in the assembly stretched across geographies and languages, independent tenant unions and housing nonprofits. Our efforts were informed by the [idea](https://www.marxistunity.com/for-a-rank-and-file-tenant-unionism/) of “rank-and-file tenant unionism,” a term derived from Kim Moody’s [prescriptions](https://solidarity-us.org/rankandfilestrategy/?ref=marxistunity.com) for socialists in the labor movement. We wanted to work out a theory that corresponded to what was developing in front of our eyes: a space for rank-and-file tenants to cultivate the stuff of mass democratic organization, from the building block to the citywide level.
We organized another assembly in December 2025, growing both in size and number of organizations present. A third is planned for October. This work is consciously prefigurative. It is an ongoing attempt to build out the structure and relationships necessary for a citywide tenant union. A tenant union that is (to use the comrade Zach W.’s terms) independent, durable, and engaged in class struggle. It must also be consciously democratic, characterized by the ability to take majority action while preserving the initiative and local prerogative of tenant associations and unions on the ground. Lenin [called](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/ch03.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) this “proletarian centralism.”
The Citywide Tenant Assembly (CTA) is developing into a Union of Unions: a means to articulate a higher form of politics that emerges from the activity of militant tenants across the city fighting alongside their neighbors against the deprivations of landlordism. This entails cross-pollinating tactics and coordinating citywide campaigns. The CTA is a container for the deep well of knowledge that tenants necessarily accumulate through the process of crisis, but all too often drains into the ether without an organization that can preserve institutional memory. It is also a means for consolidating and protecting the gains won through our independent organizing. When we win big, like the Union of Pinnacle Tenants (UPT) did when they won a [historic rent abatement](https://gothamist.com/news/landlord-targeted-by-mamdani-agrees-to-forgive-back-rent-in-5100-apartments?ref=marxistunity.com), it is inevitably followed by attempts to co-opt and sanitize. It is up to us to keep those wins whole and in the hands of the class.
The CTA was recently granted [up to $5,000](https://www.alaa.org/media-releases/language-justice-for-citywide-tenant-assembly-support-new-york-citys-tenant-movement?ref=marxistunity.com) by the Association of Legal Advocates and Attorneys (ALAA), UAW 2325, to cover language interpretation at our October assembly. This money is not conditioned on political adherence or subordination to any external body, but a genuine expression of solidarity between independent class organizations. It should be remarked that ALAA, over the last three years, has been one of the most [militant](https://www.alaa.org/media-releases/parties-reach-settlement-agreement-union-remains-steadfast-in-commitment-to-palestine?ref=marxistunity.com) labor locals in the city. The idea for the resolution was first cooked up in a conversation between two friends–one on the CTA Coordinating Committee and one on ALAA’s Joint Council–who met years ago as members of the Crown Heights Tenant Union. As our organization grows, the opportunity for more exciting instances of cross-pollination will grow with it.
The first assembly was organized through NYC-DSA’s Tenant Organizing Working Group (TOWG), and originally conceived in response to the first inklings of Zohran’s mayoral run. Our early conversations with his proto-campaign team about his “housing platform” compelled us to think backward towards a form of organization that could produce a platform that represented the needs and wants of the tenant movement in the first place. Though participants at the first assembly voted to proceed as an independent formation, of the current Coordinating Committee (CC)’s ten members: two are on the TOWG organizing committee, four are in MUG, and six total are in NYC-DSA. That is to say, the assembly would not have been possible save for our party work, and the network of cadre developed in and around DSA.
These tenant assemblies are by no means a product of MUG alone and rely on a deep network of grassroots institutions built up by many people over many years. But the reason that we held a plurality on the planning committee and were willing to dedicate many sleepless nights to bringing the assembly about, is this: Even when one intuitively understands the limits of partial struggles in one building, one union, or one community, there are deep obstacles to building broader, more general forms of organization. To overcome these obstacles requires an organizational impulse that more often than not follows from deep ideological commitment. It is this ideological commitment to a single unified working-class struggle for power that led MUG comrades to take this approach to economic organization.
### **A Critique of Economism**
In his article, Zach W. [writes](https://communistcaucus.com/the-economic-is-political/?ref=marxistunity.com):
> “In a time of profound proletarian disorganization… the most effective forms of political practice do not begin from a formal organization debating and arriving at the correct ideas. Instead, they begin from the day-to-day struggles of workers and tenants.
I want to focus on the distinction drawn by the comrade between day-to-day struggles and political organization. On one hand, we have actual, “real” class struggle, where proletarians take noble stands against our class enemies: bosses, landlords, and the like. On the other, ideologically self-selecting activists, gathered in a room quarantined off from the class struggle on shop floors and in apartment building lobbies, deliberate endlessly about ideas and slogans. These party activists tend to–this line of argument goes–prefer electoral, legislative, and ideological forms of struggle. This is perhaps due to these activists’ innate dislocation from the real proletariat. Given such options, a preference for the former is obvious. Fortunately, however, this distinction is a false one.
By presenting quotidian economic struggle and political struggle as distinct, the author artificially forecloses the possibility for the two to relate to one another, much less merge into a single force. In this just-so story, these activists (surely not working class themselves) cannot possibly seed or support independent working-class organization *through* their party work. Nor can the economically-minded, rooted-in-place proletarians, engaged in their home-field class struggles, ever have interest in joining a powerful independent socialist movement that is transforming the conditions under which the class struggle bears out.
Zach W. puts forward yet another glaring contrast. “\[T\]he primary emphasis,” he writes, “must be on the composition of the class rather than the consciousness of the class. At this moment, we must be more concerned with what actions our class can take than we are with what our class *thinks*.” Again, leaving aside my qualms with an argument for an idea that denigrates the notion of thinking, the author presents the set of options as if they are constitutionally opposed to one another. Comrades, he asks: should we think or should we do? Should the working class *think* or should it do? Again, the answer is prescribed by the options. The notion that the thinking and doing might be interwoven or at least connected is left unexamined.
### **Party Gospel or Programmatic Politics?**
The worker’s movement must be actively merged with the socialist movement in order for either to reach their historical potential. See how Lenin writes in *What is To Be Done?–*his seminal text on the merger formula–on whether socialist partisans should bring the full complexity of their political program into the arena of economic struggle. The workers “are not children whom you can feed with the thin soup of 'economist' politics by itself; we want to know everything that everyone else knows, we want to become acquainted in detail with *all* sides of political life and *actively* participate in each and every political event.”
The simplest way of articulating the MUG thesis, in response to the critique from Communist Caucus, is this: We believe in full-bodied honesty in all of our socialist activity. Not through proselytizing, though this too in choice moments, but through the richness of the interpersonal relationships, the trust, camaraderie, and love that constitute the real thing of class-struggle organization. Because the thinking and the doing of class struggle are in fact intertwined, we are very clear that the ideas we bring to that struggle are rooted in a long historical tradition of socialism.
As history bears down upon us, the Communist Caucus comrades urge socialist organizers to leave the politics at home (or in group chats or caucus publications, maybe twitter too) when they enter the hidden abode of class struggle. But just as they urge us to do this, they preclude the possibility of setting a common democratically-decided direction within the party, around their ideas or anyone else’s. To do so requires far too much engagement with the irrelevant distraction of DSA business. Instead, get on with it and go organize. Any question of strategy and tactics, of where or how, is left for the individual organizer to figure out on their own.
The program is a particular sticking point for Zach W, which in his estimation compels a misplaced focus on “correct ideas” and “party gospel” over building genuine proletarian organization. This critique, aimed squarely at MUG, imagines that we, in MUG but also DSA members writ large, think the program is literally correct. But in my appraisal, the newest edition of our Workers Deserve More [program](https://program.dsausa.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) is good but certainly not great. Many aspects of it fall far short. The housing section does what we tenant unionists hate: it centers housing rather than tenants. The section about the police is also lacking. I could go on.
But that’s the thing. The program isn’t about indexing infallible ideas, though I have faith subsequent programs will develop qualitatively. The program isn’t something we fully agree with; it's something we accept as a basis for common action. It is a means of cohering a collective political project and class unity in a fractured neoliberal world. We do not proclaim to have the absolute answers to every question that we can use to proselytize converts. Instead, we prefer the framing that we, as socialists, have a shared program of action; let’s talk about it. This is who we are, and this is what we aim for. If you disagree with it, like I do in part, join anyway and let’s figure out how we can change it and make it better.
In his polemic against the program, Zach W. concludes, in bold, that: “we must undertake organizing projects that unify and compose the class through action, bringing people together across socioeconomic differences: race, job title, gender, \[and\] nationality.” It should be clear by now that our party and its program constitute just such an organizing project, the attempt to cohere the working class into a united political actor. We cannot leave the herculean work of class unity to chance, we build it piece by piece through our collective, reflective, action.
### Run It Up the Flagpole
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/run-it-up-the-flagpole/
Last updated: 2026-08-23T16:46:48.000Z
Two years ago, Aziz Rana published [The Constitutional Bind](https://www.dsausa.org/blog/book-review-the-constitutional-bind-by-aziz-rana/?ref=marxistunity.com), a sweeping historical investigation meant to aid progressive and radical movements in the United States. How was it, Rana asked, that the relatively vibrant constitutional critique found in socialist, progressive, and intellectually honest circles in the early 20th century had been effectively silenced? How had the ruling class built a persuasive narrative of “American democracy” and convinced so many people to “idolize a document that fails them”? Where had the demand for a democratic constitution gone? More importantly, when would it return?
Constitutional criticism of all stripes was submerged in a toxic brew of World War jingoism, Cold War nationalism, and state-sponsored terrorism. Stalinism obscured Marxism’s historically [longstanding commitment](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-us-lefts-rediscovery-of-democratic-853?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) to democratic republicanism and [universal and equal rights](https://archive.org/details/marxengelstheirc0000nimt), which led to immense ideological and theoretical confusion, like the Communist Party USA’s [embrace](https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/09/which-way-cpusa/?ref=marxistunity.com) of “Bill of Rights Socialism.” During the mid 20th century, a handful of scholars and activists, including [W. E. B. Du Bois](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/what-would-it-mean-to-finish-reconstruction?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), Harry Haywood, [Afeni Shakur](https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/C/bo208177761.html?ref=marxistunity.com), Tom Hayden, and [Martin Luther King Jr.](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/martin-luther-king-and-the-democratic?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), offered passing critiques. But these voices were a dime a dozen and did not center the need to replace the undemocratic constitutional order in the struggle for freedom and autonomy.
Today, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is bringing constitutional politics back into the national spotlight. Our [program](https://program.dsausa.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) proclaims that: “We are workers fighting to transform society, to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” Establishing that new republic, the program continues, will entail abolishing the Senate and replacing the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary entirely subordinate to Congress, now unicameral and elected by proportional representation. This is the bold strategy for political power that the Left has lacked for more than a century. It’s precisely this struggle for popular, centralized government—for democracy—that will [unite the working class](https://www.marxistunity.com/the-battle-for-democracy-can-remake-the-working-class/) and be our [North Star](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/our-north-star?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) during the trying times ahead.
The new program and resulting media attention have placed DSA into the vanguard of the developing movement for a [Third Reconstruction](https://www.marxistunity.com/the-battle-for-democracy-can-remake-the-working-class/). The struggle for democracy is now ours to [win or lose](https://www.marxistunity.com/the-battle-for-democracy-can-remake-the-working-class/). How can we make sure this movement will continue to grow, both in power and ambition?
### **Force the Issue**
First, we must take a page from the [Antebellum abolitionists](https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/10/the-abolitionist-dirty-break/?ref=marxistunity.com) and force the issue. We demand a democratic government and a democratic society. From the floor of Congress to a picket line or a rally against ICE—every struggle is a platform to connect the denial of equal rights to [institutions](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/fighting-for-true-democracy-a-socialist?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) like the Senate, the President, the Electoral College, and the Supreme Court. Every election from here on out can become a “[referendum](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-senate-is-begging-to-be-abolished) on the question of universal and equal suffrage.” No politico or talking head will be able to spout off about the alleged “miracles” of America’s government without being jeered and laughed at. No politician will be able to say they are seriously addressing important issues without being challenged about their plan to fix our rotten institutions.
When we take a bold stand, others follow. In the days after the release of Workers Deserve More, [Bhaskar Sunkara](https://www.foxnews.com/video/6401490265112?ref=marxistunity.com) and [Ben Burgis](https://jacobin.com/2026/07/senate-dsa-conservative-media-freak-out?ref=marxistunity.com), two of the more public intellectuals on the American Left, both expressed support for abolishing the Senate. Of course, like almost everyone on the Left, both of them know [perfectly well](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/making-waves?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) that the Constitution is designed to stifle the will of the majority, which therefore makes the “democratic road to socialism” impossible. But it took DSA forcing the issue—pointing to the elephant in the room and saying, “There, look!”—for others to speak up.
[Bernie Sanders](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/bernie-sanders-continues-stumping?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) isn’t pointing to the Senate—let alone to the Constitution. Neither is [Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/alexandria-ocasio-cortez-covers-for?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) nor [Zohran Mamdani](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/zohran-mamdani-is-wrong-about-democracy?utm%5Fsource=publication-search). DSA member and then-Wisconsin gubernatorial hopeful [Francesca Hong](https://www.wfmd.com/2026/07/28/democratic-wisconsin-gubernatorial-candidate-doesnt-recall-abolish-the-senate-post-in-2021-campaign-says/?ref=marxistunity.com) retracted her previous calls to abolish the Senate under pressure. These political superstars might come around in time. But if they do, it will only be because DSA made the issue impossible to ignore. When we lead on bold demands for a democratic reconstruction of society—and specific constitutional proposals to bring that transformation about—other people follow. After all, who likes the Senate? And if someone doesn’t support our demand, all the worse for them. [Up and over](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/feb/01.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) we go, pushing aside the equivocators and naysayers. As King [knew well](https://nul.org/news/letter-birmingham-jail?ref=marxistunity.com), “wait” almost always means “never.” The time is always right to fight for democracy and demand that others do the same.
### **Tie It All Together**
We have far more friends than enemies in the struggle for equal rights. Over this July 4 weekend, DSA members attended the Spirit of Mandela’s [Mobilization Against Genocide](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/jalil-muntaqim-on-the-spirit-of-mandela?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) in Atlanta. National DSA [endorsed the event](https://www.dsausa.org/statements/democratic-socialists-of-america-endorses-spirit-of-mandelas-national-mobilization-against-genocide/?ref=marxistunity.com), stating that the Declaration of Independence’s “ideals of universal and equal rights—since broadened beyond white property-owning men—have never been fully realized,” and that “We *will not* let the bourgeoisie control the narrative. We *will* struggle against ongoing oppression and tyranny.”
DSA was joined by dozens of other organizations, including the Jericho Movement, the Southern Workers Assembly, the Peoples Power Union, and Black Workers for Justice. These organizations are incredibly diverse, both in membership and in politics. Yet, universal and equal rights were on the tip of everyone’s tongue, especially after the Supreme Court’s decision in *Louisiana v. Callais* [stuck another knife](https://jacobin.com/2026/05/voting-rights-louisiana-callais-race?ref=marxistunity.com) into the Voting Rights Act. Everyone knows that a handful of wealthy individuals—not the people—make the laws that shape the country’s direction and [spread destruction](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/publish/posts/detail/169018723?referrer=%2Fpublish%2Fposts%3Fsearch%3Dmartin%2520luther%2520king) across the world. Everyone at least can intuitively understand [King’s declaration](https://archive.pov.org/pov2008/election/wvote/king.html?ref=marxistunity.com) that, without an equal vote, “I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind—it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact—I can only submit to the edict of others.”
We are all united by our lack of equal political power. Donald Trump’s “Big Beautiful Bill” is one example. It slashed funding for Medicaid, lined the pockets of the military and ICE, expanded opportunities for oil and gas development, and made it harder to pay for college. There was something in it for everyone to hate, and a significant majority of the population opposed the law. But the Senate does not represent majority opinion. Thanks to equal state representation, the 50 Republican senators who voted for the bill represented roughly [25 million fewer](https://thefulcrum.us/governance-legislation/us-senate-representation-imbalance?ref=marxistunity.com) Americans than the 50 Democrats who voted against it. The Vice President—a position won through the undemocratic Electoral College—cast the tie-breaking vote. And *voilà,* the ruling class has its law. Not because Americans wanted it, but because the Constitution was [designed](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/fighting-for-true-democracy-a-socialist?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) to ensure that the rich and powerful grow more rich and powerful.
DSA is still only a fraction of the national population. As the Mobilization Against Genocide in Atlanta made clear, we are one part in a vast panorama of political organizations struggling for change. Amid all this complexity and competing ideas, a political program that centers the demand for a democratic republic can cut through the noise and grab people’s attention by providing a clear strategy. What unites the working class is our shared exclusion from property and political power. We want this power because we understand that it is intolerable to live without it, and impossible to achieve our goals for a liberated world. Our lack of power enables repression at home and imperial plunder [abroad](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/venezuela-name-the-system?utm%5Fsource=publication-search). The demand for democracy brings everything together.
### **No Shortcuts**
Can some of DSA’s more modest programmatic demands, say, winning Medicare for All or transitioning to renewable energy, be won under the existing Constitution? Unlikely. [Both](https://www.washingtonpost.com/powerpost/sanders-will-introduce-universal-health-care-backed-by-15-democrats/2017/09/12/d590ef26-97b7-11e7-87fc-c3f7ee4035c9%5Fstory.html?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com) have already [failed](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-democratic-constitution-podcast-969?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) in Congress, and face incredible opposition from capital. But even if we win a few of our major demands, the political playing field will not have changed. We would need to constantly look over our shoulder, scanning the horizon for the next filibuster, veto, or judicial review. Our wins would “never be stable, secure, or complete without full democratization,” as we find ourselves forced to fight a never-ending [rearguard battle](https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/2023-dsa-national-convention-discussion/taking-democracy-seriously/?ref=marxistunity.com).
Some argue that there is a constitutional path to universal and equal rights and an end to the tyranny of the minority through an [Article V](https://www.archives.gov/federal-register/constitution/article-v.html?ref=marxistunity.com) Convention. Again, this is [unlikely](https://www.californialawreview.org/print/the-worlds-most-difficult-constitution-to-amend?ref=marxistunity.com). So unlikely, in fact, that entertaining it would be to miseducate the working class by [sowing illusions](https://artsfuse.org/318391/book-review-we-the-people-when-constitutional-crisis-meets-narrative-excess/?ref=marxistunity.com) about what’s possible. The demand to abolish the Senate has attracted particular attention. It’s also one that clearly demonstrates the need to break free of the constitutional cage, since Article V expressly forbids changing the Senate’s allocation of representation among the states unless every single state agrees. This unanimity of agreement is what political scientists call “[interpretive unamendability](https://www.californialawreview.org/print/the-worlds-most-difficult-constitution-to-amend?ref=marxistunity.com).” In layman’s terms, don’t hold your breath.
As Jane McAlevey taught a generation of labor activists, there are [no shortcuts](https://janemcalevey.com/book/no-shortcuts-organizing-for-power-in-the-new-gilded-age/?ref=marxistunity.com). The same is true of the struggle for a radically transformed political playing field. There is no [constitutional or reformist](https://www.groundworkdsa.com/building-up/democracy-the-dsa-platform-and-the-constitution?ref=marxistunity.com) path to achieve equal suffrage, nor is leaving the Constitution [untouched](https://jacobin.com/2026/08/dsa-constitution-congress-presidency-reform?ref=marxistunity.com) a viable option. The struggle for democracy must therefore take the [revolutionary road](https://www.marxistunity.com/announcing-our-npc-candidates/). This means uniting millions behind a political program committed to convening a sovereign, [popular assembly](https://jacobin.com/2017/01/constitution-trump-democracy-electoral-college-senate?ref=marxistunity.com) to draft a new constitution. That draft must then be submitted to the nation for ratification on the basis of one person, one vote. With political power in our hands, the working class will, for the first time, have a government of, by, and for the people.
### **Run It Up the Flagpole**
Five years ago, DSA’s 2021 program took a modest but meaningful step toward confronting the Constitution, [declaring that](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/dsa-should-lead-the-charge-for-a?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) “the nation that holds itself out as the world’s premier democracy is no democracy at all,” and that “democracy is necessary to win a socialist society,” which is also the “complete realization of democracy.” Two years later, YDSA’s national convention [passed](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eBmtHUha1G72fGmSpwLVWbOG750IzqsR/view?ref=marxistunity.com) Winning the Battle for Democracy, an homage to a [similar resolution](https://docs.google.com/document/d/16dzTN2IS7Y8x2hG5Vkz37UpG6MZ6T3-%5FEx8FVPq3CCs/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com) put forward at DSA’s 2023 National Convention. YDSA identified the “liberal-constitutional regime outlined in the Constitution” as the “specific form” of capitalist-class rule, adding important theoretical clarity to the question of how the capitalist class rules. It also broke necessary ground by calling on DSA electeds to indict the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the other minoritarian checks on popular will. In 2024, the first [Workers Deserve More](https://docs.google.com/document/u/0/d/e/2PACX-1vRXJPwDotin60oZBZeLdS-5%5FCxDUcdzU0sHNwr0KIXD53AqI3RoeVIoy6FQOXicrqxBWcDDinvDeBbe/pub?pli=1&ref=marxistunity.com) program stated that “working-class majority rule” would be secured “through a democratic constitution that establishes a political system with universal and equal working-class voting rights,” and with political power vested in a single federal legislature elected by proportional representation. That brings us to today, where the new version of Workers Deserve More has brought us one more step forward, and DSA’s programmatic positions are capturing the attention of the country more than ever.
Asked recently about the demand for a democratic constitution, Richard Wolff [responded](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/richard-wolff-on-marxism-trump-and?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), “run it up the flagpole and see who salutes… then you know who you got.” This is the right attitude.Slowly but surely, DSA is raising the flag for a democratic constitution and embracing its newfound position at the forefront of a developing [Third Reconstruction](https://www.marxistunity.com/the-battle-for-democracy-can-remake-the-working-class/) in the United States. The demand for democracy drives everything else forward. All those who stand for universal and equal suffrage and against minoritarian obstacles to majority rule should join DSA. In turn, DSA should center its demand for a new constitution in the Workers Deserve More program. We aren’t the only ones with democracy in the name—but we are the only ones prepared to fight to the end to achieve it.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### A Salute To Our Florida Comrades
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/a-salute-to-our-florida-comrades/
Last updated: 2026-08-19T21:18:18.000Z
Marxist Unity Group congratulates our comrades in Florida who proved that tens of thousands of people in South Florida are hungry for socialist politics. While the Democratic Party abandons Florida, treating it as nothing but a nesting ground for fascism, Oliver Larkin and his DSA team fought through an anti-democratic gerrymander in the middle of the election to champion anti-Zionism, reparations for Black communities, and the struggle for political freedom. They proved that there is a base for socialist politics in every corner of this country.
We supported Oliver’s unanimous national endorsement because his campaign served as a model for candidates around the country: Oliver proudly identified himself as a democratic socialist, consistently centered DSA in his messaging, and defended DSA’s Workers Deserve More Program against hostile media. He organized as a socialist in the rank and file of the labor movement, putting concrete commitment to the working class above campaign results.
Most significantly, he defied the idea that socialist politics only appeal to white voters, consistently spending time in Black communities; championing Black liberation and Reconstruction; and earning the support of thousands of Black and Latino Floridians. It’s no wonder that reactionary Republicans rushed to illegally gerrymander his district to be in one of the whitest, wealthiest places in the state.
Broward DSA and other chapters across the state functioned as the engine of his campaign, building a party surrogate from the ground up to knock tens of thousands of doors, and leaned on the support of DSA’s National Electoral Commission to make hundreds of thousands of phonebanking calls. DSA members in Florida have built a movement that will shake the foundations of both fascism and liberal cowardice for years to come.
Member-driven, democratically controlled infrastructure is what separates DSA from the Democratic Party. Cadre campaigns like Oliver’s are how we build the political independence required to become a true socialist party that organizes and represents the working class. There are no shortcuts to building that infrastructure, and losses are worth it when they bring thousands to a party that represents us, not capitalists. We call on DSA chapters across the country to build up cadre campaigns with the same fearless commitment to DSA’s program for a working class democracy.
### The Gospel of Field
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-gospel-of-field/
Last updated: 2026-08-06T16:28:55.000Z
The sudden string of DSA victories at the ballot box has sent the Democratic Party bigwigs and their cable TV friends into a delightful fit of hysteria. Former DNC chair [Jaime Harrison](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jun/29/centrist-democrats-democratic-socialists-backlash?ref=marxistunity.com) and ex-Maoist turned CNN pundit [Van Jones](https://x.com/VanJones68/status/2070643643950694465?ref=marxistunity.com) are shrieking about the “army of on-the-ground organizers” knocking at their doors. Equally, DSA members across factional lines are taking advantage of the political shift to spread the gospel of field.
There’s no question that DSA’s historically impressive canvassing operations on both a national and local level were a decisive factor. The NY-7 race, between DSA candidate Claire Valdez and WFP darling Antonio Reynoso, proved without a doubt that a small team of professionals cannot withstand DSA’s ideologically driven horde of volunteers willing to spend hours having real conversations with strangers. While this moment is worth celebrating, this slate of DSA electoral victories is also the result of the historic collapse of traditional political machines. DSA’s field operation, which remains stuck in a “mobilizing” over an “organizing” model, cannot scale infinitely. We underestimate the ability of the ruling class to respond to new and creative threats to its power to our peril.
### **The Death of a Machine**
In a nutshell, a political machine is a network of community institutions—like churches, social clubs and trade unions—that a political boss mobilizes for votes in return for patronage from the candidate’s office. The machine is successful when voters are mobilized through institutions that have deep roots in a community, organized by individuals with intimate and long-term relationships with the people being mobilized. This is in stark contrast with much of DSA's canvassing operations, where most interactions are one-off conversations at the door. Canvassers may not necessarily be, and usually aren’t, from the community they canvass.
The failure of so many machine politicians to protect their seats exposes how much these machines have atrophied after decades of neoliberalism. Local politicians' complicity in gutting public programs, rising unemployment, and, most ironically, displacing their own voters through gentrification has hemorrhaged the popular base of support for these long-thought-invincible political bosses. The extent of this self-cannibalization was on full display as 11-year state Assemblymember Erik Dilan and 9-year Congressman and head of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus Adriano Espaillat, both endorsed by DC 37, the largest public sector union in the city, succumbed to DSA-endorsed candidates Christian Celeste Tate and Darializa Avila Chevalier.
The chapter successfully framed Dilan and Espaillat as do-nothing politicians, while the incumbents’ hysterical cries about “white gentrifiers taking over” fell on deaf ears as both politicians had a long and public track record of collaboration with real estate agencies to price out the Black and brown families that have lived there for generations. To a lesser extent, the same could be said for Reynoso, who cried about “rich voters in Williamsburg” (his own childhood home) even as he oversaw the neighborhood’s gentrification as Brooklyn Borough President.
But exploiting neoliberalism’s crisis of political legitimacy, which is historically rooted and not a permanent condition of our political fabric, won’t be enough for DSA to grow into a local or national majority that can hold onto power. NYC-DSA’s initial [breakthrough](https://jacobin.com/2020/10/new-york-city-democratic-socialists-of-america-elections/?ref=marxistunity.com) came in 2020, a year when traditional civil society still had yet to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Amidst another historic victory, turnout this year has dropped dramatically from 2025\. While it’s unfair to compare a midterm primary with a citywide, salaciously polarizing, and exhausting mayoral election, Zohran’s win was the result of [historically high](https://www.thecityreporter.nyc/2025/11/04/record-voters-ballots-cast-mamdani-cuomo-sliwa/?ref=marxistunity.com) voter turnout and depended on forming a popular front with the progressive non-profit sphere and the traditional union bureaucracy. As much as the influence of these powerbrokers has deteriorated, they still command sizable bases of members who represent strategic sections of the public and private workforce. The machines are weak, but they are not dead.
One could argue that the 2026 primaries show we no longer need to depend on these fair-weather allies. The NY-7 race pitted a WFP candidate that received what many assumed were the most strategic endorsements for that district (an extremely popular incumbent, most of the major trade unions, and non-profits with deep roots in the community) against a DSA-endorsee. This race was a structure test for how far NYC-DSA can rely on its own power.
But the old political order’s shocking inability to mobilize its voters in this year’s election should be as much a cause for concern as a reason to celebrate. We can’t bet solely on machine decline to expand our sphere of influence. If the crisis becomes truly existential for the Democratic Party leadership, we will see the resurrection of the sclerotic machine apparatus and political patronage on a new basis. This would be a serious threat considering DSA’s own relationship with voters is both young and fragile.
Where the machine is still somewhat healthy, we see the limitations of DSA’s operation. While doing poll site visibility for Conrad Blackburn in Harlem, I noticed that canvassers for Jordan Wright—a scion of the Wright political dynasty—were often block captains and individuals well known in their neighborhoods. Conrad was the only NYC-DSA candidate to lose his race by an impressively slim 8-point margin, due in part to $900,000 worth of [superPAC](https://nysfocus.com/2026/06/24/ny-primary-election-results-dsa-state-legislature-2026?ref=marxistunity.com) spending, the most against any statewide NYC-DSA candidate. But even these obstacles can’t be detached from the resilience of a Harlem political machine that includes the Manhattan Democratic Party Chair (the incumbent’s father), who pulled all his connections with big money donors, local churches, block clubs, endorsements from most of the Black electeds in the district, as well as scaring off left-progressive politicians from endorsing Conrad.
We must keep in mind that the political tide for many candidates, both in the polls and in volunteer turnout, [shifted](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/we-sink-or-swim-together-reflections) after coordinated endorsements from Zohran and AOC. Even Claire, who received a rare day-one Zohran endorsement, benefited heavily from the mayor personally campaigning on her behalf. Darializa’s campaign was buoyed by similar support in the critical last days of her primary, which almost certainly secured her victory. Many factors led to the DSA landslide, but it is undeniable that a popular mayor, still in his honeymoon period, pushed many of our candidates over the finish line. This isn’t a card we can rely on for the long term.
### **A Socialist Political Machine?**
Within NYC-DSA, chapter leadership is using the election results to validate their strategy of electing insurgent candidates to win bargaining power for closed-door negotiations in the halls of power, best represented by the [Tax the Rich](https://taxtherichny.com/?ref=marxistunity.com) campaign. But there is also a push within the chapter to take advantage of our electoral victories to deepen relationships between our new electeds, working-class voters, and DSA. Suggestions have included using post-primary canvasses as fact-finding missions for constituent services, and deepening collaboration between electeds and NYC-DSA Working Groups. Many of our newly elected state and federal socialists in office are now publicly promoting [Break the Chain](https://wecanbreakthechain.com/?ref=marxistunity.com), the chapter’s ambitious arms embargo campaign.
Whatever happens, organizing a popular constituency for socialism will require more than growing our army of canvassers. It will also involve more than building a “Tammandani Hall,” where voters remain loyal through a [feedback loop](https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/04/legislative-campaigns-and-policy-feedback-an-assessment-of-dsas-orientation-towards-the-fight-for-reforms/?ref=marxistunity.com) of positive legislation and magnetic political personalities. Building a socialist political machine (in the traditional sense) will be frustrated by the [political](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/member-town-hall-misses-the-mark) [compromises](https://open.substack.com/pub/socialisttribune/p/planting-the-flag-the-state-budget?utm%5Fsource=share&utm%5Fmedium=android&r=8hlad) required to pass legislation and expand funding for community services. The goal is not to replicate the machines of old, but to consolidate our project into an *alternative society*. We need a network of party-led organizations with deep and personal roots in the community for workers to engage in class struggle on a mass scale and connect socialist ideas to their daily lives.
Comrades abroad give us a glimpse of what this long-term vision might look like. In Belgium, Workers Party (PTB) parliamentarians donate their wages to set up [free clinics](https://peoplesdispatch.org/2022/06/23/medics-for-the-people-has-a-radical-plan-to-rebuild-healthcare-in-belgium-and-europe/?ref=marxistunity.com), which have been used successfully to build new party organizations and mobilize patients against neoliberal reforms to Belgium’s healthcare system. In Spain, [Barcelona En Comu](https://dissentmagazine.org/article/the-municipalist-moment/?ref=marxistunity.com) took advantage of its electoral victories to set up neighborhood assemblies and issue-based commissions to guide electeds in community-driven policy. In Venezuela’s [National Popular Consultations](https://venezuelanalysis.com/news/venezuelans-pick-state-funded-projects-to-address-local-community-needs/?ref=marxistunity.com), the federal government set aside funding for appropriation by local assemblies (*comunas)*. Commune members deliberated between competing proposals and canvassed the surrounding neighborhood with the assistance of the national electoral authority. These experiments demonstrate the possibility of moving beyond the limits of participatory budgeting towards popular democracy.
DSA may not be able to immediately adopt something so ambitious, but these case studies offer a framework for utilizing our electeds' public platform and resources to build up democratic organizations, united around the politics of a distinct and militant socialist bloc.
On a smaller scale, we can also take inspiration from [KC Tenants](https://x.com/CinemarxismBret/status/2073673594308055235?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com), who organized door-by-door food distribution to canvass residents about eviction threats and the federal government’s drastic cuts to food stamps. In light of the ongoing struggle against the [demolition](https://www.stopfecdemolition.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) of public housing in NYC, a project like this could be vital for NYCHA tenants, particularly in Darializa’s NY-13, home to some of the highest density public housing in the city. NYCHA residents are also a constituency that has historically leaned towards establishment incumbents. One could imagine that a coalition of DSA electeds’ constituent services and the chapter Tenant Organizing Working Group could make a powerful dent in meeting the needs of NYCHA tenants and winning them to socialism.
The purpose here is not simply to offer much-needed aid or even bump up recruitment for DSA and other orgs, but to politicize the community. DSA members discussing NYCHA privatization or [semi-privatization](https://citylimits.org/nychas-rad-pact-and-preservation-trust-plans-explained/?ref=marxistunity.com) with tenants could be elevated by our electeds acting as public tribunes for the tenant movement—whether it’s speaking at anti-demolition rallies or proposing legislation to refund and expand fully public housing. And the importance of this approach doesn’t end with public housing either. In April, DSA councilmember Chi Ossé was thrown to the ground and arrested by the NYPD for [protesting](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/04/chi-osse-arrested-after-protesting-deed-theft/413046/?ref=marxistunity.com) against deed theft against Black homeowners in Bed-Stuy. The goal of tying deep community organizing to political office serves to heighten the difference between our political platform and the neoliberal consensus, and to connect the immediate needs of the people with the goal of democratic socialism.
Many long-term residents remain suspicious of outside canvassers for understandably [practical reasons](https://x.com/Marni4Change/status/2070287436572176536?ref=marxistunity.com), worn down by decades of cynical promises from politicians. I was particularly inspired by a Darializa field lead who listened patiently to a NYCHA tenant's grievances and responded with immediate assistance—in this case connecting a mother to a youth employment program for her daughter—which broke through the barrier of distrust by proving we were not another set of political salesmen, and instead part of a genuine project to collectively improve the state of the world. When this trust is established, the people we need to win over open up to our political vision.
Other candidates in our slate experimented with approaches that went beyond the typical canvassing pitch. Conrad volunteers connected residents to tenant assistance hotlines and committed to canvassing NYCHA tenants up to election day. This strategy contributed to his campaign recruiting the highest proportion of non-DSA volunteers, creating a new army of Black and brown socialists in Harlem. Christian Celeste Tate (who won by the highest margin among NYC-DSA statewide candidates) spread DSA’s reach outside the borders of the commie corridor through close collaboration with North Brooklyn DSA’s Community Solidarity Committee, hosting Know Your Rights trainings and fundraisers for the East New York Community Land Trust. These campaigns show that moving beyond typical door-knocking operations can help build a durable base for socialism.
Whether DSA will plant deep roots or dissipate after this new era of ascendance will be determined by the work we do between elections. Individual efforts need to be linked up into a coherent and permanent strategy that builds buy-in for our program in apartment complexes, workplaces, and community spaces across the city. This requires that NYC-DSA prioritize more than electoral and legislative campaigns. Proposals to this effect have come and gone, but any strategic coherence to bind them together has yet to emerge. Whatever the circumstances, overcoming a transient canvassing operation requires a long-term strategy focused on building deep relationships with the sections of the working class beyond our sphere of influence, built around an uncompromising and distinctly socialist political platform.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The Battle for Democracy Can Remake the Working Class
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-battle-for-democracy-can-remake-the-working-class/
Last updated: 2026-09-04T15:14:12.000Z
The United States is mired in a constitutional crisis. Not only are the ruling-class political parties facing a total loss of popular legitimacy, but the state itself is increasingly dysfunctional. While a [shockingly corrupt](https://www.newyorker.com/news/a-reporter-at-large/trumps-profiteering-hits-four-billion-dollars?ref=marxistunity.com) administration is trying to make it [illegal](https://workdaymagazine.org/minnesota-trade-unionists-among-those-targeted-in-federal-indictments-of-ice-observers/?ref=marxistunity.com) to even observe its "[absolutely immune](https://newsroom.ap.org/detail/VancesaysICEagentinvolvedinfatalshootinghasabsoluteimmunity/5109e1f2c2504fc5b3249196cc6ba014/video?ref=marxistunity.com)" secret police, the Supreme Court has endorsed a gerrymandering [arms race](https://www.marxistunity.com/prop-50-a-race-to-the-bottom/) that can only end in the death of competitive House elections in the U.S. Meanwhile, a paralyzed Congress has kept the government shut down for longer than all previous Congresses combined, even with a Republican trifecta. All political norms have collapsed. Yet Trump’s alternative—*Hail Caesar and his Unitary Executive!*—has yet to decisively assert itself.
Amidst this crisis, the socialist Left has gone on the offensive. After a historic streak of electoral victories propelled DSA past 120,000 members, millions are now looking to democratic socialists for [leadership](https://jacobin.com/2025/09/new-poll-democratic-socialism-mainstream?ref=marxistunity.com) despite [hysterical](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/2026/07/dsa-communist-socialist-democrats/687756/?ref=marxistunity.com) [fearmongering](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/socialists-launch-radical-platform-abolish-us-senate-bid-fundamentally-transform-america?ref=marxistunity.com) from the protectors of the status quo. Whether DSA can step into the breach and lead the way out of the crisis remains to be seen, but the stakes of this confrontation could not possibly be higher. Climate change and world war threaten extinction for the vast majority of people who cannot afford to retreat to the walled gardens of the ultra-wealthy. Only a fighting working class can do anything about it, but the U.S. workers’ movement is only just beginning to stir in a fitful and disunited way.
The task before us is not just to organize workers, but in a very real sense, to rebuild a working class that exists *at all* as a historical actor. Our class exists empirically as an object of capitalism, but in order to act as a subject in history, it must be composed through conscious collective action. Historically, that collective action has taken the form of epochal struggles for democracy where working and oppressed people discovered that only they had the will or the power to fight to the end for universal, equal political rights.
In the shadow of the unfinished democratic revolution in this country, the working class has decomposed and needs to be *re*composed. To rediscover ourselves as a class, we must once again rally around the vision of a society where working people are free to rule ourselves as equals.
### **Class Formation in America**
In the 19th and 20th centuries, working-class movements around the world formed through the struggle for political democracy, first as the shock troops in cross-class coalitions and then, always, as the column willing to take the fight further than the progressive leadership of other classes could tolerate. In Europe, revolutionary social democracy emerged out of the movement for the democratic republic against feudal absolutism and restricted suffrage. In the imperial periphery, communism built a mass base through the struggle for equal rights and national sovereignty against colonialism.
In each case, society’s exploited underbelly forged a common identity, and a capacity to act as a class with shared political institutions, around the mission of winning a democratic form of government on the road to social emancipation. Across the world, the working class painfully realized that it was the sole part of society with nothing to lose by sweeping away the old order, and everything to gain by constructing a new one in its place. And through this process of self-discovery, it also learned how to struggle by creating a whole parallel society of organizations for working people—trade unions, poor farmers' associations, tenants’ and debtors’ leagues, cooperatives, and the great Labor and Socialist parties that united them.
This history played out similarly in the United States, but as Mike Davis illuminates in *Prisoners of the American Dream*, its growth was stunted. Working-class unity was strangled by racial, ethnic, gender, and occupational divisions, compounded by the origins of the U.S. as a settler-plantation colony and its emergent status as a world superpower. Promises of upward mobility, sometimes real and sometimes illusory, encouraged sections of the class to trade away their democratic ambitions to serve as junior partners to the capitalists, slamming the door to political power behind them.
The American working class was molded by two great democratic upheavals: the movement for the abolition of slavery in the 19th century that led to the Civil War and Reconstruction, and the double movement for industrial freedoms and equal citizenship in the 20th that gave birth to modern organized labor and smashed Jim Crow. Both struggles created new mass constituencies in American politics that made a democratic restructuring of society the order of the day. Yet in each case, the legacy of past defeats undermined working-class unity and independence. Deep divisions left its organizations vulnerable to being divided and conquered, like when the post-World War II Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) hollowed itself out through McCarthyist purges in exchange for what Davis called a “barren marriage” with the Democratic Party.
Likewise, the reactionary countermeasures imposed by the ruling class in the wake of both great upheavals confronted workers with new challenges to overcome if they hoped to stand strong again as a class. The defeat of the First Reconstruction gave way to Jim Crow and a resurgent nativism. The demise of the New Deal/Civil Rights era—the Second Reconstruction—left workers with decimated labor unions, a runaway police-prison complex, and the cannibalization of civil society that helped clear the way for Trumpism.
To recompose a fighting working class in the US, socialists must take a leading role in the next great uprising for political democracy. By organizing masses of ordinary people around the idea that this country is not a democracy and only they possess the power to make it one, we can bring our class back to life as history’s revolutionary protagonist.
### **The Democratic Struggle Today**
In 2026, we can see the outlines of an incipient mass movement for democracy, but one that lacks strategic clarity or unity, sustainable structure, or real political leadership. There is not yet an equivalent to the People’s Charter that unified the early democratic movement in the United Kingdom, nor the focus on dismantling slavery that united American radicals before the Civil War. What we have instead is a disarticulated movement-of-movements with three faces: general opposition to the Trump administration, resurgent left-populism, and popular mobilizations against ICE and the Border Patrol.
The anti-Trump protest culture characterized by the massive “No Kings” demonstrations has no clear positive program, and no force so far appears able or willing to impose one. Though its millions of participants are deeply politically diverse, liberal headliners like Indivisible promote an answer to the democratic question that we can describe as “restorationist:” the belief that the United States was founded as a democracy, that Trump is diverting it down an undemocratic road by tearing up the Constitution, and that checks and balances must be restored to get America back on track.
At the same time, left-populism has experienced a resurgence since the Sanders-AOC “fighting oligarchy” tour in early 2025\. It has continued its march back into the political limelight through Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral campaign, and now a slate of left-wing insurgents contesting this year’s midterms—some of whom are socialists (Claire Valdez, Melat Kiros) and many of whom are not (Abdul El-Sayed, Brad Lander). If Indivisible and mainstream Democrats are “restorers” on the democratic question, these left-populists are “renewers.” To this current, the threat to American democracy runs deeper than Trump; it has been corrupted by a corporate oligarchy. They propose a “political revolution” to renew democracy by running the lobbyists out of DC on a tidal wave of grassroots support, disbanding the Super PACs, and creating a new social contract rooted in meeting people’s basic needs so the public has reason to put faith in the political system again.
Neither the “restorers” nor the “renewers” offer a real way out of the current crisis or a vision of democracy that can sustain a working-class movement in the long term. The “restorers” merely want to turn back the clock by ten years. But the *Pax Obama* has been smashed to pieces; Trumpism, having slithered out of the wreckage, will not be contained by vain efforts to piece it back together. Fighting to restore a status quo that already failed working people a decade ago can only further decompose the class as workers gravitate towards reactionary or altogether depoliticizing answers to explain their total exclusion from the political process.
The “renewers,” meanwhile, have something worth fighting for, but they have no plan to win it that accounts for the ways the state is designed to prevent popular sovereignty. They are at best agnostic on the core questions of how political power is structured in this country, and on some issues (like the power of the police) their leading lights have actively [tacked to the right](https://www.spokesman.com/stories/2026/jun/01/nypd-to-hire-more-cops-under-mayor-mamdani-despite/?ref=marxistunity.com) to avoid politically costly confrontations. The fate of early "[Bidenism](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/06/business/economy/biden-economy.html?ref=marxistunity.com)" at the hands of the [Senate](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/joe-manchin-kills-the-build-back-better-bill?ref=marxistunity.com) and [Supreme Court](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/supreme-courts-conservatives-strike-down-biden-student-debt-forgiveness-plan?ref=marxistunity.com) is proof enough of the fatal flaw in this strategy. The oligarchs are not going to surrender an inch of ground while their constitutional veto on democracy is intact. It would be profoundly disorganizing for the “renewer” agenda to die a painful death trapped in the constitutional bind.
If the battle for democracy in the modern United States is to be the furnace that forges the working class into an independent political force, a new camp within the democratic movement must first unite around an alternative to the “restorer” and “renewer” visions.
The closest thing to that kind of class regroupment in our lifetimes was the titanic George Floyd Uprising against racist police brutality in the summer of 2020\. With the organizational and political foundations laid over the preceding decade through periodic Black revolts against police killings, tens of millions of all races spilled into the streets after another act of police murder. The rebellion forced a popular reckoning with the power of the police and enabled workers to seriously imagine political strike action as [protest walkouts](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/strike-for-black-lives-to-highlight-systemic-racism-ap-report-finds?ref=marxistunity.com) and [work stoppages](https://www.ilwu.org/ilwu-stands-down-at-west-coast-ports-for-historic-juneteenth-action-to-honor-black-lives/?ref=marxistunity.com) began to proliferate amidst the larger pandemic-driven loss of cohesion in the capitalist economy.
But the uprising lacked the organization to transform the crisis into a moment of revolutionary rupture. The moment passed, condemned to live on in the fever dreams of Cop City investors and anti-“Critical Race Theory” crusaders, long after anything like a mass constituency still fought to win its demands.
Of the active currents within today’s democratic upsurge, the “ICE OUT” movement harbors the greatest promise for a project of working-class recomposition. With episodes of popular resistance to occupations breaking out in places like Los Angeles, Chicago, and Minneapolis, the movement has raised the specter, if not yet the concrete form, of the [citywide general strike](https://jacobin.com/2026/01/strike-ice-unions-good-minneapolis?ref=marxistunity.com). These pitched, spectacle-laden urban battles have polarized society around the question of the arbitrary power of the police state. The demand for “ICE OUT,” an implicit challenge to the authority of the federal government defined in the Constitution, arguably comes closer to expressing the lines of battle of a new democratic revolution than any other demand to emerge from the democratic movement-of-movements so far.
But “ICE OUT” holds only a part of the answer to the problem of class recomposition. A future administration, faced with enough pressure, could conceivably end the occupations and dissolve ICE without wholly uprooting the undemocratic system that keeps the ruling class in power. This would be a tremendous victory for working and oppressed people, but without a shared awareness of the border regime’s place in our larger undemocratic political order, that victory could demobilize rather than embolden the movement.
Every union organizer knows a well-timed concession from the boss can disorganize a campaign without conscious effort to inoculate workers by situating wins in a counter-narrative which identifies where the power to change the workplace actually lies. Ephemeral concessions from the state played a similar role in 2020, when cities promised police reforms only to [renege](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/portland-among-u-s-cities-adding-funds-to-police-departments?ref=marxistunity.com) after the streets emptied. To turn victories into building blocks rather than stumbling blocks, we need a foundational narrative that demystifies the nature of class power in this country. Neither the “restorers” nor the “renewers” can offer one.
### **The Third Reconstruction**
Our task as socialists is to articulate a third path: the working class can reemerge as a historical actor by fighting for a democratic revolution to the end. From that task flows our strategy of forging DSA into a mass party rooted in working people’s struggles for freedom and survival, democratically controlled by its membership, and united by a program to fight for a Third Reconstruction.
The content of our program is not an abstract question. To face our tasks we must be able to articulate a vision of what the working class *is and can be* that millions of people will find compelling. The answer to “who’s in the working class?” is the same as it ever was: the disenfranchised many who are exploited and abused because of the arbitrary power of the privileged few.
Though we are wildly diverse, we share a fate as people trapped in a society made by us but not for us. Fighting to take back everything stolen from us under capitalism—healthcare, housing, education, and more—is necessary but insufficient. We must have an answer for how we are robbed of these things and how justice can be done. To convince people that to be a part of the working class is something worth embracing, we need clarity that it will take a completely new political order to set the world to rights, and that those of us who constitute the working majority have the unique power to win one.
To do so we must bury the old Constitution with a new democratic order based on the principle of majority rule. That means replacing minoritarian institutions like the Presidency, Senate, and Supreme Court with a single popular assembly elected by free, equal, and proportional suffrage for all who live here. It would also mean abolishing capitalist tools of coercion like the police, ending all forms of second-class citizenship, and enshrining our rights to organize and seize capitalist property for the common good.
Without that basic foundation, it is impossible to think seriously about what it will take to solve the other great crises of the twenty-first century—ecological collapse, genocidal imperialism, and the unsustainable cost of living. During the First and Second Reconstruction, the movements struggling to solve the great crises of their time failed to secure a democratic constitutional order, leaving a divided working class to fight with bound hands. The [rollback](https://jacobin.com/2026/05/voting-rights-louisiana-callais-race?ref=marxistunity.com) of the gains these movements bled for continues today, with terrifying consequences and no plausible constitutional path to stop it.
Nor is it possible, without a commitment to the *entire* program of a Third Reconstruction, to unite the historically fractured working class in this country. Take, for example, unequal citizenship: we must fight for open borders, the abolition of ICE, and universal residency citizenship because working-class freedom is an all-or-nothing proposition. Citizens and noncitizens are disenfranchised by different means, but the disenfranchisement of any part of the class undermines the ability of the whole to take advantage of its majority and seize power. The same can be said for the struggle against the police state, which uniquely oppresses parts of the class but arms the ruling class with the power to dominate all of society. To compromise on one freedom struggle with the expectation of advancing another is suicidally shortsighted.
The horizon of a new constitution embodied in a clarifying political program is the key to rebuilding a working-class political subject. Meekly accepting the existence of pillars of our constitutional order like the Senate or the border regime legitimizes the idea that citizenship is contingent—to be qualified by some higher authority—an idea that undermines everything we fight for as socialists. Instead, we must draw a clear line: *everyone who lives and breathes* is a free and equal citizen, and we assert the absolute right to decide the kind of society we are to live in. Because our political system denies that right, we reject the legitimacy of that system and commit ourselves to building a new one.
### **DSA’s Battle to Win or Lose**
What tactical interventions does such a strategy demand of us, in light of the composition of the existing democratic movement? The content of our program matters, but the decisive question is how we use it. The internal unity it represents must be realized externally, when we integrate it into our public identity through rhetoric, literature, and the campaigns we run. We must waste no opportunity to advance our program as an alternative to the insufficient horizons of the “restorers” and the “renewers.”
DSA is still in the process of uniting around a program that qualitatively breaks with both camps. The [updated](https://program.dsausa.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) “Workers Deserve More” program recently adopted by the National Political Committee improves on our old platform by incorporating revolutionary democratic demands like the abolition of the Presidency, Senate, and independent judiciary in favor of an all-powerful and proportionally-elected House of Representatives. But there is still a ways to go, and building membership-wide buy-in for a program ratified in an NPC meeting will be difficult, especially considering a significant faction of DSA sees no daylight between our horizons and those of the “renewers.”
It has been widely speculated that AOC will carry the left-populist resurgence to new heights by running for President in 2028\. The reality of our non-relationship with AOC means that DSA will have no control over whether she runs, and would have no means of compelling her campaign to give voice to the demands of a Third Reconstruction. But if her campaign is confronted with a working class increasingly united around the democratic ambitions spelled out in DSA’s program, the larger current of left-populism she represents will be forced to reckon with it or lose.
To realize that future, we need to transform the program of a Third Reconstruction into a concrete political force by fighting for its hegemony within the existing democratic movement. We can and should exploit the porous nature of the anti-Trump protest movement and treat events like No Kings as contested terrain. Marching with our own unified chants and signs, crowd-canvassing with or without the permission of liberal organizers, fielding speakers where possible, and stretching the limits of liberal protest tactics by being the first to step off the sidewalk and the last to leave when permits expire will all create opportunities to present our program—and meaningful opportunities to fight for it—to masses of people not yet activated by the socialist movement.
ICE OUT has so far been the most tactically advanced face of the embryonic mass movement for democracy. As the practice of street militancy evolves, DSA is not going to win the arms race for street-level leadership. That is not to say that members cannot participate in important ways on the front lines of mass unrest against ICE, but we as an organization are not built to coordinate illegal kinetic resistance to the state at scale. By its necessarily anonymous and decentralized character, it defies coordinated control, which is both a strength and a limitation.
What DSA *can* do for the ICE OUT movement is provide a permanent vehicle for more patient mass struggle during the inevitable ebbs in the street protest cycle. Chapters can run pressure campaigns, ballot issues, and tribune-candidates for local office around an agenda of zero tolerance for local collaboration with ICE. Chapter labor committees can get DSA members organizing where they work, either building towards a mandate for strike action with anti-ICE resolutions in their unions, or fighting to bring new workers into the labor movement by organizing in nonunion shops around related common-good demands. By building a mass constituency in opposition to ICE and the police state, alongside the democratic organizations to house it, DSA can begin to erect the scaffolding of an organized working class with the means to elevate its struggle for democracy beyond cyclical street battles with the police.
Realistically, a Third Reconstruction is unlikely to unfold between now and 2029\. The present constitutional crisis will reach a different resolution, on terms decided by different class forces. But the urgency facing us is this: wherever the cards fall in the coming years, the new order will either be worse than the present disorder, or it will be an illusory “return to normalcy” waiting to collapse into another, more severe crisis. The liberal reformers and left-populists do not have what it takes to lead us out of these days of catastrophe to a rational and humane world. The question of democracy will confront us, again and again, for as long as the class struggle persists. It is vital to humanity’s survival that the working class learns how to answer it.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Yes, We Want to Destroy Capitalist “Culture” and “Civilization”
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/yes-we-want-to-destroy-capitalist-culture-and-civilization/
Last updated: 2026-07-24T17:49:40.000Z
DSA’s return to national prominence has caused a frenzy on the far right. In the past few weeks, we have seen Fox News [broadcast](https://www.foxnews.com/politics/socialists-launch-radical-platform-abolish-us-senate-bid-fundamentally-transform-america?msockid=1bde8d5c0de164412eab9a650c396508&ref=marxistunity.com) leaked demands from DSA’s new [Workers Deserve More](https://program.dsausa.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) program and [read](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mr9Ww3Yk4j4&ref=marxistunity.com) from Marxist Unity Group’s points of unity. For the right, it feels like opening the basement door in search of an imaginary monster and discovering that all along, the monster was real—Socialists do want to see the downfall of everything you hold dear: voter suppression, AI art, paying for healthcare.
The media broadcasts its condemnations of democratic socialism by reading our own positions line by line, without any real persuasive argument or editorializing. For the right, it should be self-evident to the public that eliminating the Senate or defunding the Department of War is a threat to the American way of life. To much of the working class and the younger generations, however, Workers Deserve More is common sense. The hegemonic politics of the ruling class are collapsing.
Wilhelm Liebknecht, a radical parliamentarian in the Social Democratic Party of Germany, observed the same phenomenon in 1871, at the birth of socialist mass politics. DSA members have circulated screenshots of the title for his [speech](https://www.marxists.org/archive/liebknecht-w/1871/10/22.html?ref=marxistunity.com); *Yes, We Want to Destroy What Our Enemies Call “Culture,” “Civilization”* in response to the right’s panic. The article itself, one may be surprised, is a defense of universal public school and curriculum reform. For German conservatives, universal public education was an extremist attack on traditional national values. For the Social Democrats, it was a tool to create a new culture: one where everyone had the expertise to make industrial civilization their own. So is education a modest reform, or the end of a civilization?
The same question hangs over our heads. Is socialism really just about funding for libraries and schools? Is DSA fighting for a set of reasonable policies to maintain our existing public institutions? Or is it to transform social existence entirely? Can a single demand do both, or does the tension between the two eventually become untenable?
This dynamic can be intimate for socialists working in public schools. We clock in every morning and devote our labor power to our students’ lives; straining your voice to keep a classroom from spiraling out of control, kneeling on the floor to comfort a crying child, ducking out of the way when a student throws a chair, paying for school supplies out of pocket, staying for hours after class to lesson plan, working a second job just so you afford to *keep being a teacher.*
Then, leaving work exhausted. Saying goodbye to your coworkers as they return home to rest. Instead of going home, driving to a committee meeting, or a weeknight canvass, or a standout. Organizing for as many hours as you teach. Not just out of ideological fervor, but because if you don’t, every hour of labor you spent in the classroom will mean nothing. Capitalism will swallow your students’ lives the way it has swallowed billions of others before them.
Being an educator is a constant reminder of why you’re a socialist. You look at your students and see the world they are growing up into. You see ICE grabbing them from their families; the police throwing their belongings on the curb; their stomachs growling when a dry summer kills the wheat yield. Every day becomes a calculation for how much of yourself to put into teaching, and how much into struggle.
For Liebknecht, the revolutionary struggle is alive in every demand. If there is a tension between a reformist campaign and a revolutionary horizon, it was to be embraced and overcome. Yes, we want universal public school. Why? For the working class to develop the tools to bring capitalist society to an end. Schooling becomes contested territory between the new world and the old, and for socialists, there is no reason to compromise on how much funding to allocate or what model of instruction to practice. Knowledge must become common property.
The Russian Social Democrats also grappled with how to use reforms for revolutionary ends. In 1912, when the Russian labor movement was rebuilding itself and it seemed more and more possible that Tsarism could topple over on its own, the Petrograd Social Democrats made social insurance policy their core campaign. The state began to administer elections for a series of “kassy”—joint worker-management boards, organized at the factory level—to determine insurance policy. The Mensheviks responded by meticulously researching the ideal policy possible under the restrictive, centralized legal framework set up by the state, and campaigned for a winnable reform to benefit the working class. The Bolsheviks, refusing to recognize the legitimacy of the state, campaigned on uniting all of the factory kassyin a district into a single district-wide kassy, which would massively extend the leverage and organizing power of the workers. To the surprise of the Mensheviks, the unwinnable Bolshevik demand electrified the campaign and won over a majority of the workers' organizations.
Would social insurance of any kind have triggered a social revolution in Russia? No, not any more than Medicaid or workers’ compensation would imply revolutionary change in the contemporary United States. Accumulating economic reforms have always been compatible with capitalism. What made the demand for district-wide insurance committees revolutionary was the Bolsheviks’ refusal to accept the *political legitimacy* of the ruling class. It was a reform, yes, but one that openly denied that the Tsar or his government could freely dictate the terms.
In Imperial Germany, public school was a denial of bourgeois culture and its narratives about the working class. Opposing the formation of public schools meant denying that the working class could *learn to* *think*. Fighting for it relied on the logic that no one class of people was intrinsically more capable of wielding scientific knowledge and governing society than any other. Socialists should advocate for public schools, not as a politically neutral institution, but as a site of class struggle.
Workers Deserve More will pose the same problems for our own movement in the coming years. The ruling class will call it a threat to civilization. Our reformist comrades will call it a reasonable package of policy reform. We will be forced by the nature of our ultimate socialist and democratic aims to bring the program through to its revolutionary conclusion; to prove the reactionary wing of the ruling class right.
## **Wilhelm Liebknecht, *Yes, We Want to Destroy What Our Enemies Call “Culture,” “Civilization,”* October 1871.**
Written as a speech in German, delivered to supporters in Chemnitz, Saxony, October 22nd, 1871:
\[ . . . \]
In a few sentences, I want to quickly address the first accusation that I am faced with—that we are the “barbarians of the nineteenth century,” that we want to “destroy our culture,” and that the victory of Social Democracy equals the “downfall of civilization.”
A party that aims to make universal education free for the people and that wants in general to make all educational institutions free cannot feel that this accusation applies to it. However, in a certain respect, we must plead guilty as charged.
Yes, we want to destroy what our opponents call “culture” and “civilization.” We want to destroy servitude and oppression, we want to destroy the seeds of hatred and discord sown among men, we want to destroy the ignorance, the spiritual night into which the vast majority of our brothers have fallen. Yes, gentlemen of the bourgeoisie, we want to destroy ignorance, we enemies of your culture! Your culture is precisely the opposite of culture: it can save itself only by condemning the people to stupidity, by brazenly withholding from them the treasures of true culture, by closing the temple of education to them. To open this temple to the people, that is our endeavor: science, which you make the monopoly of a chosen few, and for which you will not spare a crumb of bread if it does not flatter your whims, indulge your self-interest—we want to make science the common property of all.
And this is to be done by a system of genuine elementary schools—not rote learning as is the rule at public schools today, which make a mockery of the name; not elementary schools whose teachers are starved physically and whose pupils are starved spiritually, and which throw to the children of the poor a few meager crumbs which are not even remotely sufficient to nourish the spirit—not elementary schools in which the lowest measure of knowledge is taught—no, elementary schools in the true meaning of the word, schools for the people, which impart to all children the highest possible measure of education, which awaken and develop in each child all the aptitudes, and do not, as today, stop at an age where real education only begins. Socialism: “hostile to culture”! Because it allows every talent the possibility to develop? A tremendous lever of cultural progress lies in this mere fact of real popular education!
Talents are evenly distributed among people—this is a truth that science has raised above all doubt, and to which we must adhere because it forms the basis of the socialist and democratic worldview; but today’s society allows only the fewest to develop their gifts, and even to these few, with rare exceptions, gives only a one-sided, crippled education. The vast majority of talents are now completely stifled.
One often wonders why in certain epochs so many important men are made. These are precisely epochs in which slumbering talents are given the opportunity to express themselves and to be active; this is especially the case in revolutionary epochs, which call for new forces to defend new ideas and institutions. Take, for example, the mass of great statesmen, orators and generals who characterized the French Revolution. In such times there is no more talent than in ordinary times, but—to use an economic expression—there is more demand for talent.
Opportunity not only makes thieves, it also makes “great men.”
A “great man” is an ordinary man who has had the opportunity to become “great.” This is only to show how infinitely our culture must be improved if society would one day consider it its highest task to bring the talents of all to the highest possible development. In other words, the highest possible level of education for all!
We want to make science accessible and free to all; it should no longer be shackled, its service no longer condemned to material poverty or intellectual prostitution. Yes, we want to destroy your culture—we want to destroy it because it is hostile to true culture; because it is incompatible with true civilization; because it forces science to sell itself to wealth and power; because, based on injustice, it is thoroughly immoral.[\[1\]](#fn1)
---
1. Light & Air has lightly abridged the full text out of disagreement with a metaphor used by Liebknecht. The political meaning of the text remains intact, and the unabridged document can be read on the Marxist Internet Archive. [↩︎](#fnref1)
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The Other Anniversary
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-other-anniversary/
Last updated: 2026-07-10T15:58:04.000Z
> *Perhaps the sentiments contained in the following pages are not yet sufficiently fashionable to procure them general favor; a long habit of not thinking a thing wrong gives it a superficial appearance of being right, and raises at first a formidable outcry in defense of custom. But the tumult soon subsides. Time makes more converts than reason.*
*–* Thomas Paine, *Common Sense*
This year marks the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. The ideas promoted within—that all men are created equal, and have a right to establish or alter a government to secure their fundamental rights—were not new in the 18th century. But their inclusion in a statement of national founding, a public declaration for all the world to read, was novel. These ideals had incredible staying power, especially among movements that sought to go far beyond the Founders’ intentions. In his 1963 “I Have a Dream” speech, Martin Luther King [called](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th%5Fcentury/mlk01.asp?ref=marxistunity.com) the Declaration a “promissory note to which every American was to fall heir,” and condemned the U.S. government for defaulting on that promise. Four years later, Huey Newton and Bobby Seale included almost all of the Declaration’s preamble in the conclusion of the Black Panther Party’s [Ten Point Program](https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/ten-point-program/?ref=marxistunity.com) .
This year also marks the 250th anniversary of the publication of *Common Sense*, a rousing call to revolution written by Thomas Paine. Paine was a man who gave his heart and mind to democratic struggles across the Atlantic world. In life, he was attacked by defenders of traditional authority, and by proponents of conservative republicanism like [John Adams](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/jason-maloy-on-the-paine-adams-debate?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), who won out in the immediate debate over the structure of American government. In death, his ideas influenced Radical Republicans like [Thaddeus Stevens](https://archive.org/details/thaddeusstevenss00brod) and civil rights leaders like MLK. He also influenced Socialists like Eugene Debs, who famously declared himself:
> *A patriot, but in the sense that I love all countries. I love the sentiment of William L. Garrison: ‘All the world is my country and all mankind are my countrymen.’ Thomas Jefferson once said: ‘Where liberty is, is my country.’ That is good. Thomas Paine said: ‘Where liberty is honored, that is my country.’ That is better. Where liberty is not, socialism has a mission, and, therefore, the mission of socialism is as wide as the world.*
In *Common Sense*, Paine planted the flag of unconditional independence and won people to that position on a mass scale, helping to transform diffuse radicalism into a broad popular consensus. He wrote *Common Sense* not to echo ideas that were already popular, but to express what he believed was necessary to resolve the ongoing crisis. Ideologically, Paine was a democratic republican who fought for a constitution based on unicameralism and universal and equal suffrage as a means to alleviate economic inequality. In his eyes, the inability to participate fully and equally in government was tantamount to slavery. Paine’s story can inspire us, but it also throws into sharper relief the absence of a sustained demand for a democratic constitution coming from today’s Left. The more we draw from Paine and the people he inspired, the farther we will go.
### **Defining a Majority**
The first edition of *Common Sense* appeared in all the major colonial cities. Translations made their way north to Quebec, south to colonial Spanish America, and as far east as Russia. How did it spread so far, and so fast? For one thing, Paine knew how to connect with his audience. He spoke in “[plain English](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/clyde-barrow-on-c-wright-mills-nicos),” and *Common Sense* [reads like](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/gregory-claeys-on-tom-paines-social?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) an intelligent conversation one might have at the pub (no coincidence considering where Paine loved to spend his time). Timing was another factor. Paine had his finger on America’s pulse, and the general ferment of the 1770s helped colonists digest his arguments. But a third factor was also decisive: Paine was not afraid to push forward bold minority positions. When *Common Sense* appeared, most colonists were searching for a resolution to the conflict that didn’t involve independence. They believed that the time wasn’t right. Paine disagreed. He argued instead that the colony was “ripe for revolution and republicanism,” and chided naysayers for falling prey to “chimeras” and “empty and unreal fancies of excited minds.” The people, he insisted, had it in their power to make the world over again.
At its core, *Common Sense* was a work of consensus-building. It “[not only divined](https://www.johnkeane.net/books/tom-paine-a-political-life/?ref=marxistunity.com) but also *defined* \[the\] readers’ views, strengthening their beliefs, detonating their prejudices, touching their hearts, changing their minds, convincing them that they must speak out and act.” Paine’s goal was both informative and emancipatory. He worked to “[redefine](https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/mono/10.4324/9781003071143/thomas-paine-gregory-claeys?ref=marxistunity.com)” his audience by “pressing a more egalitarian republicanism upon them.” In an era before modern mass political parties, Paine, sensing that the time for revolutionary action was at hand, stood at the vanguard of the struggle for independence. He had no interest in being a “[consensus leader](https://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/205943/where-do-we-go-from-here-by-martin-luther-king-jr/?ref=marxistunity.com)”—a pejorative coined by MLK—who gained followers by saying what was already popular or widely accepted. If he had, *Common Sense* would have been a tepid call for reconciliation with the Crown.
The idea that new majorities are built by standing for principles that aren’t yet popular is unfortunately not always the common sense of our movement. Many socialists dismiss demands for a democratic government because they aren’t “widely felt.” Last year, some DSA chapters in California even used the [national debate](https://jacobin.com/2025/09/proportional-representation-voting-democrats-gerrymandering?ref=marxistunity.com) about gerrymandering, not to agitate for universal and equal suffrage and proportional representation, but to [support Proposition 50](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/prop-50-a-race-to-the-bottom), the Democratic Party’s scheme to go toe-to-toe with Republicans in stripping what little representation exists in the House of Representatives. Opposing Prop 50 was deemed sectarian and abstentionist. Supporters argued that the only way the masses would listen to socialists was if we told them what they already wanted to hear—consciousness-raising, therefore, was off the table.
If Paine had this vision of politics, he wouldn’t have written *Common Sense*, and the independence movement would have lost its greatest champion. If MLK had been a consensus leader and tailed the Vietnam War, he would have died with higher national approval ratings, but the anti-war movement—not to mention his own principles—would have been greatly damaged. Political leadership often means pushing the envelope and staying ahead of the curve. As Wayne Gretzky once said, “I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.”
Political leadership also means recognizing that not every demand provides immediate returns. An astute reader of the political moment, Paine was confident that casting his voice into the fray of competing ideas would bear fruit. He didn’t wait for proof of success before demanding independence. He grasped what Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin would later argue: chasing “[palpable results](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What%5FIs%5FTo%5FBe%5FDone%3F%5F%28Lenin,%5F1935%29/Chapter%5F3?ref=marxistunity.com)” instead of advancing necessary political principles—even if they are not yet popular—is a dereliction of duty.
### **Radical Republicanism**
Paine was instrumental in drafting the Pennsylvania state constitution in 1776, which, before it was [replaced](https://books.google.com/books/about/Taming%5FDemocracy.html?id=JHNKEku6nKcC&ref=marxistunity.com) in 1790, was the most radical charter for government of its time. It included a unicameral legislature based on broad suffrage for taxpaying white men, a weak judiciary, a [twelve-man executive](https://harvardlawreview.org/print/vol-139/the-decline-and-fall-of-the-state-executive-council/?ref=marxistunity.com), and short terms in office. But radical democrats were in the minority before and after independence. Most of Paine’s powerful contemporaries, a venerated pantheon of “Founding Fathers” like Madison, Hamilton, and Adams, disagreed with his constitutional ideas. Drafted behind closed doors and in the shadow of [Shays’s Rebellion](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/michael-klarman-on-the-constitutions?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), the Constitution of 1787 was one of the most conservative constitutional outcomes possible for the American Revolution. The slave-owning South was overrepresented thanks to equal state representation in the Senate and the ability to count all enslaved people as three-fifths of a voter when allocating House seats. Slave states also played an outsized role in choosing the President through the Electoral College, and when selecting and appointing Supreme Court Justices.
Faced with an increasingly hostile political climate, Paine sailed to Britain in 1787 and soon became embroiled in debates over the French Revolution. Emerging from the Estates-General convened in May 1789, the [Constituent Assembly](https://global.oup.com/academic/product/forging-democracy-9780195044799?ref=marxistunity.com) split on precisely the issues that Paine had debated in America: unicameralism versus bicameralism, legislative authority versus royal power, and equal political rights among propertied white men (and perhaps some of the non-white colonial subjects in the Caribbean) versus an even more restricted suffrage.
Paine published *Rights of Man* in two parts between 1791-92 in response to Edmund Burke’s *Reflections on the Revolution in France*, which condemned the French for daring to assault the traditional authority of Church and King. In response, Paine defended the principles of universal and equal rights, arguing that political regimes and the constitutions that make them are legitimate only to the extent to which they protect those principles, and that no generation can permanently bind another to any one form of government. Along with the 1797 pamphlet *Agrarian Justice*, *Rights of Man* advocated a state-sponsored social welfare scheme with progressive taxation, old-age pensions, and abolition of the English Poor Laws.
This was too much for the British authorities. Paine was forced to flee to France, where he was welcomed by the revolutionary government before being thrown in prison and nearly executed after the Jacobins took power in 1793\. Freed after the overthrow of Robespierre, he published his *Dissertation on the First Principles of Government* in 1795 in response to the overturning of the radically democratic (but never implemented) French Constitution of 1793\. *First Principles* makes two important interventions. First, the right to an equal vote is the foundational right of a democratic political system. The “only true basis of representative government,” Paine argued, is the equality of rights. Without universal and equal suffrage, all other rights are jeopardized, and citizens are reduced to a state of political servitude, since “slavery consists in being subject to the will of another.” Paine further argued that “the influence of property” should never be allowed to infringe on these rights, which appeared increasingly common as the rising bourgeoisie asserted its own right to the unlimited accumulation of capital.
Bolstered by the French Revolution, the [newly christened](https://academic.oup.com/book/47633?login=true&ref=marxistunity.com) “Left” would forever be defined by opposition to powerful monarchs and presidents, support for a single-chamber legislature and legislative supremacy, elected judiciaries, and, of course, universal and equal suffrage. *First Principles* reminds us how radicals in the American and French Revolutions defined democracy: not in vague and abstract terms, but in clear language that directly translated into concrete demands about the structure of government.
Other demands were added to the Left’s repertoire during the French Revolution’s more radical phase, including a people’s militia in place of a standing army and progressive taxation. The rise of Marxist socialism over the course of the 19th century introduced a maximum goal to the democratic movement: the abolition of private property and all social classes with it. Until World War I, Social Democratic parties and thinkers from Marx and Engels down to Lenin and Luxemburg retained the democratic constitutional structure defended by Thomas Paine and radical French revolutionaries as the necessary form of working-class political rule and a precondition for socialism. Engels [made clear](https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1892/02/critica-sociale.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) that for him and Marx, the democratic republic forged in the French Revolution was the “only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalised and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.” For Lenin and the Russian Social Democrats, democracy [meant](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) “supreme state power” in a unicameral legislature with representatives elected through universal, equal, and direct suffrage.
### **Our Own Declaration**
Paine argued that republican government is a dead letter without universal and equal suffrage, where “citizens are reduced to a state of political servitude.” Lenin used similar language, [arguing](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1897/dec/31b.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) that a central task of the Russian Social Democrats was to connect the workers’ economic demands to their “condition of political slavery.” MLK, who was familiar with Paine’s work, also drew parallels between the denial of equal rights and a more general loss of freedom when discussing the struggle for suffrage in the South. Without the right to vote, [he argued](https://archive.pov.org/pov2008/election/wvote/king.html?ref=marxistunity.com), “I do not possess myself. I cannot make up my mind—it is made up for me. I cannot live as a democratic citizen, observing the laws I have helped to enact—I can only submit to the edict of others.”
King’s words are striking. But today, socialists talk more about wage slavery than about our lack of political freedom. Much is said about the tyranny of the boss, but far less about the domination of the [imperial executive](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/impeachment-and-immunity-2bc?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), the [malapportioned Senate](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/numbers-tell-the-story-0bb?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), or the unelected [judiciary](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/abolish-judicial-review-demand-a?utm%5Fsource=publication-search). Yet, it is the undemocratic political system that ensures Americans will never have durable power in the workplace, let alone hold the power to socialize the means of production. The framework of government outlined in our Constitution enables racist voting laws, low minimum wages, poor healthcare, abysmal environmental protections, and imperialist foreign policy. Socialists have kept Paine’s interest in economic solutions to social ills, but discarded his focus on political democracy as a means to resolve social problems. In doing so, we have fallen back into the trap of [economism](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/What%5FIs%5FTo%5FBe%5FDone%3F%5F%28Lenin,%5F1935%29/Chapter%5F3?ref=marxistunity.com)—the belief that “the economic struggle is the most widely applicable method of drawing the masses into active political struggle,” and forgetting Lenin’s enduring [contribution](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/feb/01.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) that the “class point of view” means pushing forward “every democratic movement.”
This point has been [made before](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-us-lefts-rediscovery-of-democratic-853?utm%5Fsource=publication-search). Somewhere [between](https://www.dsausa.org/blog/book-review-the-constitutional-bind-by-aziz-rana/?ref=marxistunity.com) the beginning of World War I and the end of World War II, socialists stopped agitating for a democratic republic. Without that demand—and, more importantly, the ideological commitments that make it possible—Paine appears less relevant to us today. Absent concrete and positive constitutional proposals, socialists have also lost the ability to communicate to a mass audience. America has a long history of fighting for democracy and equality, from the abolitionist movement to the Civil War and Reconstruction, from women’s suffrage to Civil Rights. But socialists have little to say about this history, and are [generally averse](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-declaration-of-independence-and?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) to the rights discourse that was central to the French Revolution and came across so clearly in Paine and his successors. Lenin [called for](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/casual/beat.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) “abolishing the whole system of police tyranny and denial of the people’s rights.” Debs [advocated](https://jacobin.com/2021/02/eugene-debs-why-outgrown-constitution?ref=marxistunity.com) a constitution based on equality of rights, duties, privileges, and opportunities. Where is this language today? The Declaration’s proclamation of equal rightsand equal liberty—the values that Paine struggled for all of his life—was and still is a revolutionary departure from our actually existing government.
Paine asserts that a country can boast of its constitution only when “my poor are happy; neither ignorance nor distress is to be found among them; my jails are empty of prisoners, my streets of beggars; the aged are not in want, \[and\] the taxes are not oppressive.” Today, the jails are full of prisoners, the streets are crowded with beggars, and the young and old alike lack the necessities of a decent life. The Constitution has always protected the interests of a minority of Americans—first[ slaveholders](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/david-waldstreicher-on-slaverys-constitution-0c7?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), then [Jim Crow Southerners](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Master%5Fof%5Fthe%5FSenate?ref=marxistunity.com), and now industrial and financial capitalists. The method of wealth extraction has changed over time, but the political system that keeps the wealthy in power has stayed the same.
250 years after the signing of the Declaration of Independence, Americans are still not independent from the tyranny of a minority. This anniversary is an opportunity to learn from Thomas Paine and agitate for a political and social system grounded in universal and equal rights. We have it in our power to make this country—and by extension the world—over again.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### What, to a Socialist, Is the Fourth of July?
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/what-to-a-socialist-is-the-fourth-of-july/
Last updated: 2026-07-05T16:53:11.000Z
On July 4th, 1776, the Second Continental Congress declared the thirteen colonies, then at war with Great Britain for over a year, a united entity fighting for its independence. The revolution that followed was the product of diverging views and interests working together and apart. Through the passing of time and the evolution of our civil religion, that revolution has been collapsed into one set of meanings about one set of people.
Despite the fact that our Declaration of Independence began with the proclamation that “all men are created equal,” the vast majority of Americans then and now had no say over the institutions that govern them. On this day, 250 years later, we have the opportunity to reflect on the story our country tells itself. Any socialist knows that story is filled with lies, and half-truths. But we must revisit the history of our old republic to search for a new national narrative.
One question confronts us today as we peer through the looking glass: How do we reconcile the forced patriotism of the 250th anniversary with the real facts of our history? What, to a socialist, is the Fourth of July?
### **The Early Republic**
The political elites we later crowned Founding Fathers did not form a united bloc. Many merchants, especially in New York City, remained loyal to the crown and left for Canada at the war’s end. Of the American patriots, ideological diversity prevailed—from Thomas Paine’s radical democratic republicanism to independent monarchism. Over the next generation, the Founding Fathers and their successors crafted an American ideology which combined conservative, property-based republicanism in the North, slavocracy in the South, and aggressive settler expansion in the West; where the conquest of land from indigenous peoples and government non-interference built a national identity for smallholders and artisans, whose economic independence made them full citizens.
To the indigenous peoples, the Declaration of Independence and the victory of the United States marked the end of indirect rule by colonial empires and accelerated their conquest and colonization. At the war’s end, George Washington ordered General John Sullivan to pursue a genocidal scorched earth campaign against the British-aligned Haudenosaunee nations, methodically destroying villages and clearing upstate New York. The destruction and disempowerment of the indigenous peoples has continued since.
To the artisans and workers of the newly minted USA there were also a variety of reactions. The tariffs and lack of representation in government had radicalized them into volunteering to fight in a war of independence. After the war was won, pensions went underpaid and the taxes levied to pay war debts often fell hardest on poor whites. Revolts like Shay’s Rebellion were put down, and the constant risk of popular uprising pushed the political elites to move on from the Articles of Confederation. The new Constitution, ratified in 1789, was [designed](https://cosmonautmag.com/2019/06/whose-democracy-an-introduction-to-oligarchy-in-the-united-states-2/?ref=marxistunity.com) to ensure that the working class could never find a foothold in our political system.
### **Slavery and Freedom**
In 1852, Frederick Douglass, an abolitionist leader and former slave, railed against July 4th as an essentially white holiday, one that did not address the reality of racialized political and economic domination in the American republic:
> Fellow citizens; above your national, tumultuous joy, I hear the mournful wail of millions! whose chains, heavy and grievous yesterday, are, today, rendered more intolerable by the jubilee shouts that reach them...Americans! your republican politics, not less than your republican religion, are flagrantly inconsistent. You boast of your love of liberty, your superior civilization, and your pure Christianity, while the whole political power of the nation, as embodied in the two great political parties, is solemnly pledged to support and perpetuate the enslavement of three millions of your countrymen.
To the enslaved peoples of the USA, the Fourth of July was a cruel joke, a song of liberty sung by a tyrant. Millions of people who could otherwise have lived full and free lives were reduced to servants, purposefully uneducated, forced to suffer constant indignities, violation, and torture. The very same Constitution that declared the blessing of liberty counted these enslaved and disempowered people as 3/5ths of a person.
Throughout the speech, Douglass pointed to the comparative youth of the United States: “for were the nation older, the patriot's heart might be sadder, and the reformer's brow heavier.” That nation was still young, and still able to resolve the glaring contradiction at the heart of its founding: that a nation of supposedly free-holding independent citizens kept millions of human beings in chains.
We now come 174 years after Douglass. The struggle of pre-war abolitionists for emancipation culminated in Reconstruction, our nation’s first attempt at a multi-racial democracy. Over the course of a generation, this experiment was dismantled and crushed; through terrorism, coups against Black political power, and gerrymandering which allowed drafters of maps to limit Black representation. Redemption re-entrenched reactionary white political power, and reinforced segregation between white and black society. The destruction of mixed society forced Black people in the South to choose between accepting a degraded life, attempting to achieve some kind of self-rule, or leaving their homes for the North. Growing opposition to this system found its apex in the Civil Rights and Black Power movements of the mid 20th century.
### **The Great Lie**
To someone raised at the end of the 20th century, the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement goes something like this: the disenfranchisement of Black people was unquestionably wrong. They struggled virtuously against their oppression, but eventually went too far after some of their better leaders were, sadly, assassinated. After a period of riots in the late 60s and early 70s, we more or less managed to achieve a perfect multi-racial political system.
The 1999 cartoon *Our Friend, Martin* represents this mythology well. In it, a pair of young men travel back in time to befriend Martin Luther King Jr. In the climax, the young MLK chooses to go back in time and accept his assassination in order to create the flawless society of post-Rodney King America. This film was shown in schools to commemorate MLK Day. This is how the Civil Rights Movement was subsumed into the American civil religion, by declaring that its defeat was a victory. This whiggish arc of history was fulfilled in the election of Barack Obama, and the seeming inauguration of a “post-racial America.”
This narrative of post-racialism was always a lie. Ideologically, Black Liberation was integrated into the narrative America told about itself; meanwhile the real struggle for economic and political equality was blunted and turned back. Redlining, racist hiring practices, over/under-policing and white flight have all contributed to a white-black [wealth gap](https://www.nber.org/digest/202208/exploring-160-years-black-white-wealth-gap?page=1&perPage=50&ref=marxistunity.com) higher than it was in 1960\. The long struggle for political representation ended in the victory of a generation of Black and Latino mayors and members of Congress who have proven just as amenable to the colonizing effects of capital, just as willing to cover up murders by the police, and just as corrupt as their white colleagues.
As the mid-century wave of struggle crashed and abated, it left the core undemocratic aspects of our country intact. The scope of Presidential power only grew through Bush and Obama’s executive orders, and since 2010 the executive branch has de facto crafted more legislation than Congress. The threat of gerrymandering, an increasingly active Supreme Court, the victory of Citizens United; all were tolerated under the whiggish idea that they could be resolved by voting for Democrats. Then Trump won, and the rest is history.
Trump has used executive power to dismantle the civil service and launch unilateral wars of aggression. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, attacks the foundations of our civil society, and effectively [annulled](https://www.hks.harvard.edu/faculty-research/policy-topics/fairness-justice/what-louisiana-v-callais-means-voting-rights-act?ref=marxistunity.com) the Voting Rights Act earlier this Spring. Gerrymandering is now an [accepted form](https://www.marxistunity.com/prop-50-a-race-to-the-bottom/) of partisan warfare, and should it proceed, we can look forward to an even less representative government than the one we have now. All this as the USA turns 250.
### **Building a New Meaning**
The Fourth of July is a whirlpool which pulls all events back to the origin. Every struggle since the Founding to bring us closer to a free society is morphed into a post-facto legitimization of the same constitutional order that produced those problems in the first place. The struggles of indigenous and enslaved people for freedom, and of women for the vote, the fight for equal civil rights through the ‘60s and ‘70s; all are presented to us as distorted reflections of the genius of our Founding slaveowners. The US civil religion imagines an already perfected government, gradually stripped of its more problematic aspects. But slavery and conquest has always been a part of Americanism.
All the facts listed above are known to you. To anyone proximate to activist spaces in the last decade, the knowledge that we are on stolen land, that the wealth of this country was born by oppressive systems designed to divide workers, that we live in a profoundly undemocratic state, are all somewhat common-sense. But without an alternative, without a positive vision for our society, acknowledging these facts comes to nothing. The colossal oppression we witness every day, the millions of corpses we walk upon, becomes a guilt-inspiring thing, not one that leads to action. We know that our society is cruel but we live with it on a day to day basis. We let that knowledge turn into yet another consumer choice, another way for us to express our identity.
But we are more than passive observers. Just as we live in what feels like the conclusion of a moment in American history defined by the collapse of the “Great Lie” of post-racial America, we live in the prelude of another, greater moment; one that is being actively shaped by the choices we make today.
There is another story we can tell of our people; a story of struggle by enslaved people and abolitionists, of liberationists and unionists, of communists and suffragettes. It will only fully cohere itself once we escape the whirlpool of American civil religion and start to understand all of these as part of a single force to transform our undemocratic society; from one rooted in the whims of a handful of slaveowners and merchants to one that will empower every human being that walks on the Earth.
As the Founding Fathers made an intentionally complex, conservative republic to disempower the working class, so will we make a democratic socialist republic which can tear down the edifice of colonialism, slavery, and all other forms of oppression. When we finally transcend the relevance of the Fourth of July, no one will ask why. They will instead ask why Americans accepted our suffering for so long, and so passively.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Viva La Huelga: The Strike at Delaney Hall
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/viva-la-huelga-the-strike-at-delaney-hall/
Last updated: 2026-07-17T21:22:07.000Z
Nowhere is ICE’s true nature as a weapon of class warfare and a vehicle for ethnic cleansing more obvious than at the Delaney Hall concentration camp, which has put Newark, New Jersey’s mostly immigrant and working-class Ironbound neighborhood on the frontline of Trump's mass deportation campaign. Protests outside the facility have been near-constant. But the greatest wave started on May 22 as a result of the groundbreaking hunger and labor strike by the men and women within the facility—bringing with it the harshest crackdown by the repressive forces of the state.
### **The Long Siege of Delaney Hall**
Delaney Hall opened like a slap in the face on May 1st, 2025\. GEO Group (the contractors charged with running the facility) and ICE began operations without having passed a single building or safety inspection, and they immediately began to fill up their newest concentration camp—the largest of its kind on the East Coast. That same day, New Jersey DSA [marched ](https://www.northjersey.com/picture-gallery/news/2025/05/01/may-day-2025-protest-newark-nj-photos/83392634007/?ref=marxistunity.com)through Newark alongside immigrants’ rights-based community organizations like Movimiento Cosecha, New Labor, and Resistencia. That May Day march was billed as a “Workers’ Memorial Day,” honoring the working people who had already lost their lives to ICE. Although we certainly dreaded the possibility, we did not know how many more losses we’d have to grieve by the same time this year.
Since its opening, there have been multiple flareups of protest against Delaney Hall. On May 9, 2025, Newark Mayor Ras Baraka [attempted](https://newjerseymonitor.com/2025/06/03/newark-mayor-sues-feds-over-arrest-outside-ice-facility/?ref=marxistunity.com) to inspect the newly renovated facility, accompanied by Representatives Bonnie Watson-Coleman, LaMonica McIver, and Rob Menendez, Jr. All were denied access despite their constitutional authority to inspect any federal facility at any time. ICE agents then kidnapped Baraka, effectively holding him hostage through the following night. Rep. McIver [still faces](https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/06/02/lamonica-mciver-federal-charges-democratic-primary/?ref=marxistunity.com) spurious assault charges from her attempt to enter the building.
Barely a month later, frustrations with the failure to provide adequate food boiled over, leading to an [uprising](https://abc7ny.com/post/ice-agents-clash-protesters-detainees-disturbance-delaney-hall-4-migrants-unaccounted/16739071/?ref=marxistunity.com) by detainees. In the commotion, four men escaped through a shoddily constructed wall. This prison break and the protests that followed drew Senator Andy Kim to Delaney Hall for the first time. Also for the first time, Sen. Kim and Rep. Menendez were allowed to enter for a limited inspection. In the aftermath, ICE demonstrated its willingness to use transfers to other facilities as a means to break immigrant resistance. These punitive transfers triggered an intense wave of protests as some tried to block the buses from carrying ICE’s victims off to the Moshannon concentration camp in Pennsylvania and detention centers as far away as Texas.
During Delaney Hall’s first winter, ICE [admitted](https://www.ice.gov/news/releases/criminal-illegal-alien-passes-away-university-hospital-following-medical-emergency?ref=marxistunity.com) to the death of a detainee in their custody: Haitian immigrant Jean Wilson Brutus, age 41\. They offered little to no explanation for Brutus’s death beyond a “medical emergency,” which sparked outrage. Somber crowds came to mourn the senseless loss of life, demonstrating that a large number of people in our communities were willing to turn out to resist ICE even in the below-freezing temperatures of the dead of winter.
Over the course of the year, several community organizations and immigrants’ rights groups coalesced to keep up the pressure at the facility. Two overlapping coalitions—Eyes on ICE, and Labor Eyes on ICE—formed. The former focused on mutual aid; providing food, clothing, and connection to services. The 24/7 Eyes on ICE “Radical Hospitality” tent became a space for rest and solace for the visiting families of detainees. Labor Eyes on ICE brought together several unions in northern New Jersey to take shifts during the 24/7 vigil and to conduct regular weekly pickets outside the camp’s gates. This all marked the near-constant presence of protestors.
That’s where things stood when Delaney Hall’s prisoners announced a hunger and labor strike on May 22, 2026.
### **An Inside Outside Strategy**
Word of the strike first reached the community through the families of striking detainees. Gabriela Soto, the wife of Martin Soto, called for those on the outside to bring greater numbers out to the facility in solidarity. NJDSA’s statewide Immigration Justice Working Group (IJWG) immediately mobilized for an all-hands-on-deck situation.
It did not take long for ICE and GEO to cancel visitations. This was almost always the first punitive measure ICE turned to against detainees and those who fought for their freedom. By denying detainees access to their families and lawyers, they also deprived them of their most direct line of communication with the outside world. Throughout the strike, however, detainees still managed to get out [four letters](https://www.lahuelga.com/freedom?ref=marxistunity.com) describing the conditions they faced and the demands of their strike.
The first two letters describe [harrowing conditions](https://www.lahuelga.com/elgrito?ref=marxistunity.com) where “people with mental health issues, physical disabilities such as deaf and non-verbal, elderly individuals, and young people with juvenile status” are indiscriminately confined in close quarters. Flu is a “constant problem,” and detainees are “[tortured](https://www.lahuelga.com/sos?ref=marxistunity.com) physically and psychologically due to the poor food resources provided.” The strikers demanded freedom for all residents of Delaney Hall, prioritizing the immediate release of the young, the pregnant, the sick, and the elderly. They also demanded a meeting with Governor Mikie Sherrill to discuss their conditions. When Sherrill tried to tour the facility, ICE [denied her entry](https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/approved/20260525a.shtml?ref=marxistunity.com), asserting that they were only legally required to offer access to federal elected officials.
Increasingly large crowds gathered outside Delaney Hall in the following days. We chanted to make sure those imprisoned inside knew we were with them. They responded in all the ways they could; pressing themselves against windows so their silhouettes could be seen, flipping lights on and off quickly, raising their fists and waving their hands. It was a beautiful display of solidarity.
By Memorial Day Weekend, a rhythm had taken shape between ICE and protestors. At the North Gate, things remained relatively calm. Eyes on ICE’s mutual aid tent provided a place of respite for families awaiting the release of detainees. There were children, wives, relatives, volunteers with immigrant rights organizations, and people involved in their legal support and defense. GEO’s staff also came and left through the North Gate, meaning the driveway had to be regularly cleared. At the South Gate, ICE agents remained in a semipermanent standoff with a larger crowd of protestors. ICE agents often pushed people into the crowd as large trucks passed by—one can only assume that this tactic was meant to either indirectly kill protestors or to use that possibility as a means of intimidation. The night usually ended when ICE agents deployed pepper spray and tear gas to disperse the crowds, already dwindling due to the late hour.
These attacks became more aggressive as the protests continued. A protester's foot was [crushed](https://www.amny.com/news/delaney-hall-ice-agents-beat-protesters-05282026/?ref=marxistunity.com) under the wheel of a truck on the night of May 27 after having been pushed by an officer. The next night, ICE pepper-sprayed the crowd at the South Gate multiple times before the sun had set, a sign that their patience was wearing thin.
As ICE escalated its dispersal tactics outside the facility, it also grew more brutal and depraved in its attempts to break the strike within. In their [fourth letter](https://www.lahuelga.com/freedom?ref=marxistunity.com), the strikers wrote that GEO staff threatened to deport the strikers, transfer them to “punishment units,” and begin moving them to other facilities. Martin Soto, whom ICE claimed was the strike’s “leader,” was transferred to the Elizabeth Detention Center (EDC) under the cover of tear gas, nearly blinding Sen. Andy Kim as he tried to broker a deal between protestors and ICE. The second strike letter reported that agents indiscriminately launched tear gas inside the facility against detainees, beat strikers in their cells, and denied them access to common and outdoor areas.
### **Mikie Sherrill Reports for Duty**
The New Jersey State Police (NJSP) arrived on the night of Friday, May 29, Governor Sherrill’s most forceful intervention in the conflict yet. As events unfolded, public statements by the Governor, and Attorney-General Jennifer Davenport, seemed to emerge from a parallel universe of the administration’s own making, disconnected from the all-out assault the NJSP launched against protestors over the following days.
Ostensibly ordered to create “peaceful protest zones” in preparation for the arrival of pro-ICE demonstrators on Saturday morning, the NJSP set up a web of grated metal barriers outside the facility, also closing off roads. Towards the end of the night, NJSP deployed dozens of state troopers on horseback, in full riot gear and armed with tear gas, pepper spray, batons, and rubber bullets. The police shot indiscriminately into the crowd. Sherrill still has not attempted to justify this level of violence, which was repeated every night that weekend.
The next day, a vanishingly small crowd of Republican Party agitators set up in a “protest zone” towards the south end of Delaney Hall. This crowd included a strange gaggle of Proud Boys; ironically, the only boy among them was a young child, who the mostly middle-aged white nationalists firmly planted in front of themselves like a human shield. Where ICE agents had “held the line” outside the south gate at Delaney Hall, there were now barriers erected by NJSP. Behind them stood a combination of State Troopers and Essex County Sheriff’s deputies. Even as she publicly repudiated private detention facilities, Sherrill’s forces had taken up the role of security for Trump’s ICE agents.
Tensions remained high throughout the day as State Troopers made ostentatious displays of power during shift changes. In the afternoon, they kettled protestors without warning or explanation. Police took up a position on top of the medical staging area, and stayed there just long enough to watch medics and others scramble to pick up all their supplies and move them in a panic. Almost as soon as they did so, the State Troopers retreated back to their original position, leaving behind a mess of medical supplies and inflamed tempers.
This reflected a disturbing pattern from the NSJP of targeting medics, and a growing number could show us their bruises from rubber bullets. Meanwhile, as the Sun began to set, more and more horse transports for mounted State Troopers pulled into their staging area in preparation for another assault. A reporter’s arm was broken during that evening’s brutality. NJSP and Mayor Baraka’s Newark Police Department [declared a curfew](https://www.newarknj.gov/m/newsflash/Home/Detail/227?ref=marxistunity.com) on May 30 within the half-mile radius around Delaney Hall, and the NPD joined the NJSP in dispersing protestors.
Governor Sherrill and Attorney-General Davenport could only muster pathetic defenses of their new roles as Quislings for the Trump administration’s deportation machine. The former fell back on tired old lines about [“out-of-state agitators”](https://www.nj.com/news/2026/05/gov-sherrill-urges-aggressive-and-dangerous-protesters-to-calm-down-amid-delaney-hall-chaos.html?ref=marxistunity.com) and insisted that the protests overall remained peaceful, without acknowledging that State Police had launched a continued and unprovoked assault on protestors. Davenport’s public statement even [suggested](https://x.com/NewJerseyOAG/status/2060579670639149195?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com) that tear gas canisters had magically appeared at the feet of protestors to be kicked at police.
Rather than “turn down the temperature”—Sherrill’s [stated goal](https://x.com/GovSherrillNJ/status/2060438345348509848?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com)—the protests did not subside, and the crowds were angrier than ever. Mayor Baraka, although he had collaborated in the declaration and enforcement of the curfew, publicly criticized the brutality of the NJSP, even going as far as to compare their tactics to ICE. Journalists who had been attacked and arrested by the NJSP were released.
Mayor Baraka [lifted the curfew](https://abc7ny.com/post/delaney-hall-protests-newark-mayor-ras-baraka-lifts-curfew-free-speech-zones-continued/19225629/?ref=marxistunity.com) around Delaney Hall on June 3\. Newark Police maintained a presence over the next few days, but, according to the Mayor, they were under orders to use “community policing tactics” to de-escalate the situation rather than obstruct protestors. This belied the fact that for at least a day NPD turned away anyone arriving to the area with a face covering of any kind, whether it be an N-95 or a keffiyeh. Things came to a head on June 7 when protestors attempted to block GEO Group employees' cars while they were leaving at the end of their shifts, and officers made an arrest.
In a public statement on the matter, Mayor Baraka admitted that “some officers were over aggressive.” Soon after this the NPD presence began to dwindle down to the minimal levels seen prior to the strike.Things have returned to the status quo ante of a daily standoff between protestors along Doremus Avenue, and ICE agents and GEO Group staff at their gates. With it, the [reckless violence](https://newjerseymonitor.com/briefs/man-delaney-hall-crash-protesters/?ref=marxistunity.com) and attempts at vehicular manslaughter by agents has returned.
### **With Friends Like These**
Gov. Sherrill’s first instinct was to sic the NJSP on protestors until they dispersed. Many Democrats’ first statements rarely if ever foregrounded the hunger and labor strike, and instead trotted out stereotypes of peaceful protests infiltrated by outside agitators. Never mind that in every instance ICE initiated the violence against protestors. Never mind that Sherrill’s deployment of NJSP blatantly violated the [Immigrant Trust Directive](https://www.nj.gov/oag/newsreleases18/Immigration-Trust-Directive-Summary.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com), which strictly prohibits any coordination or cooperation between state and local authorities and federal agencies carrying out immigration enforcement.
For moderates like Sherrill, the Democrats are part of the “Party of Order,” same as the Republicans. All the lies and hypocrisies, and the violent repression, were justified in the pursuit of “peace:” one that can only be described in the terms of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr in his Letter from Birmingham Jail: a “negative peace, which is the absence of tension,” and not a “positive peace which is the presence of justice.”
If the NJSP’s intervention was designed to make Sherrill’s perceived political problems go away, the sheer scale of the violence only brought down more pressure on her administration. In response, Sherrill turned to a second instinct: opportunism. Facing a cascade of criticisms from progressive groups claiming she “failed” her first test as governor, Sherrill gave a $12 million [funding boost](https://newjerseyglobe.com/governor/sherrill-announces-plan-to-boost-legal-assistance-funds-for-delaney-hall-detainees-low-income-residents/?ref=marxistunity.com) to New Jersey’s Detention Deportation Defense Initiative (DDDI), [sued ICE](https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/20260602.shtml?ref=marxistunity.com) for not permitting NJ Department of Health officials to inspect, and was ultimately [granted](https://www.nj.gov/governor/news/2026/approved/20260608a.shtml?ref=marxistunity.com) a limited tour of the facility. Sherrill continues to insist that her and her administration’s position is that Delaney Hall must be shut down.
The strike and protests at Delaney Hall made it impossible for NJ and NY Democrats to avoid the issue. Josh Gottheimer, one of the most conservative members of the Democratic Caucus, felt the need to [appear](https://gottheimer.house.gov/posts/release-gottheimer-visits-delaney-hall-ice-detention-center?ref=marxistunity.com) alongside Leader Hakeem Jeffries and Reps McIver and Menendez on an oversight visit. Even Cory Booker [found it in himself](https://www.booker.senate.gov/news/press/booker-demands-dhs-shut-down-delaney-hall-following-second-congressional-oversight-visit-this-year?ref=marxistunity.com) to overcome his allergy to being seen in his hometown of Newark, and joined to visit. Representative Dan Goldman (who just lost his own primary to Brad Lander) accompanied retiring Representative Jerry Nadler [on a trip to the facility](https://whyy.org/articles/new-jersey-newark-ice-detention-center-protest/?ref=marxistunity.com) the same day Adriano Espaillat (who also just lost a primary to DSA member Darializa Avila Chevalier) made the journey to Delaney Hall.
Most of the Democrats who visited Delaney Hall and called for its closure fell short of calling for the abolition of ICE. Some of these Democrats have even [voted with Republicans](https://www.njspotlightnews.org/2024/09/reps-mikie-sherrill-josh-gottheimer-sometimes-vote-gop-immigration-policing-voting-rights/?ref=marxistunity.com) on immigration bills, like Rep. Gottheimer, and Gov. Sherrill while she was still in the House. Support for half-measures is unsurprising; it also makes no real sense. As the strikers laid out in their letters, shutting down the facility without freeing those inside is meaningless. It would simply mean the transfer of interned immigrants to other facilities with the same exact inhumane conditions and abuses. All ICE detention centers share Delaney Hall’s inhospitable living conditions, and must all be shut down, and their detainees released.
### **Long Live the Strike!**
Over 300 detainees signed the “[S.O.S.](https://www.lahuelga.com/sos?ref=marxistunity.com)” letter declaring themselves a part of the hunger and labor strike. On May 27 Gabriela Soto [told the AP](https://apnews.com/article/immigration-detention-delaney-hall-hunger-strike-5e1944e1f7c1f68cfc86a7cce856f0aa?ref=marxistunity.com) that “every single detainee inside…is participating.” At their peak the protests on Doremus Avenue made it more difficult for ICE to punitively transfer strikers, and ICE even released a number of striking detainees back to their families, including an 18-year-old high school student. The State Troopers’ deployment disorganized the protests, however, keeping large crowds away. And when the NJSP left, so too did many reporters. Punitive transfers were carried out unimpeded as numbers dwindled throughout the month. Through these transfers, the targeted use of solitary confinement, and through sheer brutality, Eyes on ICE [reported](https://newjerseymonitor.com/2026/06/22/advocates-say-delaney-hall-detainees-have-ended-hunger-strike/?ref=marxistunity.com) on June 22 that the strike had been broken.
Yet this does not mean that ICE has won an indisputable victory. There are still hundreds imprisoned in a concentration camp under unimaginable conditions. But the strike demonstrated the incredible power of collective resistance, and both those who participated in it and those who mobilized in solidarity have gained invaluable experience. It is now necessary to step back and survey the strategic landscape of the struggle against the mass deportation machine in New Jersey and across the country. Where do the forces involved now stand? What new fronts may be opened? Where will the next flashpoint be? What lessons must be learned for next time?
The conditions which sparked the strike at Delaney Hall are by no means unique; 52 people [have died](https://www.hrw.org/news/2026/06/25/us-deaths-in-ice-custody-surge-under-trump?ref=marxistunity.com) in ICE custody since 2024, killed by criminal neglect and abuse. This result is inevitable when Trump and his personal Reinhard Heydrich, Stephen Miller, set absurd deportation goals in pursuit of plans to redefine American citizenship and remove a large part of the working class from the country. On May 19, 3 days before Delaney Hall’s strike began, another hunger strike was called at a concentration camp in [Adelanto, California](https://iecn.com/the-hunger-strike-at-adelanto-detention-center-warning/?ref=marxistunity.com). There, too, solitary confinement, the threat of immediate deportation, and punitive transfers have been used to [punish and isolate](https://gomez.house.gov/news/documentsingle.aspx?DocumentID=6109&ref=marxistunity.com) strikers.
These repressive measures have not impeded the outbreak of strikes, and transfers to other facilities may very well spread the know-how and will-power of experienced strikers throughout the concentration camp system. The ACLU [confirmed](https://www.aclu.org/news/immigrants-rights/hundreds-at-delaney-hall-join-detained-people-across-country-in-hunger-strike-against-inhumane-conditions?ref=marxistunity.com) on June 11 that strikes have broken out at three other ICE camps in [El Paso, Texas](https://www.aclu.org/press-releases/legal-organizations-file-lawsuit-over-immigration-detention-conditions-at-camp-east-montana-in-el-pasos-fort-bliss-military-base?ref=marxistunity.com), [Philipsburg, Pennsylvania](https://www.spotlightpa.org/statecollege/2026/06/ice-geo-moshannon-valley-detention-center-clearfield-pennsylvania-immigration/?ref=marxistunity.com), and [Baldwin, Michigan](https://michiganadvance.com/2026/04/22/protestors-gather-outside-baldwin-facility-as-immigrant-detainees-held-by-ice-launch-hunger-strike/?ref=marxistunity.com). Conditions are ripe for detainee resistance to spread like wildfire; but they will not be able to win their demands without community support.
As the detainees themselves argued, their imprisonment is intrinsically wrong. They have been denied due process, arrested while pursuing legal paths to residency and citizenship, and are subjected to conditions no human deserves to live in. This is all for what is, at worst, a civil infraction. There is no choice but to unceasingly fight for the closure of every one of ICE’s concentration camps, the prosecution of those who run them, and the dismantling of the whole deportation machine. “Abolish ICE” is the only battle cry for the resistance to the Trump regime.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Let DSA Decide! Five Demands for our Presidential Plan in 2028
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/let-dsa-decide-five-demands-for-our-presidential-plan-in-2028/
Last updated: 2026-06-19T16:25:11.000Z
Does she like us? Or does she not? Do we *like her*, or do we not?
Is AOC even running, or is she not?
For months in DSA, we've plucked sadly at our roses, red petals falling to the ground until nothing is left but thorns. Even Bud has plucked himself bald. Welcome to the graveyard of our apathy.
The midterms are coming, and once they’re behind us, DSA will face a grave risk of being passively swept along by events. Presidential announcements could drop at any moment. I had a vision of the day when AOC stepped forward. In DSA, her campaign debut jolted us from our miserable paralysis. The energy was with her, so we decided to support her as best we could. Perhaps against the odds, AOC won it all, only to renege on her promises in indefensible ways. And because we failed to establish any independent profile for ourselves, our fate was tied up wholly with hers; with the whims of a politician who does not share our politics or our strategy.
Or more likely: AOC’s coalition will win a few early victories, before the DNC pounces to shut it down. Soon enough, she graciously concedes, and the Establishment tosses us the usual “progressive” concessions, all yanked away by November like Lucy with the football. Both timelines are senselessly boring, and worse, reduce DSA to passive boosters instead of active participants in history.
But don’t worry, comrades: we don’t have to repeat these old patterns. DSA has grown tremendously over the past ten years in both numbers and confidence. We can plan a bolder intervention in this election than ever before, if we discuss and prepare for it early.
In this dialogue, MUG will make no secret that we want a cadre candidate: a socialist tribune who will run for president on the [DSA platform](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1b5KhaBrignJcRJeyytHxAu%5F5GMFopcGdl69sCs80rRA/edit?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com). DSA has many talented organizers who could rise to this task if given the opportunity. Even if they lack name recognition at the outset, we can make them [famous](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/how-zohran-mamdani-rose-from-queens-lawmaker-to-mayor-of-new-york?ref=marxistunity.com). Together with our comrades, MUG will assist outreach to potential candidates and encourage them to take the leap. We believe a DSA presidential tribune can electrify working-class struggle and advance our party forward by decades.
But we know this hope is pure fantasy if we can’t win over our comrades in a fair debate. DSA needs a deliberative process that allows membership to advocate for our competing visions: whether it’s for endorsing AOC, abstaining from endorsing any presidential candidate, or going all in to raise up a cadre candidate. No matter your perspective, we all must stand and make our case, and not hope for external events to save us. *We become a party by acting like one.*
MUG has a vision for a democratic presidential process, to empower our movement to develop real choices. We will be promoting this vision at every level of DSA. These are our Five Demandsfor DSA’s Presidential Plan*:*
### **1\. We want a debate. Between the candidates, and each other.**
Fear is the mind-killer, right? Fear of exploring disagreements, of “looking weak”—of *doing anything at all* before AOC declares—is the weakest decision imaginable. This is a beautiful opportunity for our membership to discuss, debate, and grow as a party: to build our own structures, to face 2028 head on instead of just reacting to it.
DSA already has a presidential exploratory committee, tasked by our 2025 Convention with *“\[exploring\] the different possibilities for a 2028 DSA Presidential campaign.”* As an initial step, MUG wants this committee to organize a Socialist Presidential Debate in early 2027 between candidates seeking our presidential endorsement (or if there's only one, a participatory town hall with that candidate).
If we want to endorse a candidate as a democratic socialist, we need them to answer questions from DSA members—and from a wider working-class audience—to see how they intend to present the socialist vision, and use it as a catalyst for class struggle. It’s also a way to show working people everywhere that DSA is serious about acting as an independent movement. The Democratic Party has presidential debates. Why shouldn’t a socialist party have one of our own?
### **2\. We want the rank and file to propose candidates.**
To give our membership a real menu of options for 2028, we must trust them to take grassroots action. Our exploratory committee should conduct intensive outreach to help develop potential candidates, but DSA should also create a structure for members to circulate petitions encouraging specific individuals to enter the race.
The top five petition-getters would be invited to take part in the Socialist Presidential Debate in early 2027\. MUG is also tentatively proposing a minimum threshold of 400 signatures to ensure everyone invited has a degree of organized support among DSA’s active membership.
With a touch of excitement and popular mobilization, DSA can break our spell of helpless apathy. When we empower our membership to propose candidates on their own initiative—and to think outside the box—we will bring our presidential process to life.
Imagine if you were a brilliantly charismatic but obscure socialist organizer, and DSA’s exploratory committee asked you to consider stepping forward. Which would be more convincing to you? A politely worded email from the exploratory committee and nothing more? Or learning that 500 DSA members have already enthusiastically petitioned for you to run, and you're going to be invited to a debate that will be watched by many thousands more? The best candidates are often those who are too humble to step forward initially, and they will need a friendly nudge. They deserve to see that they have comrades who will support them.
With a grassroots process and an open public debate, we will announce to the world and to ourselves that DSA is determined to act like a party in this presidential election. We will also be contrasting ourselves with the shameless, closed-door elitism of the DNC.
That's reason enough to do it.
### **3\. We want cadre candidates to step forward.**
No matter what process the National Political Committee settles on, MUG will reach out to potential candidates alongside other DSA comrades. There are [plenty](https://www.newsweek.com/protesters-arrested-schumer-gillibrand-israel-weapons-sales-11823197?ref=marxistunity.com) of [interesting](https://www.oliverforcongress.com/?ref=marxistunity.com) [people](https://www.complex.com/pop-culture/a/alex-ocho/hasan-piker-subpoenaed-federal-cuba-inquiry?ref=marxistunity.com) who could make [compelling](https://jacobin.com/2021/05/richie-floyd-democratic-socialists-of-america-florida-city-council?ref=marxistunity.com) arguments to be our tribune. Our membership must propose candidates with earnest sincerity if we want a real debate that can prepare us for this moment.
For those comrades who are named, we ask only that they take the petitions seriously. It is true that we remain a small movement, but small movements need bold representatives.
### **4\. We want DSA’s program front and center.**
During the debate, we want candidates to be asked questions that put DSA’s distinct vision front and center. Candidates should be asked about their commitment to DSA’s program, their plans to advance the labor movement, and their solidarity with Palestine and other international struggles. *If endorsed, how will you stand with Puerto Rico’s struggle for self-determination? How will you fight Israeli apartheid and genocide? How can we take back abortion rights, advance healthcare for all, and win a real democracy? What will you do if the Supreme Court and Congress try to block our political revolution?*
Alongside our rank-and-file members, we could also invite union participants and other working-class attendees to ask questions of their own. Holding a debate will help DSA make our debut to working people everywhere as a party-like organization, with its own vision for political revolution in America.
### **5\. We want a democratic conference to handle early decisions.**
If DSA hesitates to take any preliminary action before our August 2027 Convention, the race will develop ahead of us and delegates will not be presented with meaningful choices. The first Democratic presidential debate will probably already be behind us (as it was at our August 2019 convention). If DSA converges, even preliminarily, on a candidate, we will need to do everything we can to help them get on the Democratic primary debate stage. The existing presidential exploratory committee already has a clear mandate to consider preliminary steps ahead of the 2027 Convention:
> …\[The Committee will submit\] a report to the NPC prior to the 2027 convention. If DSA decides to endorse a candidate for the 2028 Democratic primary, the committee shall draft a consensus resolution outlining the campaign for the 2027 DSA convention.
2025 Convention delegates mandated DSA to actively prepare for this election, not to stand by in silence until our next convention. However, it’s important that the exploratory committee’s report, and any preliminary decisions it takes alongside the NPC, should emerge from a deliberative democratic process engaging the whole organization, not just a leadership core. We must also be clear that DSA’s 2027 Convention is free to approve, reject, or revise any preliminary plan as it sees fit.
In the coming months, MUG will work with our NPC comrades to democratize the exploratory committee as our presidential process continues. MUG will propose that chapters be asked to select delegations by proportional election to join the Committee around early 2027\. A large virtual conference of chapter-elected delegates, focused squarely on the presidential election, would allow the Committee to complete its 2025 mandate by the most democratic means available, while also avoiding the severe procedural hurdles to calling a full special convention (which requires a three-fourths NPC majority). Chapter delegations will ensure that the committee approves a report that reflects the collective will of our movement.
---
2028 will bring many unknowns, but MUG is confident that the socialist movement can face it all with courage. Together, we will completely destroy the Democratic Establishment, which has stomped on the Left for years by rigging elections with their money and media networks. They’re laughing at us, because they think we’ll play the game as usual, and not come prepared, and fall back in line when the progressive concedes like we always have before. But DSA is rising as a party of our own, and this time, **we decide our own fate!**
If you would like to join us in advancing our Five Demands, [please reach out here.](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLScA3g5r-XYEayK0vZhkf3Xf5hjFuXzC0UWSB1ghddAHMd-1gw/viewform?usp=sharing&ouid=107893306363842799520&ref=marxistunity.com)
You’ll hear from us.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Red Pride
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/red-pride/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:25:48.000Z
*This article was originally published in* [*Cosmonaut Magazine*](https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/06/red-pride/?ref=marxistunity.com)*.*
> “You and me together
>
> Fighting for our love”
*—* Bronski Beat
It’s a June morning in Margret Thatcher’s Britain. A gay man, Mark Ashton, is watching the news over breakfast. Radical posters cover his walls. He’s staring intently at reports of the Tory government’s war with the National Union of Minerworkers (NUM) in their nation-wide strike. Mark’s companion for the previous night is trying to leave his number before he goes but Mark is not listening, he’s staring intently at the news footage of cops and coal miners brawling up and down the picket lines. Mark has been struck by a feeling familiar to any communist organizer, the inspiration needed to seize a political opportunity.
Mark grabs some buckets and practically skips out the door, his neighbor hurls homophobic threats and insults which Mark confidently responds to with jokes. At the Pride parade Mark begins handing out buckets and instructing any queer person who will listen to start using them to collect money for the striking miners. They raise hundreds of pounds in a single day. Thus, Lesbians and Gays Support the Miners (LGSM) is born. With money coming in by the bucketfull the lesbians and gays just need to find some miners to support. But the film’s universe is Thatcher’s arch-reactionary homophobic Britain and these are stereotypically macho miners. LGSM makes call after call to miner’s union offices around the country, only to be rejected again and again, presumably out of a fear that this aid has AIDS. They debate hiding the nature of the group or donating the money anonymously, but Mark is adamant that the point of the project is that it is lesbians and gays publicly supporting the miners. Hiding the fact would defeat the point. Eventually LGSM finds a mining community willing to send a representative to London to pick up the money, thanks in part to a spotty phone connection causing the name of the group to get garbled. The leader in the miner’s union sent up to London to collect the money is taken by surprise when the group turns out to be a gang of gays and lesbians.
Luckily, this leader turns out to have an open mind and quickly warms to the group. What follows is a brilliantly executed dramedy of trading culture shocks. First the Welsh mining community sitting in stunned silence at learning that these lesbians aren’t just vegetarians, they’re vegans. Similarly the members of LGSM are aghast when they find out that Welsh men don’t dance. But after a frosty first meeting these two groups slowly warm to one another and become fast friends. The money that LGSM raises serves as the largest and most consistent support the village receives for everything from food, clothes, to an LGSM-branded van used to bring strikers to the picket line and deliver the much needed supplies.
I most recently watched Pride, the film from which these scenes are taken, with a group of Starbucks union activists and it was totally arresting. It made the whole room laugh and it made the whole room cry on multiple occasions.
The good times in Pride cannot last, however. An active minority of homophobic members in the mining community conspire to pass a motion at a relief committee meeting which officially rejects receiving any more aid from LGSM under the pretext of being concerned about how what the tabloids say about them is affecting the miner’s morale. As if in divine punishment, the miners lose their nation-wide strike not long after. The union has been defeated, leaving Thatcher a free hand to close as many pits as she likes. Meanwhile the gay community is decimated by AIDS and queerbashings, at turns ignored and encouraged by the ascendant neoliberals.
But in the ashes of their defeat an important victory was won. After years of campaigning to add a gay rights plank to the Labor Party manifesto the motion finally succeeded thanks to the unanimous support from one union: the National Union of Mineworkers. This political victory was symbolized by over a thousand people from the South Wales mining communities that LGSM supported marching with them in London Pride in 1985\. The miners had not forgotten the immense service that LGSM had given them and they repaid their solidarity in kind. Bill Nighy’s character sums it up: “The gays and lesbians have been absolutely magnificent there’s no other word for it.” The music soars and the heart strings are pulled as the “where are they now” begins to roll. Amidst all the triumph the film ends on a somber note:
> “Mark Ashton Continued to Fight for Political and Civil Rights Causes
>
> He died on February 11th 1987, just days after his diagnosis with HIV AIDS
>
> He was 26”
This is technically correct but leaves out one very important thing. Mark was not someone who simply fought for political and civil rights causes. He believed in the workers’ movement. He believed that the workers movement could be inspired to fight for more than just a bigger slice of the capitalists’ pie, it could be inspired to fight for more than just itself, it could fight for all oppressed people. Mark was a communist. Not just at the level of individual beliefs, he was a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. And not just a member of the Communist Party of Great Britain. Mark Ashton served as the General Secretary of the Youth Wing of the Communist Party of Great Britain.
In spite of the film’s understanding of the importance of being publicly and proudly queer it is glaringly hypocritical when it comes to acknowledging the radical politics that forged the alliance at the center of its story. It was Mark’s understanding of politics that allowed him to see the possibilities that liberals couldn’t. In addition, it was not only theory but concrete organization which made the first connections. The community in South Wales and LGSM did not find each other through phonebook misadventures but instead via party connections. Hywel Francis, a member of both the Communist Party and of the mining community that LGSM connected with had heard through the party about LGSM’s activities and made the introduction. Without Mark’s communist politics or Hywel’s communist connections the events of the film might never have occurred or may have happened very differently.
Despite being overlooked, communists should not ignore the lessons to take from the movie and the queer community at large. First and foremost, the strategic importance of being out. Whether it is a social conservative trying to stuff gays back into the closet and out of public life, whether it is a boss trying to prevent their workers from standing up to them, and whether it is the capitalist state trying to exorcise the spectre of communism, all of these rely first and foremost on one tool. Most people believe that tool is the fear of retaliation. The fear of getting queerbashed, the fear of being fired by their boss, the fear of being red scared. While it is the most attention getting it is not the one that’s used first and used most pervasively. The weapon of first resort in all these cases is shame, the fear of embarrassment. That one’s peers will find who they are or what they do to be pathetic, and they will be shunned by the vast majority who are cautious of being associated with them. Social conservatives don’t have to queerbash a queer who stays in the closet of their own volition. Bosses don’t have to fire workers who never even try to stand up for themselves in the first place. Capitalist states don’t have to exercise a phantom that doesn’t haunt.
The cure for this shame is Pride. If someone acts like they have something to hide from others, people will naturally treat them with suspicion. If someone parades themselves down Main Street with nothing to hide how can they be accused of hiding anything from anyone. What’s more, those who harbor a secret dissatisfaction with an identity they feel has been forced on them, with working conditions they find intolerable, or a dream that we have at hand the raw materials of a new world, will see this person boldly walking down the middle of Main Street and decide they can step into the light if it means they won’t be alone in it. It is in this way that queers, and communists, undermine the prevailing system through nothing more than unapologetically being themselves.
This is why every communist ought to be proud to be a communist. Obviously we cannot be out all the time to everyone in every context. Just as outing queers who aren’t ready and willing should be treated as a social crime so too should outing communists. The main point is that every second spent in the dark is a second when someone who was waiting for permission to join something larger than themselves went without that permission. This was in part the value of Bernie Sanders running for president. We do not have Medicare For All and the Supreme Court decision on Citizens United remains in force. But what Bernie Sanders did accomplish was to give the socialist movement the permission to publicly be socialist with no embarrassment of that fact.
Being out is not only how we grow our forces it is how we grow our allies. Would the miners of south wales have marched in London Pride in 1985 had LGSM declined to be out? Would the NUM have voted as a block to add gay rights to the Labor Party’s manifesto? Both are unlikely. In the case of LGSM they did give permission to some in the mining community to be out like Cliff Grist and later Jayne Headon (daughter of the Welsh mining matriarch Hefina Headon played brilliantly by Imelda Staunton). But the vast majority of Welsh miners did not convert to queerness. What they did was learn who their friends were. LGSM models a stance that communists should emulate in the campaigns we engage in. We whole-heartedly support every struggle of the oppressed against our rulers but we do so openly as ourselves. We do not demand this or that in return but by the mere fact of us loudly and unapologetically identifying ourselves we implicitly exhort acceptance of who we are from those we’re standing shoulder to shoulder with, and maybe a few of them who feel the same way we do will be comfortable enough to make that public and join us. After that struggle, win or lose, we invite, not demand, that they join us in the next struggle, come to the aid of the next group that needs help.
Too often socialists are willing to hide or downplay our bigger picture politics in the name of rallying support for reforms. The 1234 resolution, which would have required NYC DSA electeds to identify as socialists in their campaign materials, was defeated at the NYC DSA convention thanks in part to electeds saying they needed the flexibility to hold off on doing so for constituencies that aren’t ready to support an open socialist. Delaying identification until after one has been elected like this leaves one open to the reasonable accusation of a bait and switch. It is dishonest to hide our ideology and voters will recognize this dishonesty. The way that voters become comfortable voting for socialists is to see socialists unapologetically fighting for them.
When discussing the film with a comrade they said that identifying as socialist while knocking doors for raising the minimum wage was different from LGSM since LGSM wasn’t trying to convert people. But this is a wrongheaded view of both queerness and socialism. In both cases being open about ourselves is about teaching people that it is a respectable thing to be; no one stands up for those who don’t stand up for themselves. In this way, we invite those in the community who feel the same way to come out of the closet.
Though mainstream culture may try to take our accomplishments away, that’s all the more reason to fly our flag. In 1984, amidst repression and defeat and plague and death, communists saw an opportunity to unite not just two separate groups but rather two parts of the same larger struggle. That’s worth being proud of.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The Third Precinct Still Burns: Black Freedom and Political Power
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-third-precinct-still-burns-black-freedom-and-political-power/
Last updated: 2026-07-01T04:43:04.000Z
> If I make this Earth a metaphor I make a metaphor against the police.
*—* Miguel James, *Against the Police*
Six years ago today, the people of Minneapolis burned the 3rd Police Precinct to the ground to protest the murder of George Floyd. The killing of a Black person by the police remains an all-to-common occurrence in America. The uprising in Minneapolis, however, transformed this tragedy into a mass movement against state violence unparalleled in the past half-century of American history.
Despite the magnitude of events, institutional memory of the uprising has vanished, and the mainstream Left has already begun to retreat from abolitionism as an electoral liability. Since 2020, rates of police violence have only continued to rise, peaking in 2024 with 1382 people killed. This anniversary is more bitter than most because it also comes in the wake of the Supreme Court’s *Louisiana vs Callais* decision, which for all intents and purposes has put the 1965 Voting Rights Act out of its misery.
After the Civil Rights movement, racial integration undermined the power of the ruling class and created a democratic avenue for liberal reform, which made it incompatible with the Republican Party’s vision of an unfettered police state directed by the evangelical movement and large capital. The persistence of police murder and the victory of anti-Black voter suppression demonstrate both that the George Floyd Uprising and the legislative movement it spawned failed, and that the contradictions they aimed to solve remain a problem for socialist strategy. Capitalist rule depends on the authority of the police and the weight of the white vote. Defeating it requires retracing our steps to chart a positive program for abolition.
### **Poverty of Imagination**
The Left’s failure during the uprising was twofold. Organizationally, we did not build new institutions that could effectively carry the politics of the movement into harsher conditions, and existing organizations like DSA failed to absorb militants activated by street protest. Politically, we were not able to move most participants from a reformist critique of police funding and behavior to a broader political movement against the *police state*. By the time the leaves turned, the most popular explosion of street militancy in our lifetimes had given way to the dementia of the Biden era.
It is easy to substitute alternate history for strategic thinking. Since 2020, leftists have spent thousands of hours arguing that more protests, stronger demands, or political education aimed at street militants would have resulted in one or another organization absorbing protesters in the millions. But there is no reason to believe that any change in tactics by the organized Left, which played a marginal role in the movement, would have altered the course of events. To actually position ourselves to make an impact during the next uprising, it would be more fruitful to approach the problem programmatically: what demands would the Left need to win to create a world where there is never another George Floyd or Tamir Rice or Breonna Taylor? What is the minimum program for Black freedom? How does this impact our political practice here and now?
Outside of the electoralist Left, the uprising and the burning of the 3rd Precinct became a popular justification for abstentionism. Why bother electing abolitionists or pushing for legislation when the masses were clearly ready to take things into their own hands? In practice, however, elections continued to be the central site where most Americans sought political leadership. This meant that thousands of revolutionaries, convinced that they could carry the movement through to the end via direct action, abandoned formal politics and let the liberals take center stage. The first lesson of the uprising is that political action is necessary to build a movement capable of actually seizing power.
For a brief period, the electoral Left engaged directly with policing. Even Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez called to defund the police, and [collected signatures](https://act.ocasiocortez.com/signup/ads-dpath-2020q3-dfndplc/?ref=marxistunity.com) to support her position. As polling began to show lower and lower support for cutting police budgets, though, most politicians who had called to defund or openly identified as abolitionists reversed course, choosing to either remain silent or disavow their former positions. The emerging progressive common sense is to treat policing as a fringe issue worth sacrificing in exchange for institutional support.
In contrast, reformist abolitionism champions an argument for redistribution—that we should shift police funding toward social services in an attempt to cleave off broader working class support through bread and butter demands. Who doesn’t want more funding for schools? While the prevailing progressive logic argues that even redistribution is electoral self-sabotage, DSA candidates like Louisville’s JP Lyninger have taken office after campaigning openly on reallocation of funding.
As a candidate for mayor of New York City, Zohran Mamdani tried to balance both positions, promising reforms like disbanding the New York Police Department’s Strategic Response Group and eliminating its gang database, the formation of a Department of Community Safety for non-violent crisis response, and level services that would keep the NYPD officer count at 35,000\. In practice, his tenure in office has mostly been defensive of the NYPD, its budget, and its political legitimacy. In Seattle, newly-coronated progressive mayor Katie Wilson, who sought and failed to receive DSA endorsement, has backed down on her campaign promise to remove police surveillance cameras from the city, bowing to the will of the Seattle Police Department.
While useful as a legislative tactic, the redistributionist argument erases the fundamental threat of police departments: their political power. Beyond acting as budgetary parasites, the police, their unions, and their lobby form a political bloc committed to reactionary politics; defending the right of the state to commit unchecked violence, supporting right-wing candidates, and colluding with other conservative institutions. Rather than merely a passive instrument serving local and state government, the police have a politics of their own, and organize on and off the job to implement it. Everywhere in the country, [Blue Power](https://www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2026/05/opinion-can-mamdani-confront-nypds-blue-power/413527/?ref=marxistunity.com) is an obstacle to working-class political action and the liberation of the oppressed.
### **Black Liberation**
The significance of the Black liberation movement has always been its emancipatory potential, not just for the Black working class, but for every dispossessed and disenfranchised element of American society. This pattern has repeated throughout history, from the slave revolts that made Emancipation possible, to the Black Populists that fought against the entry of finance capital into the post-Reconstruction South, and the Civil Rights and Black Power movements that defeated Jim Crow and defied the transformation of white supremacy into neocolonialism. Finishing Reconstruction would have meant destroying the planter class, whose capitalist descendants today form the resurgent base for fascism.
The Voting Rights Act undermined the political power of the white bourgeoisie and the evangelical movement by ensuring majority-Black constituencies could choose their own representatives. This provided a foundation for Black liberalism and a check on reactionary politics across the country, but had minimal impact on the economic dominance of the white elite, poor housing and employment conditions for urban Black populations in the North and West, and the subjugation of the Black working class in the South. Black mayors throughout the 1970s and 80s like Maynard Jackson and Tom Bradley attempted to reform the police through accountability measures and personnel changes, and by integrating more Black men into department leadership. But the culture and politics of police in Atlanta, Los Angeles and dozens of other cities where reformers held power has remained broadly unchanged.
Economically, the conditions for white supremacy have transformed dramatically over the past century, particularly in the South. The foundation of Jim Crow was the sharecropping system. Plantations tied Black farmers to the land, and superexploitation, debt bondage, peonage, lynching and segregation kept them in chains. Despite migration to the rest of the country, much of the Black population remains in the Black Belt, once the locus of Southern agriculture. The transition from an agricultural economy to low-wage service and light manufacturing eroded the economic conditions for apartheid, creating a modernized, low-wage and underemployed Black proletariat, either hired as “free labor” or enslaved in the prison system. But development did not erode the ideology of the Southern elite and the broader ruling class, which continues to be white supremacist and anti-democratic.
Black freedom remains anathema to the dominant factions of capital, producing a range of half-measures to maintain control—mass incarceration and felon disenfranchisement, police terror, denial of municipal home rule, gerrymandering, and attempted integration into the Republican voter base. Only time will tell if the ruling class coheres its methods into another formal system of apartheid or continues to oscillate from one form of brutality to another. Both paths lead to barbarism.
Responding to the scale and ambition of reactionary politics means reviving an old slogan: Black self-determination. Majority-Black communities live according to rules set by white-dominated state governments and judiciaries. *Louisiana vs Callais* deprived them of federal representation. In practice, they have no means of exercising power over their own lives, allowing *xAI* to dump formaldehyde into the air in Memphis and white lawmakers in Mississippi to encroach on the court system of Jackson. Without representation and independence from the aristocratic federal system, self-determination is impossible.
A minimum program to put the working class in power needs to address the central political questions of Black liberation. The old jurisdictions and districts need to be torn down and replaced by a system of proportional representation, allowing Black voters to choose their own representatives; the millions of prisoners rotting across the country need to be given the tools to self-organize and liberate themselves, including suffrage, freedom of speech and assembly, and the right to strike; the police need to be abolished, replacing the specialized, full-time force occupying working-class neighborhoods with mass organizations for public safety made up of and controlled by the working class; wealth (and, yes, police funding) needs to be redistributed toward reparations to Black communities, which suffer disproportionately from environmental devastation, lack of healthcare and decaying infrastructure. Finally, Black people must be given the right to land and secession, allowing them to determine their own path.
In short, for DSA to open the road to socialism, we need to incorporate the demands of Black liberation into our electoral platform. On the municipal level, this means directly challenging Blue Power and working to shrink the authority and power of the police, naming their role as an oppressive, occupying army terrorizing working class neighborhoods. On the federal level, it means fighting for radical democratization and reparations, creating the conditions for a politically powerful, organized Black working class.
The lesson of the George Floyd Uprising is not that street tactics are more significant than political action, or that abolition is not a viable electoral plank. It is that the democratic struggle of the Black working class is the lynchpin to the overthrow of capitalism. Black freedom lights the way to freedom for all of us.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Sailing Into the Storm
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/sailing-into-the-storm/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:30:20.000Z
Zohran Mamdani set a clear tone for his administration in his first 100 days in office. Centered on an earnest approach to basic fixes from bike lanes to potholes, his commitment to a better quality of life and government for everyday people is all too rare in American politics. He has notched real wins under his belt, from securing [partial funding](https://www.cityandstateny.com/policy/2026/01/hochul-unveil-plan-universal-child-care/410536/?ref=marxistunity.com) for universal childcare to [increasing property taxes](https://www.nyc.gov/mayors-office/news/2026/04/mayor-mamdani--governor-hochul-announce-state-s-first-pied-a-ter?ref=marxistunity.com) on the wealthy. Just this month, NYC's Rent Guidelines Board [cleared the way](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/05/rent-freeze-officially-table/413412/?oref=csny-category-lander-river&ref=marxistunity.com) for a rent freeze for New York's rent-stabilized tenants, and Mamdani's newest budget proposal [appears to avoid](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/05/mamdani-proposes-1247b-executive-budget-no-gap/413486/?ref=marxistunity.com) what could have been a dangerous funding gap for NYC’s city government.
But Mamdani has also made a series of decisions ranging from confusing to legitimately disorganizing. He [reinstituted](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/18/nyregion/homeless-encampment-mamdani-nyc.html?ref=marxistunity.com) winter homeless sweeps, [endorsed](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/04/nyregion/mamdani-endorse-hochul.html?ref=marxistunity.com) right-wing Governor Kathy Hochul for her re-election bid, [thanked](https://www.amny.com/police-fire/queens-police-shooting-mental-health-mamdani/?ref=marxistunity.com) “first responders” after the NYPD shot an unarmed man, and [forced](https://jewishcurrents.org/newsletter/can-a-liberal-zionist-recreate-mamdanis-coalition?ref=marxistunity.com) a DSA-backed candidate out of a congressional race in NY-10\. At each turn, Zohran’s critics and cynics have cried “betrayal,” but the reality is far more complicated.
As Mayor of the largest city in the United States, Mamdani has taken on the burden of governance under a system that often treats municipal executives, and radicals in office more generally, rather poorly. Progressive mayors of American cities are dealt unplayable hands and then blamed for their inability to make effective change. From the direction he has taken so far, it is clear that Zohran is desperately trying to avoid “ineffectiveness,” or worse, being forced to implement austerity: the undertaker of Left electoral movements from Jackson, Mississippi to Syriza in 2010s Greece.
By appeasing various elements of the capitalist state, Zohran has proven successful in legitimizing his administration. This is not inherently a problem, since compromise has been a law of politics since the dawn of government. What I will argue, however, is that NYC-DSA leadership’s decision to back Zohran “[to the hilt](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XklAsGhrxV47uiS2wr3A8n74GMClDXSfTESsaoW9L4c/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com)” without a hint of criticism, is leading us down a blind alley. Implementing Zohran’s “Affordability Agenda,” which has become the chapter’s immediate political program, is taking place in the back rooms and catacombs of the halls of power, outside of the view of the working masses and even our own members.
In the coming months and years, DSA will need to learn when to selectively, but forcefully, assert our political independence from the Mayor’s office. If we don’t, we tie our future as a local party to one man’s approval rating and his ability to wheel and deal within an alien state power. When we elect socialists to office, they are operating in enemy territory. Zohran is no exception to that fact despite his seat at the head of the table. The capitalist state remains unconquered, and DSA remains a party in opposition to the status quo.
### **Legitimate and Illegitimate Compromise**
In the history of Marxist politics, the relative permissibility of compromise has long divided Socialist Parties. Wilhelm Liebknecht, a founder, member of parliament, and thought leader in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), worked out his theory of compromise in the 1899 [pamphlet](https://www.bing.com/search?pglt=43&q=no+compromise+no+political+trading&cvid=99541dff2d094b209e934b4e4db91a0b&gs%5Flcrp=EgRlZGdlKgYIABBFGDkyBggAEEUYOTIGCAEQABhAMgYIAhAAGEAyBggDEAAYQDIICAQQ6QcY%5FFXSAQg0NzgzajBqMagCALACAA&FORM=ANNAB1&PC=U531&ref=marxistunity.com) “No Compromises, No Political Trading,” which argued against the coalitionist impulses of some Bavarian party members. It is not harmful, Liebknecht says, to find oneself voting along the same lines as liberals or radicals in a bourgeois government on any given issue. Failure to do so in at least some circumstances would mean abstaining from political action altogether, which is unacceptable. The fact that Socialist Parties are, by and large, opposition parties and do not hold majorities in government means that failure to compromise would be akin to “rejecting the theory of gravity.”
The real danger of compromise, Liebknecht argues, lies not in taking common action with bourgeois political actors, but “in giving up, keeping in the background, or forgetting the class struggle basis \[of the party\], for this is the source of the whole modern labor movement.*”* He continues: “Growing out of the class struggle, our party rests upon \[it\] as a condition of its existence. Through and with that struggle the party is unconquerable; without it the party is lost, for it will have lost the source of its strength.”
In short, compromises with liberal and bourgeois parties become dangerous *only* when they obscure the class struggle basis of the party. This, of course, is deeply relevant a century later as we negotiate a series of legislative systems—at the municipal, state, and federal level—that can be just as byzantine and undemocratic as the institutions of the German Empire which Liebknecht grappled with in his own time. Alliances between different factions of the ruling Democratic Party are shifting and unclear, budgeting largely happens in closed-door negotiations, and Assembly and Senate leaders can place incredible pressure on our own legislators’ ability to honestly communicate with the working class by threatening to sink their reform projects unless they stay silent.
The [electoral strategy](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NKsKO3K8LtjPZwgVNC-cEtsISjD3GE6bLuPiLAXaNAY/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com) passed at NYC-DSA’s 2024 Convention argues that our representatives’ main responsibility is to serve their constituents “through passing legislation and budgets that meaningfully improve the lives of working class New Yorkers while weakening the influence of the capitalist ruling class.” In this view, compromise for the sake of policy goals is the name of the game. A DSA legislator can choose to vote for a mediocre state budget and get funding for a pet project, or speak out against it and risk losing that funding. These two choices are, Liebknecht would say, morally neutral. The problem arises when the motivations guiding these decisions remain obscured. We rarely learn what kind of pressure is placed on legislators to vote for pro-cop, anti-worker budgets, or the political price tag for our own policy goals. The urgency of “delivering the goods” results in our elected officials making inscrutable decisions.
In their ideal form, socialist-in-office committees can serve as a conduit between electeds and members by democratizing knowledge about the legislative terrain. With that knowledge, members and the leaders elected to represent them can make decisions about what types of compromises we expect DSA’s legislative group to make, and whether or not we find them acceptable. In doing so, these party organs can shed light on the internal functions of government and allow regular working people to push their own vision for socialist legislative practice. Any socialist legislative project worthy of the name requires legislators to “[name the system](https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/01/naming-the-system-means-as-ends-socialism-and-the-importance-of-alternative-political-culture-and-program/?ref=marxistunity.com),” using their offices to agitate against the formal legal and political barriers to enacting our vision within the capitalist state.
Despite practice often diverging from this ideal, NYC-DSA has weathered many bad votes, unexpected compromises with the Democratic Party, and a membership base that often demands more from our elected officials. But unlike our Assembly and Council interventions, NYC-DSA does not have a formal structure for engaging with the new reality of a DSA member in the Mayor’s office. In Zohran, we have a socialist in office whose power, reach, and entanglement with bourgeois government has rapidly outstripped the ability of our Party to communicate and negotiate with him. Combined with our chapter leadership’s philosophy that values secrecy above transparency, frustration with the DSA-Zohran relationship will only grow. Passing an affordability agenda with the passive consent of, or over the objections of, our many class enemies in power will often come at the expense of open class struggle.
### **The Party Problem**
In December, mayor-elect Mamdani endorsed Brad Lander, a liberal Zionist and campaign ally, for New York’s 10th Congressional district. Because NYC-DSA had already voted to endorse DSA Councilmember Alexa Avilés for the seat, his decision came as a surprise to many who imagined that a “cadre candidate” would back the decision of our organization. On paper, Avilés was the ideal candidate. She had to be cajoled into running in the first place, she would return to her Council seat even if she lost the race, and most importantly, she had the support of the membership.
Organizing *against* a DSA endorsement is one of the few genuinely red lines within our Party. When NYC-DSA [updated](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1NKsKO3K8LtjPZwgVNC-cEtsISjD3GE6bLuPiLAXaNAY/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com) its electoral strategy, we affirmed that candidates in same-year elections would run as a slate, and that candidates in overlapping districts would pool campaign resources. In 2025, when multiple socialists in office dragged their feet in endorsing Mamdani, members [organized for a resolution](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vQcLcW5f9Urvf71qKej8ioQfzIz6IziYQ0R2yOvH-cl0D-jJUZG6-fJWlvyexi1bpvnFVvuUBxlVrBF/pub?ref=marxistunity.com) that insisted that not endorsing the DSA candidate as the number-one choice would be a violation of organizational principles.
The Lander endorsement revealed DSA’s relative weakness as a strategic player. But for a brief moment, it didn’t feel that way. In November, we shocked many observers by rejecting an endorsement of Chi Ossé for New York’s 8th Congressional District. There were many reasons to oppose this endorsement, from the slim chance of victory to [skepticism](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/why-we-should-not-endorse-chi-osse) about the candidate’s loyalty to DSA. We surveyed the candidate and the terrain, held a robust debate, and made a decision. Though, as in Avilés’s race, Mamdani put his thumb on the scale by encouraging DSA to reject the endorsement, he did so the same way any other member would, by lining up to get on the mic at a meeting.
The primary role of DSA’s endorsement process is to make real decisions about whether or not this or that candidate or race will advance our political goals. But its second role, just as important as the first, is to establish DSA members as real decision-makers within American politics.We don’t operate as a political action committee whose board can make arbitrary decisions about turning the money faucet on or off. We make our decisions in public, in full view of the press and the working masses (although our leadership’s preference for secrecy sometimes gets in the way). We rely on the investment of our members who dedicate their time and labor to knock doors, write emails, and throw fundraising parties to put our candidates into office. None of this works if we don’t all agree to pull in the same direction.
For a brief moment, it seemed as though Zohran was willing to take our democracy seriously. If he was going to run the city, he would have to navigate his rowdy and cantankerous party that has the institutional weight to oppose him when necessary. It turns out, of course, that if Zohran believes DSA is going to make a decision that he disagrees with, he can simply ignore it and circumvent the process entirely. He did not speak at the forum to endorse Avilés, and at no time did he indicate that he would make a decision contrary to DSA. But just like Ossé’s endorsement, Mamdani and his inner circle made a set of political calculations, keeping in mind his relationship with other power brokers, and acted accordingly. In doing so, Zohran himself recognized a reality that our chapter leadership has yet to accept: that DSA and Zohran have different goals.
### **War of Position**
Beyond this episode, Zohran has taken a broad and often inscrutable series of steps to appease those he believes he needs to appease. He continues to resist endorsing DSA’s insurgent legislative slate in districts where it would upset inconvenient allies, he [declined to speak](https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/25/nyregion/tax-the-rich-rally-new-york.html?ref=marxistunity.com) at DSA’s Tax the Rich rally in Albany back in February, and he has kept billionaire heiress Jessica Tisch in office while generally toeing the line in Mayoral-NYPD relations.
Critically, NYC-DSA has taken no clear position on any of these issues. Despite calls to denounce Tisch and widespread confusion at Mamdani’s endorsement of Hochul, the chapter has mostly kept quiet. As a consequence of refusing to communicate the challenges of our situation with a broad audience, DSA’s fight for working-class liberation has left the open and democratic arena of class struggle and lodged itself firmly in the back rooms of the Capitol and Hochul’s negotiating table—and there doesn’t seem to be a plan to get it out.
It is also true that a formal position is sometimes inopportune. Although Antonio Delgado, Hochul’s Lieutenant Governor and erstwhile “progressive” opponent, appeared to represent the left flank of the race and even courted DSA support, he was by no means a socialist. Even so, a sudden and unexpected endorsement of Kathy Hochul—who was at the time [fighting to break](https://socialistcall.com/2026/02/06/zohrans-endorsement-of-hochul-isnt-pragmatic-its-self-defeating/?ref=marxistunity.com) an ongoing nurses’ strike—reeks of a smoke-filled room. The brief article [penned](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/zohran-mamdani-kathy-hochul-endorsement-essay/?ref=marxistunity.com) by Mamdani in *The Nation* to justify the endorsement was equally cryptic. Instead of offering a clear roadmap for collaboration or enumerating future projects, the article began with an effusive round of thank-yous for Hochul’s tepid and partial support for Mamdani’s childcare plan. He follows with the substance of the article: Zohran and the Governor disagree with each other, but they trust each other. He ends the piece with a meek sewer socialist battle cry, that “the success of our movement will be defined by the success of our government.”
This doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in Mamdani’s ability to navigate the competing imperatives of class struggle and delivering on his platform. In 2024, I [warned](https://www.marxistunity.com/publication-archive/run-zohran) that the scope of the pressure applied by the powers that be, especially by the NYPD, would harm Zohran’s ability to coherently express DSA’s political vision as an “organizer-in-chief.” Now, as he faces [renewed calls](https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/mamdani-is-treading-a-little-too-cautiously-with-the-nypd.html?ref=marxistunity.com) to rein in the NYPD in light of continued [collaboration](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/05/after-confrontation-outside-bk-hospital-many-electeds-are-asking-what-constitutes-nypd-collaboration-ice/413348/?ref=marxistunity.com) between it and ICE, it is clear that the police are still a problem*.* Whether or not Mamdani can [confront](https://www.cityandstateny.com/opinion/2026/05/opinion-can-mamdani-confront-nypds-blue-power/413527/?ref=marxistunity.com) the NYPD’s well-entrenched “Blue Power” from the Mayor’s office remains to be seen, and opposition to his administration will only grow as opponents are emboldened or as the Mayor himself cranks up the heat as a pressure tactic.
Right now, Zohran Mamdani is calling the shots. Some of the decisions he makes will be good for our political project, and others will not. Unlike some of Zohran’s left critics, we are careful not to mislocate the cause for his missteps. He doesn’t do these things because of some ineffable quality of the Democratic Party ballot line. Nor can his actions be blamed on a handful of consultants or strategists whispering in his ear. Finally, he is not secretly a Zionist, a cop, or worse. The issue is much more simple. Mamdani has been given access to the levers of a small portion of the state machinery, and he is taking steps to preserve that control. For this, NYC-DSA’s leadership has given him a blank cheque.
Zohran Mamdani, more than anything else, is fighting to avoid implementing austerity. Because the power of the purse is in the hands of the Governor and State Legislature, he will need to rely on their support, both for cutting checks and for passing a tax plan to fund his agenda. Mamdani is smartly moving in a way that he believes will make this possible. Because his campaign was *so* defined by “deliverism”—that is, the idea that he will *deliver* a certain set of reforms—his legacy is now wholly staked on his ability to do so. NYC-DSA’s problem is to figure out how to relate to this reality without subordinating our much wider purpose to the needs of the fledgling mayoral administration. How we engage with the trials of Zohran’s New York City in a way that educates and uplifts the working class as a whole will be *the challenge* of the next four years.
### **Breaking the Cone of Silence**
All of these pieces—the endorsement against DSA, the threat of a budget deficit, the unclear terms along which Zohran is compromising with the Democrats—point to the “reality of our reality.” We have walked (some would say sleepwalked) into the executive office with an incomplete set of tools for managing and communicating the contradictions of power. We have subordinated our political vision to the inner workings of Albany and City Hall. What everyone seems to agree on, though, is that there’s no unbaking this cake. DSA cannot be oblivious to the fact that we have implicit responsibility for what happens in Gracie Mansion. Through campaigns like “Tax the Rich,” the chapter has developed a plan for struggling within this reality, but none for struggling at its margins.
Certainly, there are grumblings about the missteps of the Zohran administration, but rarely do they make it out into the open. When NYC-DSA’s Co-chairs [were questioned](https://www.wnycstudios.org/podcasts/bl/articles/democratic-socialists-take-on-the-mayors-budget?ref=marxistunity.com) about their position on the reintroduction of homeless sweeps in February, they offered a lukewarm defense, stressing differences between the new policy and similar policies under Mayor Adams, which are, in reality, minimal. Concerningly, this did not appear to be a rote repetition of the administration’s talking points, but an attempt to read the tea leaves and guess what Zohran *might want them to say.* Following the appearance, NYC-DSA was [outflanked](https://citylimits.org/mamdanis-approach-to-homeless-sweeps-and-what-else-happened-in-housing-this-week/?ref=marxistunity.com) on the issue by homeless advocacy groups, and members circulated a resolution against the sweeps, which was [reported on](https://nypost.com/2026/02/26/us-news/mamdani-called-class-enemy-over-homeless-sweep-policy/?ref=marxistunity.com) by the *New York Post.* The Co-chairs twisted themselves into knots to defend the indefensible for no appreciable political gain.
On the other hand, DSA could not assert any sort of meaningful control over the Mayor’s office even if we wanted to. The “leverage model” of socialist governance, by which parties hold electeds “accountable” through threats to withdraw support, is of little use here. In fact, it has [never worked](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/dsas-electoral-program-belongs-to-its-membership). Zohran Mamdani has thrown himself into the deep end and is swimming with the sharks, both in the Governor’s Office and in the West Wing. We want to believe that our work will make the difference on whether he sinks or swims. But we need to recognize that much of this is out of our hands. We need a programmatic vision that is more durable than the fortunes of individual leaders, as charismatic as they may be.
This is the paradox of NYC-DSA’s [orientation](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XklAsGhrxV47uiS2wr3A8n74GMClDXSfTESsaoW9L4c/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com) to the Zohran administration, which commits us to carry out precisely the goals that we have no power to enact. I would argue that Our Time, a front organization organized around the Tax the Rich demand, [struggled](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/our-time-is-out) for exactly this reason. The campaign offered few opportunities for supporters to self-organize beyond acting as cogs in the mobilization machine, and few appreciable wins. The situation clearly calls for different tactics, and luckily, we can afford to be far more politically flexible than the Mayor.
Some commentators [have suggested](https://jacobin.com/2025/12/mamdani-popular-assemblies-democratic-socialism?ref=marxistunity.com) that popular assemblies, hosted by the administration, can bridge the gap between backroom politics and working-class protagonism. I argue that it is even more critical that *DSA* continue to serve this role*.* The working class needs a party—a space where members can develop a collective political vision which transcends the narrow confines of elected office. Steering the ship of state towards an affordability agenda is still important, but we are not the ones at the wheel.
The short-term future of democratic socialism as a 21st-century political movement seems to hinge on the ability of one man to carry out a sweeping and expensive political program in the face of long odds. Our job, everywhere, is to make that *not the case;* to present an electoral vision, a labor vision, a street action vision, an internationalist and abolitionist vision, a vision in all spaces where politics are done to agitate for a [revolutionary program](https://www.marxistunity.com/mugdsa-convention-2025/workers-demand-the-world). The next four years will be defined by whether DSA (both in New York and elsewhere) is able to exert political authority and decision-making power *independently*, outside of the influence of Zohran Mamdani or any other [celebrity politician](https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/politics/aoc-surges-to-lead-in-2028-primary-for-first-time-most-accurate-pollster/ar-AA230jrL?ocid=BingNewsSerp&ref=marxistunity.com).
If Zohran is successful, skeptics of executive power (myself included) should acknowledge the material gains we win from this venture, outside of the power of an executive campaign to build interest in our party which has already been demonstrated. At the same time, supporters of Zohran’s strategy should openly examine challenges, setbacks, and disappointments, and participate in discussions about how DSA should respond and correct course. We need to communicate with each other honestly, and without prejudice. Those closest to the administration should also understand that they have an important role to play as a bridge between our electeds and DSA’s membership as a whole.
It is true that we cannot stay out of power forever. A strategy of permanent opposition has never succeeded in the United States, and workers grow tired of it just as quickly as they grow tired of mayors. But without tools to adapt to the reality we have created, we risk stagnation and the loss of our voice as the only truly independent force in American politics. We must continue to insist on DSA’s power as a decision maker, not only because we can win elections, but because the power of our member democracy to shape *all of politics* is the envy of the world. We can’t give that up.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Our Time Is Out, the Party Is In
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/our-time-is-out/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:34:26.000Z
On April 21st, we were greeted with news of the untimely [passing](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/04/mamdani-aligned-political-group-our-time-loses-almost-all-staff/413022/?ref=marxistunity.com) of Our Time, a 501(c)(4) set up by leading NYC-DSA members last November. As is tradition in the chapter, especially for less than triumphant messages, the news was relayed to us via Peter Sterne rather than through internal channels.
The organization was announced to us just as unexpectedly. Founded to “win the affordability agenda,” Our Time set out to organize Zohran Mamdani supporters and keep them engaged without the baggage of dues or formal membership. After it was announced, the liberal press was quick to make use of [comparisons](https://www.commondreams.org/news/mamdani-wins?ref=marxistunity.com) to the [Obama campaign](https://www.dailykos.com/stories/2025/11/6/2352500/community/Our-Time-Mamdani-team-not-repeating-Obama-s-greatest-error/?ref=marxistunity.com). They claimed that Mamdani, by creating new avenues to mobilize volunteers in support of the administration’s goals, was doing what Obama *should have* done, citing his team’s decision to shutter their volunteer mobilizing networks immediately after winning the election.The comparison would be fitting if Zohran were a rogue insurgent Democrat channeling populist anger through his individual personality, and lacking an organized movement behind him. That is, if he were Obama in 2008 or if he were Sanders in 2016\. If Zohran were a progressive Democrat and not a democratic socialist. We now live in very different times.
Zohran’s campaign was the product of a DSA chapter with thousands of members, and a slate of election wins under its belt. He was described by the leading tendencies of NYC-DSA as a “cadre candidate,” and the chapter itself [voted](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XklAsGhrxV47uiS2wr3A8n74GMClDXSfTESsaoW9L4c/edit?link%5Fid=1&can%5Fid=811db178d533fce0f2dabd92a19fce45&source=email-chapterwide-general-meeting-1014-what-to-expect&email%5Freferrer=email%5F2923667&email%5Fsubject=chapterwide-general-meeting-1014-nil-what-to-expect&tab=t.0) to put all its energy towards winning Zohran’s affordability agenda. Chapter leadership had pitched the Zohran campaign early on as a way to build the chapter. A political home for Zohran’s supporters already existed; it launched his campaign and won. Why did we need another?
Liberal outlets can be excused for not knowing the difference between a socialist and a progressive, and missing the role of DSA. However, we find the same logic in an August 2025 [article](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/zohran-mamdani-organizing-plan/?ref=marxistunity.com) in The Nation by DSA members Eric Blanc, Emily Lemmerman and Wen Zhuang, which outlined the theoretical blueprint for an organization like Our Time. They made the same comparison to the Obama campaign, starting from the premise that no organized movement existed to back up Mamdani’s agenda. The article proposed a new broad campaign around the affordability agenda, recruiting and training up new organizers and leaders from the community. Why could these tactics not instead be used to directly grow DSA as a political party for the working class?
Jeremy Gong and Oren Schweitzer addressed the same question in their [article](https://jacobin.com/2025/08/zohran-bernie-party-power-strategy?ref=marxistunity.com) in Jacobin. They correctly pointed out that in order to carry out policy which is oppositional to capitalist interests, the working class needs to organize independently. Their solution entailed creating what they refer to as a “proto-party” which would bring together the Zohran campaign’s supporters and progressive organizations. They list DSA as just one coalition partner among many, forgetting which actually-existing proto-party is both Zohran’s own political home (alongside 100,000 other socialists), and the only one which took initiative to make the campaign happen.
In informal discussions following the launch of Our Time, there were whispers of a practical need to utilize campaign resources legally, but the actual political logic was left unstated. Peter Sterne’s [obituary](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/04/mamdani-aligned-political-group-our-time-loses-almost-all-staff/413022/?ref=marxistunity.com) on Our Time clarified openly what was only implied in the preceding pieces. NYC-DSA leadership did not believe that Zohran’s volunteer base were ready to organize as socialists. They were mistaken. In the words of Emma Saltzberg, an Our Time board member, “It turns out that democratic socialism is more popular than we thought it was.” Far more volunteers went on to join DSA than supported Our Time, and the chapter grew from just under 6,000 members in late 2024 to over 14,000 members today.
One million New Yorkers voted to transform our city into a place they can live and work without the crushing burden of our existing social and political system. They want to make New York affordable, to use the wealth of society for society’s benefit. They want to have a system that reflects popular will and human needs over the interests of the wealthy and powerful. That is an impulse that can only be fully realized through socialism, and Zohran, running as an open socialist, is a confirmation of that fact.
Mamdani’s most active volunteers instinctively voted with their feet, to be part of an organization of members who think, deliberate and act together in the course of a movement for broad social change. They did not want to be merely an army of canvassers for policy goals already set by others, the model of the world of progressive non-profits and bureaucratic unions. That model stifles creativity and initiative of activists, and narrows the horizons of struggle through organizational and financial limitations. Instead of a mass membership, Our Time relied on donor funding and professional staff to get the goods. Once the funding dried up, there was nothing left to save.
Instead, these volunteers chose to be members of a self-funded and (imperfectly) democratic organization. It is exactly our success at talking to our communities, boldly and openly organizing around a powerful shared program and vision that we were able to cut through the most advanced propaganda in history, against the miseducation and bribery of a decisive section of the US working class. We didn’t just build a constituency of voters for socialist candidates, we recruited and developed fighters for the socialist future.
The misjudgement on the part of leaders in NYC-DSA to embark on the Our Time debacle would be a minor embarrassment if it did not mean a massive waste of funds, effort and volunteer lists which would have better served to build up DSA. More importantly, it illustrates a general poverty of political vision. Like Our Time, the leading tendencies of NYC-DSA prioritize *mobilizing* members, to make calls on politicians, to canvas, and to sign letter tools, instead of promoting a deeper and more enduring self-organization of the working class. Instead of solving the logistical problem of all-member spaces for members to make collective decisions in the chapter, we are turned out to “mass calls” and branch meetings consisting of power-point presentations. In the hostility of our leadership towards even the most measured criticism of our elected representatives lies a hostility towards deliberation and democracy itself.
This vision for the socialist project, like Our Time, is doomed to fail. If it is possible to win socialism it will be a conscious act of an organized working class that knows what it wants. We will not trick workers into overthrowing capitalism with clever branding and cookie-cutter policy campaigns. We must convince people of the need for socialism and teach them what that need really means. Insofar as they aren’t already there, it means taking risky and unpopular stances from time to time.
The kind of muscle required for the working class to rule is built in the process of struggle. There is no replacement for this process, which consists not just in campaigning, but in building lasting communities, and in discussing, analyzing and strategizing the path forward in every organizing arena. Along with expanding democratic participation at all levels of society, this requires a party. Only DSA has the ability to make that happen. It is indeed our time, should we choose to seize it.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### No More 24 is a Battle for Democracy
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/no-more-24/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:35:24.000Z
> *Unless you do everything for liberty, you have done nothing. There are no two ways of being free: one must be entirely free, or become a slave once more.*
Marxist Unity Group stands in full solidarity with the No More 24 movement and the courageous home attendants going on a hunger strike in front of City Hall. Home attendants are starving themselves to force the city to witness the daily violence the state inflicts on them through grueling 24-hour workdays. They will not end their hunger strike until City Council Speaker Julie Menin brings the No More 24 bill (Intro. 303) up for a vote. Intro 303 would prohibit employers from assigning home attendants a shift longer than 12 hours, ending the torturous 24-hour shift for exploited women of color home care workers in NYC.
As socialists, we demand the abolition of the modern-day plantation embodied in 24-hour workdays and an immigration system that has created an underclass of workers disenfranchised and exploited for superprofits within the borders of the imperial police state. We recognize that there can be no democracy if there is a layer of the working class that is excluded from citizenship, labor law, and made invisible by a racist and patriarchal society that destroys women's bodies for the profits of health insurers. The 24-hour workday embodies the authoritarian structures pitting workers against each other in a race to the bottom.
There have been many misleading statements by home care employers, such as the Chinese-American Planning Council (CPC). Opponents of the bill claim that if passed, patients will lose their home care, that home care is solely a state issue, and that the real problem is funding. These claims are baseless. Large home care agencies, like CPC, are crying poor, while they publicly brag about their multi-million dollar budget and construct a luxury tower in Chinatown. Every other town and city in the state of New York has split shifts. Only New York City has 24-hour workdays, and even non-union home care agencies in the city have already switched to split shifts without patients losing access.
The unacknowledged reason NYC-DSA chapter leadership and some of our SIOs are silent or flipped their position on No More 24 (including Zohran Mamdani’s silence on the hunger strike) is to please progressive non-profits and trade union leadership, particularly 1199, who had previously negotiated a settlement with CPC, offering only pennies in turn for not contesting 24-hour workdays and the $90 million in stolen wages.
At the end of the day, the debate about funding is a deliberate diversion from the real question: whether socialists can justify the existence of any system that depends on slavery and superexploitation. The obvious answer is a vehement no. Just as the slaves in Haiti forced the Jacobins to decide if the rights of man are universal or conditional on an alliance with plantation owners, DSA members must decide if abandoning the struggles of immigrant women, forced by their employers to stay awake for three consecutive 24-hour shifts, can be justified to maintain ties with non-profits and the trade union bureaucracy.
The Marxist Unity Group is committed to building DSA into an independent socialist party that can effectively fight for all people exploited and oppressed by capitalism and the imperial police state; a party that does not bend to the will of the Democratic Party or its allies that routinely sell out our immigrant, Black, brown, and superexploited brothers and sisters. In DSA, we have a duty to fight for the liberation of all people, even when it puts us at odds with liberal allies. We will only become the party of the masses if we stand in integrity with them.
We call on NYC-DSA to pass the No More 24 resolution, publicly affirm support for banning 24-hour workdays, for all our CSIOs to sign on to Intro. 303, and for the chapter to pressure Julie Menin to stop blocking passage of the bill.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Stand with the Prairieland 19!
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/stand-with-the-prairieland-19/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:39:37.000Z
Last week, a federal jury found nine protestors guilty of various charges in connection with a July 4th noise demonstration outside of an ICE detention near Dallas. This facility imprisons hundreds of detainees, including, until this week, Palestinian protestor Leqaa Kordia. Eight of the nine defendants were convicted on material support for terrorism for wearing black to the protest – they face up to 15 years in prison for this alone. This is the first time the federal government has used this charge against ‘antifa’ members. One of the nine defendants wasn’t even there, but was still convicted for [moving a box of radical zines](https://theintercept.com/2025/11/23/prairieland-ice-antifa-zines-criminalize-protest-journalism/?ref=marxistunity.com) after the protest. Like the Stop Cop City RICO defendants before them, these protestors face decades in jail for their beliefs and First Amendment protected activities. From Georgia to Texas, state and federal officials are using escalating charges to choke out dissent.
Though the legal precedent created by Prairieland represents a new fetter on political freedom, the method of their punishment is familiar. They will enter a system of incarceration that the United States has long deployed against colonized people and working class people resisting capitalism’s warfare. They join generations of political prisoners like Mumia Abu-Jamal and Leonard Peltier held prisoner for resisting national oppression. The state’s strategy is to isolate political prisoners from their communities and the broader Left, creating the illusion that our cooperation will buy safety. Our response must be to shine light not just on the Prairieland 19, but on every prisoner of the American empire. The release of Columbia University Palestinian solidarity protesters Mahmoud Khalil and Leqaa Kordia, just like the release of the Panther 21 in New York City decades before, or the dropping of all charges against the J20 Defendants, proves that political struggle can outmaneuver state repression. Describing the experience of political prisoners from the New Left, Ashanti Alston once said:
> *They know it’s tough, because what goes on in the prison is a microcosm of what goes on out there. It’s a microcosm. They just want us to remember them. They want to be free. They would love to be free. But we know on the outside, and they know too from the Panther days in the ‘60s, that power is really with the people. It’s with the people.*
Incarceration has a direct impact on our movement. The Prairieland defendants were largely convicted for activities—attending protests, carrying left-wing zines, wearing black—that could lead to the arrest of anyone on the Left. Our movement depends on the right to assembly and speech. If attending a protest means risking decades of confinement, so, too, does membership of a party fighting to remake the world. If a comrade can be arrested for wearing black, we can be arrested for wearing red. The fight to release the Prairieland prisoners, along with all people incarcerated by the criminal US empire, is our fight.
Every life is a universe--it is impossible for us to ever know what these defendants would be able to do if they were able to live free lives, free lives that have been taken from them and their communities. Every comrade the state throws into prison makes all of us less free. Marxist Unity Group supports the Prairieland Defendants and calls for the freedom of all political prisoners.
Please support the Prairieland Defendants at [https://prairielanddefendants.com](https://prairielanddefendants.com/?ref=marxistunity.com), and please support the family of Maricela at this [gofundme](https://www.gofundme.com/f/help-maricelas-family-while-she-fights-for-justice?ref=marxistunity.com).
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Statement in support of the NYC Anti-War Working Group
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/statement-in-support-of-the-nyc-anti-war-working-group/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:40:26.000Z
Marxist Unity Group opposes the move by the NYC-DSA steering committee to coup the leadership of the Anti-War Working Group. The AWWG should be able to run its own elections from among its membership according to its own bylaws. The alternative plan - to move the leadership election outside of the active WG membership against bylaws and custom - is a bureaucratic maneuver by the dominant factions of the steering committee to disrupt work that other factions have led.
If DSA is able to operate with unity around a program of shared goals, member-led working groups will pursue tactics in varied fields including both electoral and anti-war organizing. We should see the electoral effort and on-the-ground antiwar organizing as two tactics of the same organization and the same program. The current maneuvering reflects, in our view, an overblown fear by the steering committee majority that the two areas of work cannot coexist unless the steering committee’s dominant factions have total control. This fear has apparently justified the manipulation of the Anti-War Working Group immediately at the outset of a new imperialist war.
The coup against the working group leadership is counter to healthy internal democracy and, as the AWWG statement puts it, “the very possibility of carrying out democratic, member-led work in DSA.” Factional disagreement is inevitable in a democratic organization, but the factions which were so disengaged from this work that they could not produce eligible candidates now aim to decide its leadership.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Tribunes in the Halls of Congress
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/tribunes-in-the-halls-of-congress/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:41:26.000Z
At the time of writing, as many as ten Democratic Socialists of America members may seek national endorsement for Congressional races in this year's midterms. Winning even half of these races would qualify 2026 as the most successful year yet for our national electoral project. At the same time, with DSA's relationship to our Congressional representatives historically confused and contentious, it would present the socialist movement with new uncertainties for the second half of the Trump administration and beyond.
Socialists should take a leap of faith and use 2026 to build something bigger than the careers of any of our individual candidates or electeds. Now is the time to carve out space for a kind of politics that has become alien to the American electorate: a revolutionary, party-building approach to elections. We can learn from how our sister party of a hundred years ago, the Socialist Party of America (SPA), used Congress to strengthen its organization during the period it was a mass party that anchored the socialist Left in the United States.
### **Representing a Mass Socialist Party**
From 1910 to 1920, the Socialist Party elected two of its members to the House of Representatives, and credibly contested numerous other Congressional seats. Socialist candidates for Congress were the standard-bearers of a party-movement that was beginning to blossom into a genuine mass force in American society. They helped popularize the Socialist message to millions of voters, as well as onlookers who, like most American workers at the time, could not vote.
The party project these Socialist candidates and Congressmen worked to build was eventually destroyed by government repression and internal strife that disrupted the party's democracy. But for years, it survived and even thrived in the face of intense opposition and reached heights that the modern DSA should envy.
Socialist campaigns for the House looked different in the 1910s than they do today. For one, the socialist movement had its own ballot line, whereas DSA generally runs candidates in Democratic primaries. The different degree of control over who runs (and how) is also notable. The SPA's congressional races bore more similarities to how many DSA chapters today relate to local races than they do runs for Congress. The party, not the prospective candidates, decided who to run and on what platform. There was no possibility that a member could run without the party's endorsement, and there was no ambiguity that the SPA was its candidates' political home, not just one among many in a coalition of endorsers.
I offer a disclaimer that his article will reference the career of Victor Berger, the Socialist Congressman from Milwaukee. No serious study of the SPA should do so without mentioning Berger's record of [white supremacism](https://www.marxistunity.com/socialisminonecity/). Like many figures in the history of our movement, we should look to this history without illusions. Part of the strength of the SPA's electoral program in its heyday was that its electeds represented the mandates of the party membership, not their own personal political projects. In that respect Berger was a vessel for a political strategy that is worth adapting to our modern conditions.
### **Lesson 1: Fight the Battle to Win the War**
The Socialist Party ran members for Congress fully intending to elect them to office. But this was not their only goal. Socialist candidates used their campaigns to grow and strengthen the party by relentlessly campaigning on its platform and running on a [slate](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1GgZASLnFdbbxyC2mtmMgKOMteTCvrfzf/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) with fellow Socialists. Socialists campaigned together, and party literature [encouraged voters](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dPg3p9qI-51MQaxArm77QxZJpMh8spTR/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) to support a straight Socialist ticket.
This strategy was well-suited to the Socialists' independent ballot line, but is in line with the [orientation](https://www.marxistunity.com/principles-party-building/) DSA adopted at the 2025 National Convention which argues that political independence can be pursued on any ballot line. It will become especially important if DSA’s roster of congressional candidates runs under different party labels. With Chicago DSA endorsing Byron Sigcho-Lopez for the House as an [independent](https://www.instagram.com/p/DUGjSy%5FD-Us/?ref=marxistunity.com), for example, building a common party identity with those DSA candidates contesting Democratic primaries will require an active effort to associate candidates with the Democratic Socialist label and program, and not with the ballot line their name might appear on.
Chapters considering Congressional endorsements should require that nominees cross-endorse other DSA candidates and *only* other DSA candidates, including other national endorsees for Congress and DSA members running for state and local office in their districts. They should also stipulate that an endorsement requires candidates to promote DSA on their website, in campaign literature, at campaign events, and in earned media, and to publicly endorse DSA's national program, [Workers Deserve More](https://2024.dsausa.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/11/DSA%5F2024Program%5FPrint.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com).
### **Lesson 2: Know Your Audience**
When they won their campaigns, Socialists used their seats in Congress as a platform to speak to the working class, not a place to bargain with other Congresspeople. Berger [said as much](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DUthsKNOOXTqpt4%5FEwu4av6UTTo-PAKM/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) during his first term in the House: “I shall prepare my speeches very carefully…because I feel that I am not talking to that crowd up there \[in Congress\], but, as they say in Germany, ‘out of the window, to the people at large.’”
Socialists treated the floor of the House as the biggest campaign platform in the nation, and used every opportunity to speak before the body while actually addressing the masses outside the chamber's walls. Their speeches were tailored to the needs of mass propaganda and [printed](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gLB7rvh77OgZQug1sMFZbVHhtVAFVTZ8/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) [widely](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ZMFcjpLQYb0eMnLNEqnLsBYAOp8lzY%5FO/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) in [the Socialist press](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tSJf6Nlv275414LEnNiFzxqd8jOLkiQI/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com). During the Wilson administration's "preparedness" rush before the First World War, Socialist Congressman Meyer London from New York took the floor to [propagandize](https://drive.google.com/file/d/10LGNAnYn4km4Du2dT%5FqoWCkKSkpjtFWQ/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) against the coming war, knowing full well he would be overwhelmingly voted down. London exposed the class interests behind the war and [offered](https://drive.google.com/file/d/19mxKsI8B8IQWgvZOhUmh8P6tLDnX0OXK/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) his colleagues a choice: take action to secure a fast peace or face "one of the greatest revolutions in the history of mankind." The real message was aimed at the working class: force your masters to concede peace or give them class war.
Chapters who manage to elect members to Congress should work closely with them through Socialists in Office (SIO) committees to coordinate their interventions in Congressional debate, co-author and edit their speeches, and turn their remarks on the floor into propaganda to be publicized through every available medium.
### **Lesson 3: Raise Expectations**
If DSA elects a strong bloc to Congress in 2026, we will have to make a decision about our theory of change: do we contest legislative offices to negotiate for incremental reforms within a larger liberal coalition, or is the point to stake out a distinct socialist position in American politics and expand the horizons of our movement?
The Socialist Representatives did campaign for constructive legislation, like Meyer London's bill to introduce social insurance. But their overall strategy, as a party outnumbered 434-to-one in the House, hinged on their ability to raise the expectations of the class. They used Congress as a tool to organize workers to fight for demands that the capitalist parties would never give up in backroom negotiations.
When he was first elected to Congress, Victor Berger introduced a slate of legislation which [included](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DUthsKNOOXTqpt4%5FEwu4av6UTTo-PAKM/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) resolutions to abolish the Senate and call a new Constitutional convention. This had no chance of passing, but it earned publicity for demands the party would campaign on in its 1912 races. On pieces of legislation like his bill to introduce pensions for the elderly, Berger [appended](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TLyVjJ2z1Dc%5FKccqkKdS4e0QVbnCUICh/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) a controversial clause declaring that it was not subject to judicial review. This was in hopes of provoking a confrontation with the Supreme Court which might strike down the broadly popular demand.
The strategy of using Congress to stump for the Socialist program did not mean substituting words for action. Socialists used Capitol Hill as an *organizing* tool, not just a propaganda tool. In the leadup to the American entry into the First World War, Congressman London exploited a committee hearing to bring the SPA and the labor movement directly onto the House floor. Throngs of working-class observers watched on as socialists and trade-unionists [testified](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EmbTEm9IiVRgn3vGXu7-wE4wdRfYv8jy/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) [against](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1c1zt7is2dbwAmisoGFWedM3o9CJwR4Hz/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) the capitalist conspiracy to send workers off to die for profit. Their remarks, of course, were reprinted in the red press for the benefit of the many workers who could not physically come to Washington to hear them.
This approach also did not forego real, tangible victories for the sake of the moral victory of saying the right things at the right time. Berger’s [indictments](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1tSJf6Nlv275414LEnNiFzxqd8jOLkiQI/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) of the ruling class helped workers win the Lawrence textile strike in 1912 and forced a corrupt federal judge who had targeted Socialists for denaturalization to resign in disgrace. London's rabble-rousing [killed](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Iv9ugZXVPep049SCG92Slmjnymezelgy/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) a provision of the 1917 Jones Act that would have imposed Jim Crow literacy and property requirements on suffrage in Puerto Rico, saving tens of thousands of working-class Puerto Ricans from further disenfranchisement under American occupation.
If the Democrats retake one or both chambers of Congress in 2026, an enlarged DSA bloc in the House could emulate the SPA's Congressional tribunes by proposing legislation that, although unlikely to pass, would raise voters' expectations of what the "opposition party" can achieve. A floor vote on a DSA-submitted bill to abolish ICE or to zero-out the budget for Trump's war agenda abroad in order to restore programs like SNAP at home would be immensely clarifying for DSA's potential base ahead of the 2028 elections. Socialist members of Congress could lead the charge on filing for Trump's impeachment on charges mainstream Democrats would normally avoid, turning the hearings into a public trial on Trump's criminal warmongering and forcing Democrats to publicly choose between the sympathies of their own voters and military-industrial complex donors.
DSA's representatives could also borrow from the SPA's playbook by fighting to attach "not subject to judicial review" clauses to popular legislation like, for example, a bill to legalize abortion nationwide in the wake of the *Dobbs* decision*.* Such a stunt would put the undemocratic nature of the judiciary center stage in the struggle for social freedoms. It would also delineate DSA, the party of consistent democracy, from the Democrats, the party of subservience to Trump's reactionary unelected Supreme Court.
Regardless of which bloc of capitalists controls Congress next year, DSA's legislators should invite the working class to crash the party. Like Meyer London, a DSA bloc could use committee hearings to give DSA partisans and union militants the Congressional megaphone. Even under a maximally restrictive Republican majority, they could act as organizer-legislators and use the prestige of their office to push the boundaries of collective action outside Congress. NYC-DSA electeds’ direct participation in [street protests and civil disobedience](https://www.democracynow.org/2023/10/30/grand%5Fcentral%5Fprotest?ref=marxistunity.com) against the genocide in Gaza offers some recent inspiration.
### **Lesson 4: Give No Quarter**
At its best, the Socialist Party's activity in Congress embodied the role of an unrelenting opposition. Its electeds knew this would mark them for repression by the ruling capitalist parties and acted accordingly. They expected no quarter from their major party colleagues and gave none in return. When their efforts to use Congress to propagandize for the socialist program were inevitably met with attempts to shut them out, they fought back with every tool at their disposal to disrupt the functioning of the capitalist state and draw clear battle-lines for the whole working class to see.
During the SPA's campaign against war mobilization in 1916, Meyer London spared no opportunity to rise and speak against the Wilson administration's maneuvers towards joining the war, including during floor debate on bills where it was not strictly relevant. On at least one such occasion, the Speaker of the House put London under a [gag order](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-eBfhTtsZVZjPD4tus9DxKlYx5EXi0b6/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) (a time-honored Democratic tradition since the days of [silencing abolitionists](https://cosmonautmag.com/2024/10/the-abolitionist-dirty-break/?ref=marxistunity.com)), at which point the Socialist Congressman used procedural rules-lawyering to stall proceedings. He then ordered a roll call in an attempt to disperse the body for lack of quorum. London knew he did not have the votes to overturn a gag order; the point was to be seen fighting to the last resort for his right to make a pro-peace stand in Congress and to punish the capitalist majority for suppressing him by turning every effort to do so into a fiasco.
DSA legislators could stand to learn from this kind of intransigence, which is also modeled in the modern day by left-wing parties like the [Economic Freedom Fighters](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BnxhEtPNOm8&ref=marxistunity.com) in the South African parliament. The logic is simple: as a socialist deputy, no matter how much you might prefer to negotiate in good faith, the billionaires' paid representatives see you as an enemy to be marginalized. So turn Congress upside down and see what falls out. Socialist representatives should do everything in their power to disrupt any Congressional business that does not benefit the working class or advance the socialist program.
A small but disciplined bloc of socialists could be a real obstacle to the ruling-class parties' ability to govern without objections from or concessions to the working class. This is especially true with the razor-thin legislative majorities that have become the norm in this era of protracted crisis. Borrowing a tactic from [historical abolitionists](https://www.politico.com/story/2012/12/this-day-in-politics-dec-3-1855-084492?ref=marxistunity.com) and [modern reactionaries](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2023/jan/06/kevin-mccarthy-republican-wins-house-speaker?ref=marxistunity.com), a bloc of DSA representatives could hold Speaker of the House elections hostage for a set of incisive popular demands and use the repeated nominating motions for a Speaker candidate of their own as free airtime for agitational speeches. By the same principle, they could hold up budget negotiations or extensions of the debt ceiling by refusing to vote for a dime for the military, ICE, or Israel.
Even in scenarios where a Republican majority (or Democrats' willingness to cross the aisle to create one) dilutes the structural leverage of a Socialist bloc in the legislature, our representatives could creatively abuse their powers to make it difficult to conduct legislative business. They could, for instance, exploit their ability to issue gallery passes to pack the chamber with hecklers, and then act as hecklers themselves if their guests are dragged out and their gallery passes voided.
It is plausible that a DSA bloc going out of its way to disrupt the proceedings of a reactionary Congress would at some point see one or more of its members expelled from the body. The precedent for this was set when Representatives on both sides of the aisle voted to censure Rashida Tlaib for speaking in favor of Palestinian liberation. Here, too, socialists should give no quarter and accept no setback as a defeat.
When Victor Berger was [sentenced](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1e1aaVuzy6FTtsPxDF8Ob2becQgq2ov1c/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) to 20 years in prison for opposition to the First World War shortly before swearing in for his second term in Congress, the House [voted to vacate](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1EGCQ9iyBf1JBVuPNskzO8%5FFZazHrFmoB/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) his duly-elected seat. Rather than surrender the district or run a less encumbered candidate, the Socialists successfully [re-elected](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1YWA%5FNgZmoyXDgu2SLnE5veovsg6jV3F8/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) Berger in the special election to replace himself. He was [disqualified](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1J2r25IJSdVazwXR%5F5%5Fs41uMUj5fNQIZ0/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) a second time, but the Socialists continued re-running him until he was at last allowed to take his seat after his third re-election in 1922\. A similar drama played out in 1919 at the state level in New York, where the Socialists turned the ejection of five of their members from the State Assembly into a cause célèbre for organized labor and successfully neutralized their expulsion by winning re-election in 1920.
In a historical moment like this, the working class needs fighters. DSA should put the acquiescent Democrats to shame by electing socialists who will show the people what it really looks like to fight the agenda of the reactionary, anti-democratic ultra-rich.
### **Lesson 5: Serve Something Greater**
The Socialist Party's electoral machine was far from perfect. Alongside inspiring examples of what it means to send a socialist rebel into the halls of power, it also suffered shortcomings we in DSA would find familiar today. While Meyer London took a heroic stand for the Socialist Party's anti-war program in Congress during the "preparedness" rush of 1915-1916, when the US officially entered the war in 1917, his resolve wavered amidst high-profile defections from the party. He ultimately broke in support of the war in the name of “national defense,” which elicited a major scandal in the party. This breach of programmatic unity with the comrades to whom he owed his office [prepared the ground](https://www.marxistunity.com/in-defense-of-principles/) for the split that marked the end of the SPA’s existence as a mass party in 1919.
We see echoes of London's defection today in [Jamaal Bowman](https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/04/socialism-of-the-oppressed-the-stakes-of-the-bowman-affair/?ref=marxistunity.com) and [AOC](https://x.com/AOC/status/1946588421197046084?ref=marxistunity.com)'s support for Israeli military funding and in Zohran Mamdani's [scabbing](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1565/zohran-set-to-scab/?ref=marxistunity.com) on NYC-DSA's electoral program to clear the field for a liberal Zionist. Especially as the Trump administration escalates warmongering across Latin America, in the Middle East, and towards China, the specter of the kind of wartime emergency that confronted the SPA in 1917 rises again. It is imperative that DSA build the capacity to articulate the *democratically decided politics of our membership* through our representatives in Congress. They must not merely tail behind or react against political decisions made behind closed doors under the opportunist pressures of their offices.
Where possible, DSA chapters should run dedicated, active members for Congress with clear expectations set ahead of time. Endorsees should be bound to promote and abide by DSA's program, caucus together and vote as a bloc, refuse to cross the class line for perceived short-term gains, and consult with the National Political Committee or their chapter SIO structures on certain pre-defined categories of decisions. Members should take the initiative by writing resolutions to craft sample legislation based on DSA's program for our tribunes in Congress to bring to the floor. In order to expand the country's political horizons and advance the socialist agenda, we should all be ready to fight for candidates and electeds who rise to this challenge and take the leap of faith with us.
The crisis we are now living through has no clear precedent in American history. The working class is fighting for its very survival in the face of climate catastrophe, the threat of war, and the repressive rampages of a tyrannical administration empowered by an undemocratic and decaying constitutional order. In times like these, workers deserve more from the elected representatives of our movement. We need a fundamentally new—but not historically unprecedented—kind of politics to survive the crisis and conquer power.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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[Read the Printable version here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/181pGyOg7Lmo4cNYldKu0rfALZtcUODc3OpCOCUMErSQ/edit?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com)
### What Kind of Party?
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/what-are-the-principles-of-party-building/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:43:52.000Z
At the 2025 National Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America, delegates debated and passed [R07: Principles of Party Building](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r07-principles-for-party-building/41437?ref=marxistunity.com) by a roughly 55%-45% vote. In the wake of convention, the resolution has not received much attention, but I believe it to be one of the most significant steps forward in DSA’s strategic thinking in the post-Bernie era. At its core, the resolution put forward MUG’s vision for party-building, and why we see DSA as the mass socialist party that can cohere the working class into a vehicle for transforming our society.
### **A Brief History**
America boasts a vibrant history of working-class parties, but following the 1919 split of the Socialist Party, the socialist movement in America fractured catastrophically into a constellation of left-wing sects. One could spend a whole lifetime inconclusively investigating the many branches and splits. These small groups are politically ineffective because of their size, but also because of a rigid system of internal control. At worst, they are prone to splits and purges, and collapse into chauvinistic politics like the Zionism of the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). At best, they fail to offer any path forward for socialists in America, hawking their niche of socialism on the street corner like any other vendor.
Even with the Communist Party’s rise to a mass political organization in the 1930s, the bi-partisan embrace of anti-communism after WWII battered the Left into submission, first by the McCarthyist purges of the late 1940s and 1950s, and second by the demoralization and demobilization of groups like Students for a Democratic Society. While the New Communist Movement of the 70s and 80s was an attempt to revive the party-building tradition of the Left, it did little more than accelerate the proliferation of micro-sects, which squabbled amongst each other and splintered over increasingly diverging opinions on international issues.
Those groups on the Left who survived moderated, and turned to liquidate their socialist politics into the Democratic Party. DSA itself, founded by the merger of Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee (a split from the rump Socialist Party of America) and New American Movement (a successor to the collapsing SDS), took this road. It was primarily focused on bourgeois electoral action for much of its existence, supporting establishment Democrats like Obama prior to the membership surges during Bernie Sanders’ 2016 campaign. The dominant trend was best summed up by DSA founder Michael Harrington’s maxim that “the left wing of realism is found today in the Democratic Party.” This strategy which we now call "realignment", of limiting the scope and horizon of socialist organizing to electoral action within the Democratic Party, has been just as disastrous as the sect form for socialism in the US.
The mid to late 20th century was not immune to genuine mass politics, organized through the Civil Rights Movement, the New Left, the movement against the War in Vietnam, and the Black Liberation movement. Organizations of the Left did grow and attempt to take advantage of these movements, but their disunity effectively prevented them from elevating the socialist Left to a mass scale, especially after the split in the SDS. Today, one recognizes the successors of this era in groups like the Revolutionary Communist Party, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and the Progressive Labor Party, none of which have more than a handful of members, and all of which have fallen victim to either left sectarianism, dead-end Democratic Party entryism, or both.
These two paths constitute the fate of practically all leftist or socialist groups in the US since the 1960s. Today, as DSA nears 100,000 members, it appears to have shaken off the dusty politics of the 20th century, and we may assume that we have escaped the blind alley of the past. But while our size and youth give us many advantages, we must be careful not to repeat the mistakes of our forerunners. DSA is already grappling with the edges of the problem. As we debate ballot lines, ideological red-lines for membership, and how to approach coalition work as the center-of-gravity within a fractured left, we constantly raise the question: what kind of party do we aim to build?
DSA already has the structures necessary to serve as a democratic, revolutionary socialist party which can lead the working class to power. But to do so we require a roadmap of the path ahead. Principles for Party Building aims to provide that roadmap; with clear guidelines on how internal party democracy should function, how to contest elections in order to grow socialist numbers and power regardless of ballot line, what to do with elected office when we win, and the crucial recognition that our struggle for an egalitarian socialist society must be international.
### **Party Democracy and Programmatic Unity**
A genuine socialist party is a mass association of the working class. It is a party which represents broad sections of the movement and necessarily includes a diversity of strategies on how to wage the struggle for a new society. While the shallow unity of the sect-form provides a tempting but hollow model for ideological hegemony, no organization can be truly representative of the working class unless it allows for freedom of thought, association, information, and discussion within the party’s full scope of organizing activities.
The first four points in Principles of Party Building lay out reflections on the nature of DSA’s multi-tendency “big-tent,” defining how to maintain a healthy and open internal culture without glossing over important differences in theory or strategy.
> *1.The fundamental purpose of a socialist party is to be a mass association of the working class formed for collective political action. The party will be united around a democratically created program that outlines goals that, enacted together, will allow the working class to rule and end capitalism.*
>
> *2\. The foundation of party democracy is freedom of information, association, and discussion. Members must be able to critique the party’s program and organize to change it, as long as they are willing to accept fighting for it as the democratically-determined expression of DSA’s goals.*
>
> *3\. The internal governing principles of the party must guarantee all members equal right of participation in the democratic process, regular conventions of membership as the highest decision-making body, open leadership elections at conventions, local party organizations run by membership, and the free organization of factions.*
>
> *4\. Guaranteeing members equal right of participation in the democratic process requires that participation be reserved for individual members. Groups may choose to affiliate with DSA on the basis of acceptance of our program, but may not be given voting rights as an organization.*
Any party or proto-party organization is defined by its method of achieving political unity. One method put forward by the DSA right demands that political debate be sidelined, so as to not interfere with the appearance of unity, or “doing the work.” Another equally wrong approach looks for unity in the “golden mean” among the varying opinions of party members.
We assert that the path to unity can only flow through a process of democratic collaboration, deliberation, and decision-making at every level of the organization, but in particular at the national level. Every party needs a program, or a clear statement of tasks and principles which embodies the spirit of the movement. The process for its adoption must be democratic, and move through a national party congress like DSA’s National Convention. This nation-wide democratic process creates the basis for programmatic unity, where members are willing to fight for the program even if they don’t agree with every line.
Even under a common program, the freedom to organize factions will play a critical part in the internal life of the party. We cannot expect 100% agreement on every tenet of a party program. What we should expect, however, is a recognition that a democratic program represents the will of the membership, and that members should work to carry it out even as they have the right to voice disagreement and organize to change it.
Despite shallow arguments against “factionalism” and genuine weaknesses in our internal process of disagreement, DSA’s evolving caucus system can only be [seen as a net positive for the political development of the socialist movement](https://cosmonautmag.com/2025/08/on-the-pro-factionalist-model-of-party-organization/?ref=marxistunity.com). Looking to our past, resulting from the Bolshevik’s ban on internal party factions by their 10th party congress in 1921 and the micro-sects which shallowly imitate its mandate, we find that limiting internal debate produces only crushing bureaucracy and a self-suppressed and depoliticized membership. It stands to reason that internal party formations produce the skills in methods of persuasion necessary to win the broader working class over to our political goals.
Democracy doesn’t just mean the ability to vote, but the ability of the governed to govern. It is not just a means to an end, but is woven into the fabric of our beliefs about what a socialist society can and should be. If we are sincere about a society where the people truly rule, then there can be no illusion that the party that prefigures that society must be democratic.
### **Electoral Strategy**
America’s undemocratic first-past-the-post electoral system definitionally favors the two dominant parties in our country’s political life. The limitations imposed by this system have by and large pushed democratic socialists to run on the Democratic Party ballot line over third-party experiments. This debate over the nature of the ballot line and our relationship to the Democrats, which predates most existing caucuses, runs the gambit from attempts to “realign” the Democratic Party as an internal faction, to the “clean break,” which argues that we should immediately break from the Democrats to run third-party or independent. But this debate produces an unnecessary binary that foregrounds tactics over strategy.
Points 5-7 of Principles of Party Building are recommendations to continue growing DSA’s electoral work, taking into account the successes and failures of the past 10 years, and attempting to think through the party question without falling into the ballot line trap.
> *5\. Because of an undemocratic and uneven electoral system designed to maintain capitalist rule, DSA fights on unfavorable terrain and is pulled between the necessity of independent political action and using the ballot line of the Democratic Party. DSA’s approach is the party surrogate, acting as a party but without a dedicated ballot line.*
>
> *6\. While DSA must move away from use of the Democratic Party ballot line and primaries, a ballot line is not the primary goal or indication of political independence. What matters most is bringing our independent organization and program to races whether on a Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot line.*
>
> *7.When considering whether to create a ballot line of our own, losing control of our candidates to an open state-run process is a non-negotiable red line. Our ability to take independent political action is essential to preserve above all other considerations.*
Running for office is one of the main tactics socialists use to build the working-class party, this is true even in undemocratic political systems like our own. Lenin famously recognized this when he championed the use of the Russian Duma as a prime venue for agitation around socialist politics and building proletarian class-consciousness in 1906-7\. He fiercely argued against and even threatened to split the unity of the Bolshevik faction over attempts to boycott the elections or recall socialist elected officials from office.
Our firm commitment to running socialist candidates for office forces us to accept the realities that this commitment implies. A patchwork of uneven and prohibitive state election laws means that we need to keep our options open to run on whatever ballot line presents the best opportunity to bring our politics to a mass audience.
But a willingness to tactically use the Democratic ballot line must not be mistaken for a strategic orientation towards Democratic Party entryism/realignment, which must be avoided at all costs. Democratic Party voters that are amenable to socialism can be won to DSA. But we should seek to bring those individuals into OUR movement, rather than subsuming our political stances and democratic decisions into their decrepit machine. Even without our own ballot line, our candidates must be under the discipline of DSA’s democracy, both at the chapter and national level. Regardless of whether a DSA candidate is running on the Democratic, Independent, or any other ballot line, they should commit to running on the issues laid out by a democratically-decided program.
Our state-form is hostile to genuine democracy. That is a feature, not a bug. Both capitalist parties will do anything to stop coordinated leftist political action, if they can help it. There is no cozying up to a ruling class that is hellbent on the marginalization and destruction of our movement. It is for this reason that socialists cannot place trust in the capitalist state to fairly and impartially regulate DSA or any socialist party. We, the members of DSA, are the ones who must decide who our party runs for office, and relinquishing regulation of that power to the state is a poisoned chalice.
### **The Strategy of Patience**
Once socialists are in office, some among us look to the actions of individual legislators on the basis of “purity,” or agreeability to specific moral commitments. But the actions of any actor in government are less dependent on individual heroics (or lack thereof), and more to do with the pressures applied by the body in which they serve. To win a small fraction of the legislature is an impressive feat, but it becomes irrelevant if our representatives cannot work in concert to amplify each other’s power and efforts. To overcome the weakness of the political minority, the right wing of our movement has historically chosen to enter into a coalition with bourgeois parties and assume some of the responsibility for governing while the party has not yet won over a majority of the working class.
In opposition to this tendency, Point 8 of Principles of Party Building reads:
> *8.DSA orients itself in opposition to all ruling class political forces. DSA’s project is to unite workers to win the battle for democracy and bring about socialism, not to seek a governing coalition with a perceived lesser evil under the current undemocratic political system*
Socialists rarely reap the rewards of center-left coalition governments, and are often saddled with the blowback when liberal intransigence against working-class demands produces lackluster governance. At worst, this leaves the socialist movement and working class open to brutal oppression, like the reactionary military coup against Salvador Allende’s government in Chile in 1973, where the center-left Christian Democrats who were initially part of Allende’s coalition sided with General Pinochet and the military junta.
The alternative path forward for DSA and its electeds is a patient strategy of opposition. Our electeds should act as tribunes of the people which indict the existing system, and refuse to seek coalition government or govern via backroom negotiations with the capitalist parties. While we can and must struggle for ameliorative reforms, socialists cannot forego the primary goal, which is to convince the class of the necessity of socialism. The history makes it overwhelmingly clear that even modest reforms will be rolled back if socialists cannot raise the consciousness of the working class in order to confront our despotic government.
As DSA continues to grow, the contradiction between the party of government and the party of opposition will increasingly come to the forefront. In New York City, DSA elected Zohran Mamdani has already made impressive strides in forcing Governor Hochul’s hand in implementing a limited section of his platform for universal child care. But Zohran has also made compromises with elements of the capitalist class in order to legitimize his “good government” project. His decision to keep on Police Commissioner Jessica Tisch is a reflection of the weakness of this approach, and NYC-DSA will have to decide on which side of the barricades it stands when a cop murder provokes another mass movement against the police. The threat of the independence of elected officials to the party project was further asserted by Zohran’s moves behind the scenes to crown liberal former Comptroller Brad Lander over DSA-endorsed elected Alexa Avilez as the left challenger in New York’s 10th Congressional District.
The desire to govern in order to improve the condition of the working class is a natural impulse. But as Marx aptly stated in his reflection on the Paris Commune, “ …the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” It is critical that we center the work of building the working-class majority necessary to not only elect reformers, but to smash the capitalist state and begin the process of building a new, democratic socialist society. As long as the US state remains anti-democratic, and as long as the state uses their monopoly on violence to deny genuine working-class participation, our duty is to patiently organize and educate the class to fight against it.
### **Workers Demand the World**
So far, our discussion of the political action of our party has not transcended the national scope. But the working class, like the capitalist class, is international. Our strengths and weaknesses are the common heritage of a global majority of the exploited and oppressed, and the strategy for our liberation can only run through taking power at an international scale.
Points 9 & 10 of Principles of Party Building declare:
> *9\. A socialist party in the United States must be a part of the global political movement of the working class. It is guided by the international interests of the class, not narrow national interests.*
>
> *10\. The socialist movement is strengthened by putting forward common perspectives and engaging in common action internationally. DSA will continue to build ties with socialist parties around the world with the goal of forming a new International.*
Socialist internationalism is fundamentally counterposed to loyalty to the existing state, a division which has run through the socialist movement since the beginning. This division was responsible for the split in international socialism during WWI, after pro-war majorities in the German Social Democratic Party (SDP) and other European socialist parties voted for war credits. The anti-war opposition, made up of dissenters from the atrocious pro-war stance, split off to form their own parties, permanently dividing the socialist movement.
A socialist party must definitionally prioritize the interests of the international working class above the particular interests of its own nation-state. This means building DSA into a vehicle capable of gutting and undermining the US imperial police state from within. Concretely, this commits us against any kind of national or sectoral chauvinism that pits different elements of the working class against each other via tariffs, trade-wars, immigration controls, or any other measures. Some “progressive” Congress members like Rep. Ro Khanna of California have attempted to rally those who want to help workers into a program of “Economic Nationalism,” with strong state controls and tariffs on trade to rebuild a degraded manufacturing base. But Khanna’s plans disregard the concerns of other workers on the North American continent and beyond who will be further exploited to make up for the capitalists’ rate of falling profit in America. These short-sighted technocratic fixes are not only morally wrong but strategically backwards.
The US is the most violent nation in the history of the world. It goes without saying that socialists should oppose any military action undertaken by our government. Despite the phony rhetoric about “spreading democracy”, US imperialism has devastated every country it has touched, even when our actions removed foreign leaders who we as socialists would morally and politically oppose. The duty of any socialist is revolutionary defeatism, organizing towards the defeat of our own government during reactionary war. This has real implications for our organizing as the decrepit US empire enters a violent but prolonged death spiral.
DSA has made real strides in this regard, with our 2024 Workers Deserve More Program calling for closure of all overseas military bases, an end to US economic warfare via sanctions, and universal freedom of movement. However, DSA is a still a long way away from promoting genuine common political action across national boundaries towards a new International, or decisively sidelining the state loyalist tendencies in our movement. We must ensure that at every possible juncture, DSA tribunes in elected office, the labor movement, media, and all spheres of society force public confrontation over the imperial police state by refusing to support military, police, national security, and intelligence budgets.
### **Declaration Isn’t Enough**
DSA’s 2023 National Convention also committed itself to party-building via the resolution “Act Like a Party.” But merely resolving to build towards a break with the Democrats did not in itself provide the necessary steps to overcome the junior-partner adherents and Democratic-dead-enders who remain committed to DSA’s identity as a faction within a larger progressive ecosystem. Nor did it convince the disparate and disunited movementist left, which largely remained aloof to the party question, to join DSA. Some comrades may feel 2025’s “Principles of Party Building” resolution is similarly disconnected from DSA’s practical activity. If we wish to complete DSA’s transformation into a mass party that can serve as a political home and rallying banner for America’s growing socialist movement, we must put these principles into action in every facet of our work.
Internal party democracy must be protected, cultivated, and expanded. Electoral work must continue to grow, embracing a diversity of tactics to punch through the cobwebs of bureaucratic election law. Our campaigns must adhere to DSA’s program, and our electeds must submit themselves to member democracy and discipline as guiding beacons. While we make every attempt to strengthen the working class, we must never compromise on principles or subordinate ourselves to elements of the bourgeoisie and its monopoly on state power. Lastly, as the US socialist movement struggles from within to decapitate the beast, we must continue to develop and strengthen ties with comrades around the world who are engaged in the same struggle.
As Marxists we don’t have the luxury to think in the short term. Our government is constitutionally incapable of the kind of class governance that we need to transform society to meet the needs of humankind. Though it may take decades, we need to build a party that can measure its membership in the millions rather than thousands, and win over a majority of the working class to our beliefs. There are no shortcuts, and only through continued organizing along the partyist lines described above can we build something strong enough to weather the coming storms and come out swinging on the other side.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Strange Days & the Millennium Revolution Deferred
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/strange-days-amp-the-millennium-revolution-deferred/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:44:39.000Z
James Cameron is a strange filmmaker, rarely suspected of being any more radical than the typical “Hollywood liberal,” he nonetheless has a career peppered with hints of something more. He is in fact often thought of as a dedicated company man, someone who made the biggest budget, broadest appealing films of the last three decades. However, Cameron’s liberalism is not a liberalism typical of today, but a more radical echo of liberalism’s past. A liberalism that wasn’t afraid to not only protest the war in Vietnam, but wave the Vietcong flag at protests. A semi-Jacobinism that isn’t afraid to confront the contradictions of its own societal foundations and call for their destruction if that is what is needed for the progress of Virtue. But also a liberalism that hopes that isn’t necessary. Among his canon, one of the more fascinating, and unfortunately little-known films that encapsulates these themes is a film he merely wrote and did not direct. That film is Strange Days.
### **The Familiar World of Strange Days**
Strange Days is a 1995 film that was not successful on release and almost forgotten by mainstream audiences today. It is a science fiction film taking place over the last three days of 1999\. It could be described as “cyberpunk” though it may be more appropriate to just call it a near-future science fiction film “that has cyberpunk elements.” In this sense it shares lineage with many traditions. It is a part of a series of films that were made in the 1990s that could be described as “not quite cyberpunk, but clearly inspired.” It is also a part of a series of films made in the 1990s that speculated on the impact of the coming change in millenium. Finally, and most pertinent to this essay, it is a part of a series of films responding to the 1992 Los Angeles Riots and the instigating Rodney King beating.
The Los Angeles depicted is one of hyper militarization. LAPD in full military transports and riot gear line street corners and have checkpoints peppered throughout the city. This isn’t the focus of the film, it’s a persistent background, a fact of life that the characters rarely acknowledge and barely notice. The LA Riots of our world have clearly happened in this one as well and the state’s response has been what amounts to a permanent, seven year long occupation. The world of Strange Days is very much like our own, despite its regular classifications of “science fiction” or “cyberpunk”.
There are no flying cars, laser guns, gene splicing, or many of the other typical trappings of the cyberpunk genre. The one piece of novel technology introduced is what is called a SQUID. The SQUID is basically a video camera which records not just video and sound, but all sensory inputs experienced by the user, with the ability to play them back later. This, we are told, “isn’t like TV only better,” one does not simply see and hear footage but physically feels it, smells it, tastes it, as well. It was developed, we are told, for police surveillance and it is officially restricted from use by the general public.
This does not stop the open proliferation of the technology on the black market. Independent amateur filmmakers rush to create what are called “clips” to be sold via a series of middlemen. These clips consist of what one would initially expect for such a technology, namely a lot of pornography, but also recordings of the execution of crimes such as petty theft. Anything that might bring excitement to the lives of office workers living in late 90’s America. In the opening scene we are shown a clip, being presented to a middleman named Lenny (Ralph Fiennes), an ex-LAPD officer and our protagonist, of a group of individuals sticking up a small, seemingly family owned, chinese restaurant. One might wonder how much payout one could expect from such a robbery, until we realize it wasn’t the money in the cash register they were after at all. Instead, they were after the raw experience to be packaged and resold to some middle class voyeur. This clip ends with the death of the filmmaker and another revelation on this black market libidinal economy: that an increasing number of clips being traded are snuff films. Something Lenny refuses to deal in despite the potential profit incentive.
### **Three Conspiracies**
The inciting incident, predictably enough, is that Lenny comes into possession of a clip he shouldn’t have seen. This clip, recorded from the perspective of an old acquaintance of Lenny’s, a sex worker named Iris, is of two LAPD officers murdering Jeriko One, a prominent black hip hop artist and outspoken political revolutionary. Despite this having taken place two years before his murder, the similarities to Tupac Shakur are striking to a modern watcher. Tupac’s public image meshes well with the presentation of Jeriko One, outspoken, a fixture of Los Angeles culture, not afraid to mix the aesthetics of radical liberatory politics with those of gangster rap. Additionally, in an instance of eerie prescience, it is often speculated that the real Tupac was murdered by corrupt members of the police.
As we eventually learn, this incident spurs three parallel conspiracies with Lenny, and his longtime friend, Lornette “Mace” Mason (Angela Bassett), trying to navigate through the middle. The first conspiracy is the most obvious one, the two police officers who murdered Jeriko One are trying to get the clip and destroy it, and they intend to kill whomever they need to to accomplish that goal. The second conspiracy is more nuanced. Jeriko One’s manager and label owner, industry mogul Philo Grant, is responsible for the creation of the recording in the first place. He had apparently grown a level of paranoia of late, and started spying on his artists convinced they might be planning to leave him. To that end he was the one who used secretly wired sex workers to record Jeriko One on the night of his murder. When Iris eventually returned to Gant and told him of what occurred his paranoia only increased. Over the course of the film he has Iris killed and her copy of the clip destroyed, lest the music world find out about his tendency of spying.
The third conspiracy, in true noir fashion, is a subset of the second, and involves a femme fatale. Faith Justin, Lenny’s ex, a woman he still pines for, left Lenny for Gant before the start of the film. She and Gant have a clearly transactional relationship for her own career advancement as a singer. Gant, in his paranoia, has hired an ex-LAPD officer and apparent “friend” of Lenny’s, private investigator Max Peltier, to spy on her. Unbeknownst to anyone else, the two of them subsequently began an affair of their own. When Gant orders Max to kill Faith, as part of his efforts to tie up loose ends regarding the Jeriko One situation, Max and Faith instead hatch a plan to kill Gant and manipulate Lenny in order to frame him for said murder.
### **A Radical Rug Pull**
Iris, as mentioned, eventually gets an additional copy of the clip to Lenny before being brutally murdered herself by (as we will later learn) Max. Subsequently, Lenny, Mace, and a still apparently friendly (as far as both the main characters, and the audience is aware at this point) Max decide what to do with the clip. Lenny’s chief concern at this point is the wellbeing of Faith, whom he suspects is somehow in danger though he can’t quite figure out why. He initially suggests going to the police, Max warns him against such a plan, as far as he knows this killing could go to the top. He even heard whispers of internal gangs formed within the police force, which acted as hit squads. Mace, most overtly disturbed by the murder of a seminal revolutionary figure of the black community, wishes to go public. Max protests that doing so would kick off an “all out war,” to which Mace responds that “maybe it’s time for a war.”
It is eventually decided that Lenny will use the clip as leverage, trade it to Gant, in exchange for the safety of himself and Faith. Lenny and Mace go to a new year’s celebration Gant’s record label is hosting and Max is working security for. Lenny attempts to find Faith in a skyscraper penthouse while Mace tracks down the chief of the LAPD whom Lenny told her to trust against her better judgment.
The shots of the new year’s celebrations outside are striking, especially for anyone familiar with news coverage of the LA Riots. Sweeping helicopter shots show crowds filling up the streets, as militarized LAPD stand by with their armored transports and riot gear. Although we are witnessing an ostensible celebration, the visual reference is clear as the tension in the story is coming to its climax. In the penthouse, Lenny finds an out of commission Gant. Max and Faith arrive and reveal their relationship and conspiracy to him. Max explains that the tale of systemic corruption he spun was simply to dissuade Lenny from going to the police. That as far as he knew the murderers of Jeriko One were in fact just a couple of bad apples. A fight ensues in which Max, in one of the more unsubtle pieces of visual symbolism shown on film, literally stabs Lenny in the back with a knife. Lenny thereafter manages to force Max over the edge of the balcony who falls to his death in an odd pantomime of Die Hard’s climatic scene.
Meanwhile, Mace makes contact with the police chief and hands him a copy of the clip but is thrown out of the party into the street celebrations where she is spotted by the two cops who shot Jeriko One. Mace finds herself cornered by the police but she manages to fight back and successfully incapacitates them with a taser. Other LAPD officers, seeing a black woman holding two of their comrades at gunpoint, respond as LAPD officers do.
What follows is essentially an abridged reenactment of the Rodney King video. Horrified New Years celebrants look on as multiple police officers proceed to beat Mace with batons, who is on the ground in a fetal position. This only ends when one onlooker, a child, throws himself on one of the cops. This opens the floodgates as the crowds rush the police and soon Max’s promised war seems inevitable. This war is cut short by the arrival of a white savior, the police chief arrives on the scene. He orders his officers to release Mace, and shows the two corrupt cops the copy of the clip he apparently watched, and places them under arrest. The two police officers do not take this well. One of the arrested cops immediately shoots himself. His now blood-covered and traumatized partner snaps and begins to pull out his gun to shoot Mace, before being quickly gunned down by his coworkers, who only moments before were enthusiastically beating his victim.
Thereafter, the film ends, the countdown reaches zero, it’s the year 2000, Faith, the ghost of Lenny’s past, is finally exorcised as Lenny and Mace kiss and Faith is placed in the back of a police car. Likewise the racial tensions haunting Los Angeles similarly dissipate as the crowd celebrates the new millenium.
### **Cameron vs. Cameron**
Strange Days is a movie about moving forward while dealing with one’s past. The LA Riots hang on like a counter-thesis to Fukuyama, a Derridian haunting as we look to the future millennium. Lenny pines for a woman who stopped loving him long ago, as the woman who loves him now selflessly works to save him. If history is to end, this film suggests it won’t go quietly. Ultimately, however, it does go eventually. Lenny gets over his ex, and the LAPD leadership ultimately does the right thing by its citizens and purges its bad apples. One could even imagine that when January 1st starts, the checkpoints and militarized police might finally pack up and leave. It would be tempting to dismiss this film as nothing more than liberal ideology, how much more revolutionary is it really than say Demolition Man? It acknowledges the existence of bad cops but it makes it clear it’s not systemic, and working in the system ultimately becomes the best way to clean them out. It is as if this film contains two voices, two James Camerons.
The first voice is the voice of the radical James Cameron, a voice so in tune to the zeitgeist of 1995 he seemingly predicted the most impactful celebrity death of the 1990s two years before it happened. He built a world and story designed to support the thesis that the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s is unfinished, the issues have not been solved even as we enter the cusp of a new millennium. Moreover, the solution to these problems might, in fact, have to be violent, and those who are victimized by state violence in fact have every right to see popular violence as a legitimate avenue for their deliverance. The LA Riots of three years prior, traumatically burned into the minds of white America like a latter day Nat Turner were not only to be expected, but perhaps desirable if they might once and for all cleanse the ghosts of our past and purify us so we can enter the future.
It should be noted as well, the critiques of the police, even those later revealed to be false within the logic of the film, were fairly extreme for a mainstream film of the 1990s. Even if the description of deputy gangs was later explained away as a red herring, they actually were and likely still are real. Even if we handwave the killing of Jeriko One as the result of bad apples, the police who pulled the trigger made it clear that his radical anti-racism, anti-police sentiments, and specifically working class community organizing was the primary reason for the killing. Although their actions may have been superficially their own, their motivations arose squarely from within the system and serve those interests.
Finally, the setting of the militarized Los Angeles is one of the most striking displays of Cesaire’s imperial boomerang on screen. Checkpoints dot the street like it’s occupied territory. It recalls in many ways Mark Fisher’s observations of Children of Men, the matter of factness of every day totalitarianism mixed with ostensible liberal democracy. One could imagine franchise coffee shops existing alongside internment camps. It is the undertone, the believability and familiarity of state repression that makes the climate of the film all the more impactful. The audience, an audience which paid to see a James Cameron movie in 1995, has been truly primed to cheer for a replay of the LA Riots on the side of the rioters. The child who launches himself at the cop who is beating Mace is clearly heroic. The men and women who follow him come down like Gandalf’s relief army at Helm’s Deep. These aren't the alien streets of V for Vendetta’s fantastically dystopian London, these are our streets, we walk them everyday. The cops aren’t faceless thugs wearing armbands with the novel logo of some imagined fascist government, they are the cops we see everyday. The people who choose, in a moment, to enact violence against the police aren’t a bunch of Guy Fawkes mask wearers fighting for some vague notion of “freedom,” they are us, their struggle is ours. We can imagine ourselves in the shoes of those who might be driven to riot, in fact we would hope to share their courage.
The second voice is James Cameron, the company man. One could be tempted to ascribe this voice entirely to some hypothetical studio meddling, or perhaps Cameron practiced self-censorship in anticipation of the same. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter. He explains, in exacting detail, how the LAPD uses its veil of secrecy and violence to enforce a shadow government on the citizens of the city only to declare that a lie. He primes the audience to call for the violent overthrow of the system only to show how justice can be accomplished by the better angels of that system. The very nature of the ending plays like a liberal wishcasting of how the Rodney King fallout should have happened. A video is taken which shows the truth, it is handed to proper authorities, and those in charge don’t ignore it but do the right thing, thus averting disaster. Even the police officers beating Mace in what is clearly a play-act of Rodney King are shown to simply be mistaken, and equally willing to serve actual justice when the truth is revealed to them.
It is hard to pin down what we are meant to conclude from Strange Days. Which of these Camerons is the real one, who is telling us the truth? The Marxist in us might be tempted to synthesize its contradictions. In the words of Zizek, let us take the third option. It isn’t an option that magically transforms Strange Days into an unassailable piece of revolutionary theory and art, but it also isn’t reactionary. The film is aware that the ghosts of America’s past have not been truly exorcised, but it is perhaps naively hopeful that America is good enough to take that burden on. In either case, it knows that this is not a problem that can be ignored, even if it suggests it might be solved peacefully from within. The coming new millennium is a reckoning. It is a countdown for America. One way or the other, by peace or violence, inside the system or out, we will confront our past, and there will be a new beginning after. If nothing else, that message certainly rings true today.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Time To Think
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/time-to-think/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:46:00.000Z
> *“The Workers Party was born on Christmas day, 1921, and no date could be more appropriate. It is not that Jesus Christ was born on that day, although the chances are at least 1 to 364 that he was. And it is not that Christmas is the one day set aside by our highly specialized culture for the business of charity and the love of the neighbor — or at least for the mailing of an engraved neighborly formula to all the addresses contained in a card catalog.*
>
> *The reason why it was appropriate for the Workers Party to be born on Christmas day, 1921, is that on that day, once in every seven years, the workers get two days of liberty in succession. They get that much opportunity to think.”*
—Max Eastman
Like Max Eastman pointed out, holidays are important most of all as a time to think. As a public sector worker with a meager 3 weeks of vacation a year, federal holidays have a special significance for me. Not because I honor Presidents Day in any meaningful way, but because I get a chance to think about how to do away with presidents.
These days, it’s been hard for me to think. I’m perpetually overcommitted to activism, in too many group chats, and not getting enough sleep. I work a manual labor job that I’ve always valued for letting me work with my hands and let my mind wander. But banging and clanging in the cold weather saps at my energy. I used to switch off driving with my coworker, affording me a cherished hour or so hanging in the truck where I could read or chat. Lately we have larger crews who aren’t yet authorized to drive, so I have to drive both directions. Not much time to think, mostly just traffic.
In our party, too, it’s hard to find time to think. It’s easy to fall into the pattern of meeting, meeting, meeting, chat argument, meeting, meeting, event. It’s hard to carve out time to debrief and build relationships outside of transactional one on ones. To ask your crew to take a second to step back and assess where we’re at feels like making yourself a burden, or adding another thing to every one’s to-do list when we’re overcommitted enough as it is.
A recent article on Trotsky’s struggle for intra-party democracy in 1923 shows that this isn’t a new problem. It claimed that his critiques of the bureaucratization of the Party were seen by party officials as “counter-productive of the basic imperative of establishing a stable economy and political order” (Harris 110). The previous debates stirred by the Workers Opposition in 1920-21 had led to practical work being ground to a halt amidst the “angry debates about what had to be done.” The lesson taken was that “it was better to have a single agreed policy about which officialdom could be rallied, a clear chain of command and a flow of detailed instructions” (Harris 112).
The Politburo responded to Trotsky’s Declaration of the 46 with a call for Trotsky “to be more involved in the ‘practical work of the Party and Soviet organs of which he is a member” (Harris 118). Basically, he needed to shut up and “do the work.” In this atmosphere, party discipline was placed at odds with party democracy, or preconditioned it when it should have been the other way around.
Stalin’s road to power wasn’t (solely) through dirty tricks or secret police, it was through a call to focus on practical tasks and administration and to cut out the noise. Stalin’s appeals were rooted in a deeply held belief in the party – that there was an enormous amount of work to do. Factions were at best a distraction and at worst an active threat that foreign powers could exploit to destroy the Union.
My intention is not to draw exact modern day parallels to the party battles between Trotsky and Stalin. I’ll leave that for the ever sharp polemicists of the cruise missile left like Arash Azizi. What I intend is to draw out the long history of democracy being framed as a burden on discipline and efficiency. To be clear, it isn’t easy and doesn’t guarantee success to have more democratic organizations. But in a society where time to think is precious and hard to come by, we should be more generous in our Party than we are now.
This holiday season, take time to take a break from immediate tasks and sit down and think. Open up a blank page and write down your lessons from the past year. Meet for coffee or dinner with a friend you made in The Work and talk about why you do what you do. Enjoy the holiday and the time to think it allows.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### In Defense of Principles
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/in-defense-of-principles/
Last updated: 2026-07-18T18:42:44.000Z
Political divisions in the socialist movement are nothing new, but our understanding of them changes over time. Many Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members remember Representative Jamaal Bowman’s 2021 [vote for Iron Dome funding](https://www.dsausa.org/statements/dsa-stands-with-the-palestinian-people-national-political-committee-condemns-iron-dome-vote/?ref=marxistunity.com) as the first time the unity of our political project was seriously called into question. For the last 4 years the fight for Anti-Zionist electoral standards has drawn out fierce conflict between the different tendencies of our organization, from the National Political Committee’s decision to [set conditions](https://www.dsausa.org/statements/status-of-dsa-national-endorsement-for-rep-ocasio-cortez/?ref=marxistunity.com) on AOC's re-endorsement in 2024, to the hard-won victory of [Resolution 22](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vR3Mw7Id7pRbX6MUxth7UwiS2aOxK0Ctd01ZDRjmlAkwYx-mfheC%5FZM4qI9uDTn1-ebFk5iYWKYTxuP/pub?ref=marxistunity.com) at DSA's 2025 National Convention.
The DSA right has [increasingly framed the debate](https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/caucus-primer?ref=marxistunity.com) as a conflict between an inward-facing “sectarian wing,” defined by morality policing and purity tests, and an outward facing “mass politics wing,” defined by hard-nosed, practical politics that recognizes the messy compromises needed to build a mass base. NYC-DSA’s right-led chapter leadership [has proposed](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/nyc-dsa-orients-to-a-zohran-administration) that the mere idea that elected officials should be held accountable to their party has only emerged “in moments of decline and marginality” for the Left.
When we have major factions calling consistent politics a sign of marginal sectarianism, it’s clear that we have work to do to rescue some of the most basic principles of party-building from historical obscurity. This applies equally to the so-called “principled” politics of the left-wing sects and social media influencers*,* which make moral proclamations atomized from mass organization and detached from political practice. Principles, especially as they apply to electoral politics, are not a metric of moral purity, but a necessary part of how political organizations function.
Bourgeois parties rely on a complex system of political patronage, pre-existing access to the levers of state power, corporate funding, and especially in the United States, a monopoly on deciding the rules of the game in an undemocratic electoral system. The Democratic Party can afford to break from its base on Palestine, on healthcare, on trans rights, and on abortion. It will certainly suffer electorally for this backsliding, but since its organization relies on funding from wealthy donors instead of the labor of a mass volunteer base, it will not collapse.
Parties like ours rely on none of these. We are measured only by the strength of our organization, the trust and zeal of our rank-and-file, and the convincing power of our ideas. For democratic mass parties, excluded from political power, principles are what cohere our political project. Far from a product of the Left in decline, a commitment to unity around a common program defined the peak of our movement in the early 20th century, and the retreat from this principle had devastating and long-lasting consequences.
### **Twin Histories**
The United States once had a Socialist Party, much like our own, which united all the trends of our diverse movement into a single political force. Its power and influence, while small relative to the whole country, would strike us as something alien today. It elected 2 Congressmen and thousands of state and local politicians on an independent ballot line. It marshalled up to 6% of the presidential vote for perennial candidate Eugene Debs, and it could rally tens of thousands, not just in New York City, but [in the far-flung agrarian districts of Oklahoma](https://www.oupress.com/9780806134277/agrarian-socialism-in-america/?ref=marxistunity.com).
And its political debates, too, were much like our own. Left to right, a strategy of intransigent political opposition was counterposed to an emphasis on passing constructive political legislation alongside liberal allies. Many of these debates centered on the role of elected office. Should the Party “truck votes” to [win at all costs](https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1911/danger.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), or should its representatives aspire to more, to educate and organize the class around a struggle for socialism and democracy?
Upon the outbreak of World War I in August 1914, socialist parliamentarians across Europe voted for war credits, and by doing so endorsed their governments’ prosecution of the war. The international socialist movement split down the middle, and American socialists met these events with confusion and dismay. How could the great socialist parties of Europe, with all their size and prestige, support sending the working class of each country into the fratricidal mincing machine of war?
At first, the SPA was united in its response. The party would not repeat the failures of its sibling parties in the Second International. When the U.S. formally entered the conflict in April 1917, the SPA called an Emergency National Convention in St. Louis. They [ratified a proclamation](https://jacobin.com/2020/05/st-louis-proclamation-socialist-party?ref=marxistunity.com) which railed against militarism on all sides:
> As against the false doctrine of national patriotism we uphold the ideal of international working-class solidarity. In support of capitalism we will not willingly give a single life or a single dollar; in support of the struggle of the workers for freedom we pledge our all.
But even before U.S. entry into the war, there were exceptions to this unity. A number of party members, including New York Congressman Meyer London, argued that socialists would be justified in supporting a war of “national defense”—the same argument given by French and German socialist deputies to vote for war credits. A section of the movement even argued that socialists were duty-bound to support their country during wartime. But this pro-war minority was vanishingly small. A group of prominent intellectuals split off from the party, but the [overwhelming majority](https://www.nytimes.com/1917/07/08/archives/socialists-vote-war-unjustified-referendum-of-party-undorses.html?ref=marxistunity.com) of both Party leadership and membership upheld its anti-war program, affirmed by the St. Louis proclamation.
As the pressures of wartime politics grew, however, so too did pro-war sentiment. Though the pro-war minority remained small throughout the war, it increasingly held sway among a significant section of the Party’s most powerful members—its elected officials.
In April 1918, the SPA’s seven representatives on the New York City Board of Alderman (the predecessor to the City Council), [voted in favor](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1G4Vg-aKjXnzNzgUnlomnD9BPFd1b9bpv/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) of endorsing a municipal “Liberty Bond” campaign to fund the war effort. The party membership immediately erupted in outrage. Algernon Lee, the chair of the socialist group on the Board, gave the [motivating speech](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1u94pFjUxlJoW2BwCBq%5Fp2OkgscxwYulj/view?usp=drivesdk&ref=marxistunity.com). The threat of German militarism had pushed broad sections of progressive society to support the war. Socialist electeds represented more than just their Party, he argued, they represented the broader liberal movement which elected them.
The issue divided the socialist Alderman group, which was bound to vote together as a bloc. Abraham Beckerman, one of the dissenters in the delegation, stayed away from the meeting to avoid splitting the vote. But he and his colleagues, he argued, had no right to go against the Party’s anti-war program. Beckerman [took his case to his party branch](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1DqZdrjsLTTVjuytf01MvVNnegG-LU-1I/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) in the 6th Assembly District, and asked members to weigh in on the group’s actions. The branch overwhelmingly endorsed Beckerman and condemned the socialist vote for Liberty Bonds. In the coming weeks, party branches across the city held meetings to discuss the issue. By the end of April, [the balance sheet was clear](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1TgNuR%5FUJfhgSaBBYDYEYxWplKl3pqMmb/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com)—27 branches denounced the actions of the socialists on the Board, 3 endorsed, and 4 even called for resignation or expulsion.
Local party leadership, sensing the tenor of the moment, stewarded the opportunity for membership to weigh in on the issue and hold their electeds to account. And the Aldermen, to their credit, were generally willing to be held accountable—spurred on both by the membership and by dissenting members of the delegation.
But as Spring turned to Summer, the atmosphere changed. Socialists [bitterly fought over](https://revolutionsnewsstand.com/2024/10/02/meyer-london-a-socialist-disgrace-from-new-international-s-p-l-a-vol-1-no-12-september-october-1918/?ref=marxistunity.com) the re-endorsement of New York Congressman Meyer London, who supported the war despite his own moral misgivings. This led to a narrow vote—first against endorsement, and then after a re-vote was called, a narrow vote in favor. Many of those who supported London’s endorsement detested his position on the war, but recognized his immense popularity and believed that no other candidate could beat Tammany Hall in the Lower East Side. On the other side, opposition to London became even more raucous as Party members called for his expulsion.
The lose-lose nature of the debate over London set the tone for Fall 1918, when the Aldermen were again faced with difficult votes. Without time to deliberate amongst themselves, they voted in favor of a snap proposal on a new Liberty Loan drive, and for appropriations for a massive “Victory Arch” to adorn 5th Avenue during a military parade for returning soldiers. The Aldermen [later regretted both of these votes](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1oj58MY310%5FJxcdkSV1tD6pQ7qF0mkxTZ/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com), which partially occurred under duress in a political atmosphere defined by the repressive censorship regime of the Espionage and Sedition Acts. But the damage had been done.
This time, there would be no democratic account. Between Spring and Fall, something had broken. Trust had been lost. The left and right, no longer united around upholding the party program, bitterly feuded over how to deal with the elected officials. The leadership of Local New York, dominated by the party right’s political machine, now acted to defend the electeds from member criticism instead of stewarding a process of accountability. The party left, for their part, became increasingly intransigent in their demands—for the expulsion of London, for recall of the Aldermen from the Board, and for removing all reform planks from the Party platform. Both sides negatively polarized against one another, locked in a political death spiral.
These conflicts were now defined by disputes over party democracy. The right [used its control over the party machinery](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1KgchL9R9GiFRQ06u0Yj0PaaJc2IoSAfF/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) to steer meetings in their direction. They chaired meetings one-sidedly, Central Committee delegates stopped reporting back from the branches during role-call attendance, and a proposal to unify the Locals of Greater New York, including the Brooklyn and Queens Locals dominated by the party left, fell apart. During these months we see the first signs of utterly chaotic breakdown in the party branches—conflicting reports of fraud, mutual recrimination, and multiple parties claiming to be the legitimately elected leadership.
The dam broke in early January 1919, at a city-wide meeting called to discuss the Aldermen’s controversial votes ([Draper](https://files.libcom.org/files/Theodore%20Draper%20The%20Roots%20of%20American%20Communism%20%202003.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com), 145, 422). Alderman Lee gave a lengthy speech which avoided the subject entirely. The chair opened for questions, which the other Aldermen leisurely answered. As minutes turned into hours, motions from the floor were repeatedly ignored by the chair. As soon as it became clear that the meeting was a sham, half of the delegates bolted the meeting, including the entire delegations of Locals Queens and Brooklyn. In an adjacent room, the delegates elected the leadership of what would become the “[Left Wing Section](http://www.marxisthistory.org/history/usa/parties/spusa/1919/0500-lw-manifesto.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)” of the Socialist Party of Greater New York.
What happened next is well-trodden in any general history of the SPA. The left-wingers launched a bid to win control of the Party, and the “party regulars” moved to stop them at any cost. Locals and branches entered a state of civil war, with New York at its epicenter. In April, the New York state organization voted to expel any local that affiliated with the Left Wing Section. The lefts appeared to be on the verge of victory when they ran away with the National Executive Committee elections in May. But both sides were committed to either rule the party or ruin it. The right called fraud, and they moved quickly and without remorse.
By the time the dust settled, the right-dominated National Executive Committee [had purged tens of thousands of members](https://jacobin.com/2017/02/rise-and-fall-socialist-party-of-america?ref=marxistunity.com), including the entire state organizations of Michigan and Massachusetts. The Left-wing fractured amongst itself on whether to immediately form a new party or stay in the SPA to fight it out. The parties consummated the split at an Emergency National Convention in September. Two rival Conventions established the Communist Party and the Communist Labor Party. One party had become three—but the size and influence of the socialist movement decreased by an order of magnitude. 100 years later, our movement is still recovering from this collapse.
The role played by the October Revolution in galvanizing left-wing opposition in all the old socialist parties is undeniable. But academic historians like [James Weinstein](https://archive.org/details/bwb%5FW7-CSM-579) are wrong to treat these events like a bolt out of the blue for an otherwise well-functioning party. Or, like [Daniel Bell](https://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/book/9780801483097/marxian-socialism-in-the-united-states/?ref=marxistunity.com#bookTabs=1), as the inevitable conclusion of socialist politics, detached from the (pro-war) reality of American political life. The source of the split and collapse of the SPA cannot be located in simple fractiousness and internal strife—which had dominated the party through its entire existence, even times of growth. The split materialized around concrete organizing issues, flowing from the relationship between party democracy and elected officials who violated the SPA’s anti-war program.
### **Lessons for Today**
This story should send a shiver down the spine of any organized socialist. Today, DSA’s party project is much less developed than the Party of Debs. Our roots in the working class are shallow, our debates often immature. Our historical memory of the great movements of the past is broken. And yet, this is the best shot we have for building an enduring mass socialist movement in the United States.
These historical actors were not heroes or villains. They were like us—doing what they thought was best under difficult circumstances, making disastrous mistakes in the process. What this history teaches us is that there is no simple binary between “inward-facing” and “outward-facing” politics. Compromises have consequences, and unity is hard won and easily lost. The party’s program and structure defines its intervention in the workers movement. We decide amongst ourselves the politics we practice out in the world.
Principles are not abstract moral purity tests, as the DSA right of today claims. They are those shared commitments and ambitions that bind us together in a common organization, even through the most trying internal division. They are not guarantees of virtue, but the material preconditions of collective organization which relies on the voluntary activity of the rank-and-file. Concrete questions around program, discipline, and accountability are decisive for the health of our organization, the commitment of our members, and ultimately, the ability to achieve our goals.
When NYC-DSA’s co-chair [tells the New York Times](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/30/nyregion/zohran-mamdani-nyc-mayor-democratic-socialism.html?ref=marxistunity.com) that “we don’t have any red lines,” they are not only saying something dangerous, but spreading a falsehood. If AOC came out tomorrow in support of conversion therapy and climate denialism, members across our chapter’s political spectrum would clamor to unendorse her. The right clearly has standards, or they would be organizing in the Democratic Party and not DSA. What they advocate for, instead, is negotiating those standards behind closed doors and out of the view of the membership. With any notion of member-led politics safely out of sight, our only visible political program is what our elected officials say and do. This is obviously untenable. Another crisis has and will arise, especially as one of our own gears up to govern the largest city in the country.
The decision by socialist elected officials to vote for war credits, and by a significant portion of the movement to follow them off the cliff, wrecked the socialist movement for over a century. This produced more decline and marginality than any dissent ever could. There is no easy or pragmatic path to victory. The project to permanently insulate our electeds from party democracy is not, in the end, a path to “mass politics” over inward-facing sectarianism. It can only lead to ruin, and the shipwreck of 20th century socialism is a testament to that fact.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Toward a New American Founding
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/toward-a-new-american-founding/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:53:19.000Z
Some childhood memories last longer than others. For Osita Nwanevu, it was a day in early [December 2000](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/osita-nwanevu-on-democracy-and-the?utm%5Fsource=publication-search), when, surrounded by upset adults, “it was imparted to me that George Bush had lost the popular vote… but was going to be president anyway.” Bush’s victory after the Supreme Court stopped Florida’s recount was “basically unfair… in a way that has stuck with me all of these years.”
That early impression of unfairness deepened over time. In 2016, Nwanevu saw another president enter the White House despite losing the popular vote, and later watched as just [43,000 swing-state](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2024/sep/03/electoral-votes-swing-state-margins-explained?ref=marxistunity.com) votes prevented a repeat in 2020\. During the Biden administration, Nwanevu grew tired of explaining why crucial bills like Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, or Build Back Better were dead on arrival in Congress, even when Democrats won. And then Trump returned for a second term.
These experiences drove Nwanevu— now a columnist at *The Guardian* and contributing editor at *The New Republic* — to write his new book, [*The Right of* *the People:* *Democracy and the Case for a New American Founding*](https://bookshop.org/p/books/the-right-of-the-people-democracy-and-the-case-for-a-new-american-founding-osita-nwanevu/20736370?ean=9780593449929&next=t&affiliate=56068&ref=ositanwanevu.com). The title invokes the Declaration of Independence and [Thomas Paine](https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/1776-paine-common-sense-pamphlet?ref=marxistunity.com)’s memorable assertion that “every age and generation must be as free to act for itself in all cases as the age and generations which preceded it,” and “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.”
### **Defining Democracy**
Few phrases have “rung as loudly in the ears of American voters this decade” as “our democracy,” observes Nwanevu. Hoping to clarify the term, he draws on a dizzying array of sources to offer several definitions, including “a form of government in which people come together every so often to decide… what should be done and who should do it,” a state in which “the governed govern,” and a system grounded in “equality, responsiveness, and majoritarianism.” Nwanevu also entertains the idea that democracy is a ceaseless process of “reaching and struggling” for an “ideal that can never be fulfilled,” “a never-ending series of contests for governing power,” or, as Sheldon Wolin and Philip Green put it, “a series of moments: moments of popular insurgency and direct action, of unmediated politics.”
But the abstract definitions presented by Nwanevu fall short as a guide for activism and building programmatic unity around concrete political demands. Democracy as a “constant reaching and struggling,” a “series of moments,” or a system in which “the governed govern” tells us little to nothing about the structure of a democratic political system we should be arguing for and building a movement toward winning.
During the American and French Revolutions, a democratic political system was understood as a single representative assembly elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage. Democratic republicans such as Thomas Paine influenced both [Pennsylvania’s 1776 Constitution](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th%5Fcentury/pa08.asp?ref=marxistunity.com), which embraced this vision, and the [French Constitution of 1793](https://revolution.chnm.org/d/430?ref=marxistunity.com), which aspired to realize it in the context of social and political upheaval. The democratic republican tradition continued in the [Chartists](https://jacobin.com/2016/02/chartism-feargus-oconnor-democracy-suffrage-thomas-paine/?ref=marxistunity.com), the [revolutionaries of 1848](https://jacobin.com/2023/06/revolutionary-spring-christopher-clark-book-review-1848-revolutions-history-socialism-liberalism-nationalism?ref=marxistunity.com), the [Radical Republicans](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mi2YTUtgjlQ&t=4s&ref=marxistunity.com) during Reconstruction, and the Social Democrats of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, including Marx and Engels, [Kautsky](https://www.academia.edu/5787062/Karl%5FKautsky%5FRepublic%5Fand%5FSocial%5FDemocracy%5Fin%5FFrance%5FPart%5FI%5Fintroduced%5Fby%5FLars%5FT%5FLih?ref=marxistunity.com) ([for a time](https://newpol.org/marxism-the-democratic-republic-and-the-undemocratic-u-s-constitution/?ref=marxistunity.com)), [Luxemburg](https://www.marxists.org/archive/luxemburg/1910/theory-practice/ch01.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), the [Russian Social Democratic Labor Party](https://www.marxists.org/history/international/social-democracy/rsdlp/1903/program.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), and the [Socialist Party of America](https://sageamericanhistory.net/progressive/docs/SocialistPlat1912.htm?ref=marxistunity.com).
Within Marxism, the conception of democracy as a single representative assembly elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage was rejected and replaced with Soviet Bolshevism following the Russian Revolution. Democratic republican agitation was sidelined in favor of workers' councils or single-party states. While the power elite’s Constitution-worship ideology never truly infected the left, the programmatic demands for a democratic constitution were discarded as a product of the pre-Soviet era.
The left should return to the democratic republican understanding of democracy that infused the most radical elements of the American and French Revolutions. It’s this specific institutional structure of democracy that we must recover to drive forward the movement for a reconstructed America. The history and theory we draw on should be able to explain why, on a structural level, the US is not a democracy, as well as how it can be transformed. The traditions of democratic republicanism provide exactly that understanding. In contrast, many of the impressionistic characterizations of mass struggle for equal rights offered in Nwanevu’s *The Right of the People* — evocative statements, but not truly definitions— only obscure the issue and do not offer a clear way forward.
### **Politics First**
*The Right of the People* correctlyargues that “we cannot talk meaningfully about democracy without thinking critically about the economy.” Nwanevu calls for reducing inequality, improving working conditions, building cooperatives, and generally moving toward a new economic model. Unlike many on the left, he thankfully does not let his economic analysis overshadow the political question. However, Nwanevu does not give a clear starting point or indicate where efforts should be focused. He states that the two struggles are inseparable: “Our political system and our economic system cannot be separated, even conceptually. And America cannot be founded anew without remaking both in tandem.”
Nwanevu is right to denounce the capitalist economy as an undemocratic hellscape and to call out political scientists who say nothing about material inequality. But if our aim is a truly democratic society, and our task is winning people over to a political program for change, we must ask: what is the primary obstacle facing the left? What comes first in the fight for democracy?
Social Democracy had an answer: the demand for a democratic republic, the political form through which the working class could eventually take hold of the economy itself. “Above all, \[the revolution\] will establish a democratic constitution,” wrote [Friedrich Engels](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1847/11/prin-com.htm?ref=marxistunity.com). Decades later, Engels [reaffirmed](https://marxists.architexturez.net/archive/marx/works/1892/02/critica-sociale.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) the point: “\[T\]he democratic republic is the only political form in which the struggle between the working class and the capitalist class can first be universalised and then culminate in the decisive victory of the proletariat.”
This emphasis on politics first does not minimize the need for economic change. Rather, it clarifies the path to it. Against Nwanevu’s claim that the struggle for economic and political change cannot be distinguished by order of importance, I argue that the road to economic emancipation runs through political reconstruction.
### **No Constitutional Path Forward**
Nwanevu concludes that our country is due for “another constitutional revolution — one animated by the idea that American democracy is a promise we’ve yet to make good on, a project that remains ours to define and complete.” This belief in redemptive possibility flows throughout Nwanevu's work. If *The Right of the People* included a poem, it would surely be one by [Langston Hughes](https://poets.org/poem/let-america-be-america-again?ref=marxistunity.com): “O, let America be America again— / The land that never has been yet— / And yet must be—the land where *every* man is free.”
But there’s a problem. The call for “another constitutional revolution,” announced in the book’s introduction, is not backed by a clear political strategy. Only at the end does Nwanevu offer something of a plan. But it’s inadequate.
“The immediate task for those committed to the project of American democracy,” he argues, “is mounting an effective resistance to the forces of the right” through reforms, including curbing the powers of the Supreme Court, enacting proportional representation in the House of Representatives, making the District of Columbia a state, and expanding voting rights. “Pro-democracy majorities,” he argues, should also pass legislation to raise taxes on the wealthy and pass the Protecting Rights to Organize (PRO) Act.
America may need a “wholly new Constitutional system,” concludes Nwanevu, but that project should be the last stop — the “capstone” or “end point” — on a long road of “democratization” that will build a mass movement necessary for any further change. Maybe there’s an entire constitutional rewrite at some point in the next several generations. In the meantime, “there are bills to be written and passed,” and “workers and workplaces to be organized.”
Here lies the contradiction. Unexplained is how any real “democratization” can happen within the same constitutional system analyzed throughout the rest of the book. After all, Nwanevu was driven to write *The Right* *of the People* partly because of the failure of progressive laws like Medicare for All and the Green New Deal, even during Democratic Party administrations. It’s unclear why the legislative battles for the [PRO Act](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protecting%5Fthe%5FRight%5Fto%5FOrganize%5FAct?utm%5Fsource=chatgpt.com), [District of Columbia statehood](https://jacobin.com/2025/08/trump-washington-dc-democracy-statehood?ref=marxistunity.com), or the [John Lewis Voting Rights Advancement Act](https://jacobin.com/2025/08/voting-rights-act-democratic-constitution?ref=marxistunity.com) — which have all already been obstructed or defeated despite widespread popular support — would turn out any differently.
Individual or freestanding constitutional amendments are just as unlikely. As [Lawrence Lessig](https://hls.harvard.edu/bibliography/republic-lost-version-2-0/?ref=marxistunity.com) notes, no constitutional amendment, except for the post-Civil War amendments, has passed when one of the two parties was in opposition. Of the [12,000-plus](https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2018/04/12/a-look-at-proposed-constitutional-amendments-and-how-seldom-they-go-anywhere/?ref=marxistunity.com) amendment proposals since the Constitutional Convention, just thirty-three have gone to the states for ratification, and only twenty-seven have made it into the Constitution.
Nwanevu knows that the Constitution impedes progressive reform, yet by the end of his book, he’s encouraging readers to place their hopes on reforms that the Constitution makes impossible. Nwanevu's reluctance to argue for a new constitution and his reliance on the formal amending process may reflect widespread anxieties about how a rewrite would unfold. We often hear about the Convention of States and the right’s purported attempt to get the necessary two-thirds of state legislatures to call for an Article V convention. Constitutional critics are often told that changing the founding document would only play into the right’s hands.
We should reject this fear. First, as [Daniel Lazare](https://urpe.org/2025/03/14/constitutional-convention/?ref=marxistunity.com) argues, “the real danger is not that the Constitution will change too much, but that it will not change at all.” The Constitution got us into this mess, and now is as good a time as any to talk about the need for a truly democratic political system. Second, there’s reason to doubt that any group, regardless of its politics, could successfully [maneuver through](https://www.californialawreview.org/print/the-worlds-most-difficult-constitution-to-amend?ref=marxistunity.com) Article V, which provides a very partial outline for working through Congress or doing an end-around Congress through the states. Third, Article V is profoundly undemocratic. State legislatures and the House are heavily gerrymandered, the Senate is absurdly malapportioned, and the requirement that two-thirds of states ratify any change is a denial of equal suffrage due to differing populations.
Instead of getting hung up on what the right is doing and whether or not they can somehow torture a coherent process out of Article V, we should put forward the demand for a popular assembly in which a constitution is drafted by representatives elected by universal and equal suffrage and proportional representation, and ratified by a nationwide vote.
### **Towards a Majority for Democracy**
Critiquingthe Constitution used to be a fringe position. Daniel Lazare — who, alongside [Thomas Geoghegan](https://newrepublic.com/article/62471/the-infernal-senate?ref=marxistunity.com), wrote important [constitutional takedowns](https://archive.org/details/frozenrepublicho0000laza) immediately following the collapse of the Soviet Union — recalls being [laughed off TV](https://creators.spotify.com/pod/profile/democratic-constitution/episodes/Ep--3-Daniel-Lazare-on-Worshipping-the-Constitution-e2lj09g?ref=marxistunity.com) in the 1990s. But times have changed. *The Right of the People* is a welcome contribution to a growing conversation within professional, academic, and activist spaces — including [Democratic Socialists of America](https://2024.dsausa.org/program/?ref=marxistunity.com) — about fundamental constitutional change. Nwanevu has friends.
What the moment calls for isn’t more vague declarations. We need a clear and strategic proposal. We should openly campaign for a [popular assembly](https://www.archives.gov/calendar/event/making-a-new-american-constitution-and-the-question-of-constitutional-reform?ref=marxistunity.com) — not an Article V convention — to draft a democratic constitution based on a unicameral legislature elected by universal and equal suffrage, with a judiciary accountable to the people. This approach would steer the debate away from piecemeal reforms that the current system prevents and toward a new mass movement for voting rights and democratic rebuilding.
America’s political storms are only worsening. The path forward is not chasing futile reforms within the current constitutional system. Rather, we should focus on our agitation on the lack of political equality, call for a popular assembly, and unite with those who share our vision. A clear and steady political vision, amidst these turbulent times, will help build majority support. The journey toward a democratic constitution will be long and hard, but that’s all the more reason to start moving today.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Socialism in One City? Sewer Socialism in Context
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/socialisminonecity/
Last updated: 2026-06-13T20:54:14.000Z
Zohran Mamdani’s election is easily the most significant electoral accomplishment of the organized US socialist movement in over a century. The prospect of a cadre member of DSA governing the beating heart of American capitalism under Donald Trump’s presidency opens a range of new strategic questions. How should DSA’s internal democracy relate to the municipal administration of a city of eight million? How do we balance the needs of the national movement with the needs of NYC-DSA as it fights to enforce Zohran’s agenda? What do we do about the police now that one of ours is their boss?
These considerations would have been incomprehensible to the US Left of a decade ago. It is only natural, then, that we turn our attention to the last time socialists had to confront questions like these—the height of the old Socialist Party of America (SPA).
In [“Socialists in City Hall? A New Look at Sewer Socialism in Wisconsin,”](https://www.laborpolitics.com/p/sewer-socialism-in-wisconsin-and?ref=marxistunity.com) Eric Blanc dives into the history of the Wisconsin Social-Democratic Party (WSDP), a state branch of the SPA. The WSDP sent Socialist Victor Berger to Congress, became a powerbroker in the Wisconsin state government, and held municipal power in Milwaukee from 1910-1912 and 1916-1940\. Blanc makes the case that the WSPD’s strategy of mass base-building through pragmatic, incremental reform succeeded where the national Socialist Party failed. In this just-so narrative, Wisconsin oriented to the “broad mass of working people” while the Party at large succumbed to self-marginalizing sectarianism.
The relevance of this argument is clear in the context of a Mamdani mayoralty. While Zohran has signaled that his administration will make the kind of pragmatic compromises Blanc endorses—for example, reaching far beyond the socialist bench to staff top posts in his government, going as far right as NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch—NYC-DSA has moved to discourage its membership from holding the new mayoralty to strict standards in favor of a single-minded pursuit of the “Affordability Agenda.” Blanc seconds this approach, arguing that socialists should disregard a more uncompromising assault on the establishment, and instead focus on gradually raising the public’s confidence in socialism by proving that we can be competent administrators who deliver increases in the standard of living.
In contrast, DSA’s more left-wing national leadership attempted to set terms on its relationship with NYC’s Alexandria Occasio-Cortez in 2024, and this year’s National Convention endorsed steps toward increased party-like discipline. Now, in the Zohran moment, NYC-DSA has taken steps to distance itself from national DSA, declining to seek a national endorsement for Mamdani and recently stirring controversy with a “local-only membership” scheme. It appears that NYC-DSA and the wider socialist movement are on two different tracks. Socialists will need to confront this contradiction as Mamdani enters office in the coming year.
In service of his argument, Blanc commits what amounts to historical malpractice with what he says—and doesn’t say—about twentieth-century American socialism. He isolates the Wisconsin sewer socialist project from its wider historical context and obscures details that fail to fit his narrative. Because of the stakes of the subject at hand, we need to set the record straight.
### **Milwaukee and the Mass Party**
For Blanc, the WSDP took a “mass” approach and succeeded at building Socialist hegemony within Milwaukee, as opposed to the uncompromising and self-marginalizing national SPA. To construct this narrative, he blurs together two periods: the 1900s-1910s, when the SPA was the hegemonic force on the American Left and increasingly influential in wider society, and the 1920s-1930s, when it was an increasingly marginal faction of both. To be clear, it was during the earlier period that the national party was generally to the left of the sewer socialists. The later years of marginalization which killed the national SPA happened under the political leadership of the kind of "pragmatists" Blanc would point to as models to emulate. This same leadership was often part of the Wisconsin sewer socialist machine itself, or actively emulating it in places like Reading, Pennsylvania.
It was during the national SPA's most militant period that it grew into something like a mass socialist party, the only one of its kind in American history. At a time when the party openly condemned the Constitution, welcomed insurgent industrial unionists in its ranks, and rejected compromises with the burgeoning liberal "Progressive" movement, it boasted over 125,000 members[\[1\]](#note-1) and perhaps two million total active supporters.[\[2\]](#note-2) It won the support of between thirty and forty percent of delegates against Samuel Gompers' establishment at the American Federation of Labor's annual conventions,[\[3\]](#note-3) and was a decisive political force in major proto-industrial unions like the ILGWU and UMWA.[\[4\]](#note-4)
To put this in perspective, socialists today can imagine a DSA with half a million members in good standing and broad support for our political program in large, strategically situated unions like the Teamsters and the American Federation of Teachers.
More than anything the left-wing Socialists did, it was the “pragmatic” decisions to rid the party of its industrial radicals in 1913, force a split in 1919 to prevent pro-Bolshevik Socialists from taking leadership, and liquidate into Bob LaFollette’s nebulous liberal-labor coalition in 1924 that led to stagnation, disorganization, and then a long decline into irrelevancy from which the SPA never recovered. Especially after 1919, the Berger-Hillquit wing of the party had a virtually free hand in deciding its political direction, and the results speak for themselves. By the time Trotskyist entryists arrived on the scene in the 1930s, the Socialist Party was already a dead letter.
### **American Socialism, Right, Left and Center**
Because Blanc ignores the wider context the WSDP was situated in, he can claim that no departure from the project of revolutionary socialism was needed for socialists to step into municipal administration. But we must view sewer socialism in the context of contemporary debates in the global socialist movement over Millerand's "ministerial socialism" in France and Bernstein's "revisionism" in Germany; in this light it is clearly part of the wider turn by a section of the Second International towards loyalty to the capitalist state and gradual reform as guarantors of social peace.
The sewer socialists themselves saw their project in these terms. Berger described his socialism as necessary to prevent a "fearful retribution" against the capitalist class that would "throw humanity back into semi-barbarism."[\[5\]](#note-5) To prevent the catastrophe of revolution, land and industry had to pass into public ownership, but only—as Berger argued strenuously against the rest of his party—legally and with fair compensation to the capitalist class.[\[6\]](#note-6)
Like Bernstein, Berger and the Wisconsinites believed that the extension of suffrage to wide sections of the working class made revolution obsolete. They explicitly cast themselves in the tradition of "moderate" reformers like Henry Clay, with his compromising attitude towards the slaveowning class and gradual, compensated plan to abolish slavery, in contrast to the revolutionary abolitionists that most of the SPA revered.[\[7\]](#note-7) Berger saw the abolitionists and their modern equivalents, the radicals they shared a party with, as "fanatics" who posed as much a threat to the peaceful evolution of society as did the forces of reaction.[\[8\]](#note-8)
The WSDP's conservative socialism was already far to the right of the politics that would later bring the working class to power across the Russian Empire, and to the brink of power across Europe, in 1917-21\. And it was pushed even further right by the pressures of maintaining a stable municipal administration in Milwaukee. Berger, Sleidel, Hoan and the other sewer socialists sought a party and a program that was as broadly appealing as possible to remain competitive against the united Republican and Democratic opposition.
In practical terms, this meant reducing the movement's horizons to hard-nosed municipal reform and good governance, keeping the lofty aims of political and social emancipation confined to the pages of the socialist press. It also meant making socialism "safe." While Berger, to his credit, faced down prison to defy Woodrow Wilson's war agenda in World War I, the actual Socialist administration in Milwaukee threaded the needle between antiwar sentiment, social patriotism, and fear of repression. It emerged on the other side supporting the imperialist war effort.[\[9\]](#note-9)
Another consequence was to incentivize the Wisconsin Social-Democrats to appeal to the lowest-common-denominator instincts of the workers whose votes they depended on, including racism. Victor Berger promoted the idea that "the negroes and mulattoes \[sic\] constitute a lower race—that the Caucasian and indeed even the Mongolian have the start on them in civilization by many thousand years." The local party press played into lynch-mob hysteria by publishing Berger's defense of racial segregation on the grounds that "free contact" between the races resulted in "many cases of rape."[\[10\]](#note-10) In a 1907 article, republished at least as late as 1912, he declared the "brilliant culture of \[the\] country" was "by right an inheritance of the white race."[\[11\]](#note-11)
This tendency to appeal to white workers as white workers was so bad that by 1922—a year after the infamous Tulsa Race Massacre—the Wisconsin SDP had cultivated a significant overlap in membership with the Ku Klux Klan. They ran John Kleist, a dual-carder who publicly bragged about his Klan membership, for state office.[\[12\]](#note-12) Amidst a nationwide awakening of Black radical consciousness, the scandal this incident provoked forced the Wisconsin socialists to take a firmer stance against the Klan and begin purging themselves of the white supremacy they had allowed to fester in the party. Kleist was not formally expelled until 1924.
“Pragmatic Marxism” indeed. Would challenging the racial attitudes of white workers in the early twentieth century have been “jumping too far ahead” of the working class? With immigration, policing, and Zionism front of mind in Mamdani’s New York, the implications of replicating a strategy that inadvertently welcomed the vanguard of contemporary American fascism into the ranks of the WSDP need stern interrogation.
### **Socialism and Labor**
Part of Blanc’s argument rests on the claim that the WSDP was deeply rooted in the labor movement while the tactically rigid, “far left socialists” elsewhere in the SPA had “weaker roots in the class.” To illustrate the difference, he points to the Milwaukee Socialists’ successful effort to win over existing trade unions, in contrast with efforts to organize new militant unions like the Industrial Workers of the World or the Socialist Labor Party’s much smaller Socialist Trades and Labor Alliance.
Blanc is correct that "boring from within" existing trade unions was strategically valuable, but he is wrong to imply that this approach was the sole domain of the "pragmatic" right wing of the SPA. Party centrists and leftists like Eugene Debs also embraced working to transform existing unions.[\[13\]](#note-13) He is also right in noting that this strategy paid off spectacularly in Milwaukee. But in order to bend contemporary labor debates to fit his larger argument about "mass"-oriented pragmatism, he does a disservice to the historic struggle for industrial unionism and obscures the truth about where the lines of class unity and class division lay in the early twentieth-century labor movement.
The IWW's "dual-unionism" should not be lumped in with the SLP's "red unionism," nor can it be reduced to a self-marginalizing sectarian strategy. As many as one million workers may have passed through the IWW's ranks in the first fifteen years or so of its existence, drawn from among the masses of workers the dominant trade unions generally refused to organize. Some of these became important actors in the birth of the Congress of Industrial Organizations a generation later.[\[14\]](#note-14)
The real labor sectarians in this period were the craft-unionists who excluded the majority of American workers who were unskilled, itinerant, Black, recent immigrants, or some combination of the four. Blanc correctly identifies that boring-from-within as practiced by the WSPD was one way to break down these sectarian walls, but goes too far in insisting with (ironically) sect-like tactical stubbornness that it was the only way. Given the era's low union density (around half of what it is today), there is no reason to believe that the two strategies could not have productively coexisted in some form.[\[15\]](#note-15) Later socialists like the League of Revolutionary Black Workers even experimented with such an "inside-outside" labor strategy in their own context.[\[16\]](#note-16)
### **Carrying the Socialist Flame**
In explaining sewer socialism's demise, Blanc admits that it failed to build a popular base for socialism that was durable enough to survive such inevitable constraints as "employer opposition," "public opinion," and "media scaremongering" during periods of conservative backlash. Chalking up the decline and defeat of a supposedly wildly successful strategy to structural forces outside our control paints a bleak picture: it might be impossible to build a militant socialist party in the long run. The best we can hope for is to use our fleeting time in the sun to struggle for better institutions like the Milwaukee socialists did by "\[pioneering\] the New Deal."
Society will always oscillate between periods of radicalism and conservatism, upsurge and sedation, political plasticity and rigidity. But socialists' ability to carry the flame through periods where unfavorable conditions reign is a contingent thing.
It is likely the Socialist Party would have shrunk during the repressive and economically stable 1920s in any scenario, but its complete implosion was not inevitable. Absent the rightist coup of 1919 and the rump party's liquidation into progressivism in the early 1920s, it may have been the open and democratic SPA that seized the crisis of the 1930s to catapult socialism back into the mainstream, not the CPUSA with its militarized bureaucracy and self-destructive subservience to the twists and turns of Comintern policy. In turn, without the misadventures of the late Popular Front, the Communists and the left wing of the CIO may have been able to survive the repression of the early Cold War intact, which could have drastically altered the fate of the social movements of the 1950s-1970s.
Marxism’s historical contribution was to inject a rigorous scientific analysis of structural forces into the movement for political and social freedom we now call socialism. But what allowed it to grip the hearts and minds of millions is that it has always affirmed our power to overcome the structural obstacles facing us through collective action and make our own history out of the conditions we inherit. Obstacles like "media scaremongering" and "employer opposition" can be out-organized, though that is, of course, easier said than done. And Zohran's triumph in the shadow of Trumpism and capitalist-driven crime hysteria proves we can positively transform public opinion even in an atmosphere of reaction. This isn’t just a question of making our program broadly appealing, but of taking heroic public stands on issues like Palestine and immigration.
This kind of political courage, the courage it took for Eugene Debs and many other Socialists to go to prison or worse for opposing their government’s war aims, the courage it will take for Zohran Mamdani to follow through on promises like arresting Benjamin Netanyahu in the face of massive retaliation, is the kind of courage we in DSA should expect from our elected representatives. It is the kind of courage we must show workers they can expect from socialist politicians if we are going to reignite in masses of working people the fire that fueled Reconstruction, the SPA, and the CIO. And it is the kind of courage that requires a nationwide mass party and an effective program to sustain.
For the sake of the socialist movement, NYC-DSA cannot afford to strike out alone under the coming Zohran administration. Every socialist in the country has a stake in what happens in New York. When we review the balance sheet of sewer socialism without obscuring the history out of political convenience, we know that we will not see victory in our lifetimes if socialism in twenty-first-century New York City goes the way of socialism in twentieth-century Milwaukee.
### Notes
1\. "Report of National Secretary to the Socialist Party National Convention, 1912," May 1912, Duke University Archives and Manuscripts, Durham, North Carolina. Secretary Work reports a membership of 125,826 for the first quarter of 1912\. This is around 10,000 higher than most figures that appear in the secondary literature. [↩](#ref-1)
2\. Jeffrey A. Johnson, They Are All Red Out Here: Socialist Politics in the Pacific Northwest, 1895-1925 (Norman, OK: University of Oklahoma Press, 2008), p. 107\. [↩](#ref-2)
3\. Report of Proceedings of the Thirty-Second Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor (Washington, DC: The Law Reporter Printing Company, 1912), pp. 374-375; Report of Proceedings of the Thirty-Fourth Annual Convention of the American Federation of Labor (Washington, DC: The Law Reporter Printing Company, 1915), pp. 443-444\. Socialist labor organizer Max S. Hayes won a third of the vote in challenging Gompers for the presidency of the AFL in 1912; Socialist delegates won over forty percent of the vote on a motion to adopt a political campaign for the eight-hour day in 1914\. [↩](#ref-3)
4\. John HM Laslett, Labor and the Left: A Study of Socialist and Radical Influences in the American Labor Movement, 1881-1924 (New York, NY: Basic Books, 1970), pp. 98-99, 205, 216-217\. [↩](#ref-4)
5\. Victor L. Berger, "A Few Plain Pointers for Plain Working People—By a Plain Man," essay, in Broadsides (Milwaukee, WI: Social-Democratic Publishing Co., 1912), 174-182, p. 178\. [↩](#ref-5)
6\. Berger, "How Will Socialism Come?," Ibid, 25-30, pp. 27-8\. [↩](#ref-6)
7\. Berger, "Do We Want Progress by Catastrophe and Bloodshed or by Common Sense?," Ibid, 228-235, pp. 231-233\. [↩](#ref-7)
8\. Ibid. [↩](#ref-8)
9\. Joshua Kluever, "The Golden Age of Pragmatic Socialism: Wisconsin Socialists at the State Level, 1919-37," The Journal of the Gilded Age and Progressive Era 22 (2023): 204-223, p. 205\. [↩](#ref-9)
10\. Victor Berger, "The Misfortune of the Negroes," Social Democratic Herald, May 31 1902\. Accessed via Marxists Internet Archive. [↩](#ref-10)
11\. Berger, "The Flag Superstition," essay, in Broadsides, 97-103, p. 100\. [↩](#ref-11)
12\. David M. Chalmers, Hooded Americanism: The History of the Ku Klux Klan (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1987), p. 191\. [↩](#ref-12)
13\. Eugene V. Debs, "Unity and Victory," speech addressing the Kansas American Federation of Labor, published in Labor & Freedom, 107–132\. Accessed via Marxists Internet Archive. Here we have a notable example of Debs appealing directly to the membership of the AFL. [↩](#ref-13)
14\. James Pruitt, "The Industrial Workers of the World: A West Coast Perspective," Perspectives on Work 10, no. 2 (2007), 42-44\. [↩](#ref-14)
15\. Leo Troy, Trade Union Membership, 1897-1962 (Cambridge, MA: National Bureau of Economic Research, 1965), p. 2\. [↩](#ref-15)
16\. "The General Policy Statement And Labor Program of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers," 1969, Box 1, Folder 86, American Left Ephemera Collection, University of Pittsburgh. Accessed via Marxists Internet Archive, p. 3\. [↩](#ref-16)
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Proposition 50: A Race To The Bottom
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/prop-50-a-race-to-the-bottom/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:16:23.000Z
A recent [Jacobin](https://jacobin.com/2025/09/proportional-representation-voting-democrats-gerrymandering?ref=marxistunity.com) article allowed me to indulge in a guilty pleasure: calling out the Democratic Party's hypocrisy and tarring it as democratic in name only. It’s almost too easy. Barack Obama bled out homeowners, bailed out the banks, and [assassinated citizens](https://mwi.westpoint.edu/ten-years-after-the-al-awlaki-killing-a-reckoning-for-the-united-states-drones-wars-awaits/?ref=marxistunity.com)by executive decree. Joe Manchin used the Senate to single-handedly kill the [Build Back Better Act](https://www.newyorker.com/news/our-columnists/joe-manchin-kills-the-build-back-better-bill?ref=marxistunity.com) and the [John Lewis Voting Rights Act](https://jacobin.com/2025/08/voting-rights-act-democratic-constitution?ref=marxistunity.com) (fellow Democrat Krysten Sinema helped with the latter). [Joe Biden](https://www.democracynow.org/2024/6/5/biden%5Fcloses%5Fborder?ref=marxistunity.com) shut down the border in a move called “excruciating and likely deadly,” flipped on [DC statehood](https://jacobin.com/2025/08/trump-washington-dc-democracy-statehood?ref=marxistunity.com), and supported the genocide in Gaza. More recently, [House Democrats](https://www.newsweek.com/democrats-ice-gratitude-resolution-backlash-2084004?ref=marxistunity.com) thanked ICE for its service.
Last month, it was good ‘ol Gavin Newsom — blue tie, hair slicked back with L'Oréal — arguing that Proposition 50 is urgently needed to “push back on Trump’s attempts to shred democracy” and “bring accountability” to his administration. The initiative, which would gerrymander California’s congressional map for the next two elections, isn’t another example of overt political corruption, [Newsom argued](https://calmatters.org/politics/2025/07/gavin-newsom-redistricting/?ref=marxistunity.com): it’s “fighting fire with fire.”
Thanks to Newsom and the Democrats, we Californians supposedly have an opportunity to “level the playing field and give power back to the people” ([Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez](https://www.instagram.com/reel/DO8o0MakVWz/?ref=marxistunity.com)), take the “responsible…smart, measured approach” ([Obama](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/20/us/politics/california-redistricting-newsom-obama.html?ref=marxistunity.com)), and “meet and balance Texas’s outrageous power grab” ([Eric Holder](https://democraticredistricting.com/eric-holder-statement-on-california-putting-redistricting-on-the-ballot-in-november/?ref=marxistunity.com)). For the umpteenth time, something called our “democracy” is supposedly hanging by a thread. And once again, the Democrats claim they’ve come to the rescue.
One might think that Democratic Socialists of America — looking to create some separation from the mainstream of the Democratic Party; with no ability to sway the outcome of the November 4 vote and, therefore, in a perfect position to make a principled stand against gerrymandering; and with at least some institutional knowledge and historical memory of previous Democratic Party gimmicks — would want nothing to do with *the* Democratic Party initiative of 2025\. That DSA might, in fact, use the [Texas fallout](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/voting-rights-act?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) and the Prop 50 hubbub to indict our undemocratic system, call out the Democrats’ latest stunt, and agitate for what we actually need: nationwide multimember districts with proportional representation.
Instead, many California chapters have supported Newsom’s move. California DSA, a council composed of delegates from chapters across the state, was the first to endorse it. The discussion on its website exemplifies two political tendencies within DSA. One seeks to downplay criticism of the Democratic Party in hopes of removing Republicans and electing DSA members or DSA-supported progressives. The other consistently condemns the Democratic Party and aims to build a working-class movement by calling for class struggle and a socialist revolution. The first believes the United States is sufficiently democratic to bring about meaningful change if the right people are in power. The second argues that issues of political equality are secondary to demands for a socialist economic system. The main flaw in both positions is the absence of the democratic republic, which serves as both a strategy for taking power and an ideology and programmatic demand around which an independent party can form.
### **Two Tendencies**
The arguments put forward by [Chris Kutalik Cauther](https://www.californiadsa.org/news/caredistricting2025sep?ref=marxistunity.com)n, [Fred Glass](https://www.californiadsa.org/news/antiprop50rebuttal2025sep?ref=marxistunity.com), and [Mark Gaynor](https://www.californiadsa.org/news/prop502025sep?ref=marxistunity.com) are examples of the first tendency. Cauthern argues that gerrymandering is “the right’s most powerful weapon for locking working people out of politics.” In addition to taking the fight to the Republicans, he supports Prop 50 endorsement because it will supposedly help socialists “agitate and push beyond the rigged two-party system” and make demands for “fundamental reforms in CA,” like proportional representation, multimember districts, and ranked-choice voting. Finally, a gerrymandered map will help DSA by “opening space” for us to run our own members for Congress.
Glass is not a fan of Newsom. But all is fair in love and war. For him, going all-in on Prop 50 is a chance to “build alliances with progressive forces” and fight fascism — a threat “far worse for the working class” than “working with the class-betraying Democratic Party.” *Nothing* can be worse than fascism. It's a hard reality to accept, but to “retain basic democratic rights,” DSA must support the Democrats. To say otherwise shows a “rigid belief in \[a\] party line combined with hallucinatory expectations for revolution around the corner.”
Gaynor reiterates many of the previous points. Opposing Prop 50 is equivalent to sitting on one’s hands. A gerrymandered House map could allow DSA to elect more socialist sympathetic Democrats to Congress. Endorsement is part of a longer-term strategy that will help us connect with the working class and build something called “collective power.” And no one likes Newsom — but a Republican-controlled House in 2026 means fascism.
The arguments put forward by [Andrew T. and Ian H.](https://www.californiadsa.org/news/antiprop502025sep?ref=marxistunity.com) are emblematic of the second tendency. Both are skeptical of the supposed benefits of endorsement, support organizational independence, and recognize the Democratic Party’s base is “shrinking and demoralized.” They want nothing to do with Newsom, use terms like “capitalist politics” versus “socialist politics,” and argue workers need an independent socialist party and a “new kind of political system entirely — one in which workers control their workplaces, communities, and government directly.”
### **Less Than Convincing**
DSA’s Prop 50 endorsement will continue squandering a valuable opportunity to advocate for nationwide multimember districts and proportional representation and won’t bring us any closer to the working class. Even if the Democrats did win the House, it would have no real effect on the Republicans’ ability to steamroll over the majority of Americans with the trifecta of the executive, Senate, and Supreme Court.
Cauthern, Glass, and Gaynor are unconvincing. Cauthern mistakes the symptom for the disease. Gerrymandering isn’t the central means by which the right locks workers out of politics — the constitutional order is. The Electoral College, where a [few hundred thousand](https://prospect.org/politics/2024-01-29-america-is-not-democracy/?ref=marxistunity.com) voters in swing states choose the president; the [malapportioned Senate](https://newrepublic.com/article/62471/the-infernal-senate?ref=marxistunity.com), which underrepresents Californians and blocks progressive legislation, [including gerrymandering reform](https://jacobin.com/2025/09/proportional-representation-voting-democrats-gerrymandering?ref=marxistunity.com) itself; and the unelected Supreme Court, which has been striking down emancipatory projects [since Reconstruction](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/manisha-sinha-on-the-rise-and-fall) — this system is what disempowers working people. And Democrats defend it just as fiercely as Republicans.
Glass, meanwhile, thinks the only way to “earn” workers’ attention is to tail labor unions. But that logic treats working people as if they could never be wrong or persuaded by an argument. At the same time, Glass argues workers outside of DSA won’t “stand in judgment of our actions anytime soon.” By that logic, supporting an undemocratic ploy while representing a *democratic* socialist organization is an acceptable contradiction because no one is paying attention.
I disagree. Workers are paying attention, and many are [frustrated with the Democratic Party](https://www.cnbc.com/2025/08/07/trumps-approval-rating-still-negative-while-the-public-sours-further-on-democrats-cnbc-survey-shows.html?ref=marxistunity.com) and our [political system](https://www.pewresearch.org/global/2025/09/15/people-around-the-world-want-political-change-but-many-doubt-it-can-happen/?ref=marxistunity.com). We must talk directly to those people and win them to our ideas. It’s our job to organize the advanced section of the working class — those who know the United States isn’t a democracy, understand the Democratic Party is a dead end, and are ready to fight for change. Talking about democracy while supporting gerrymandering and Newsom only alienates the people we want in our organization.
It’s DSA’s obligation to unite the working class and lead the democratic struggle against our oligarchic government — to be the “[vanguard fighters for democracy](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm?ref=marxistunity.com)” and wrest political and ideological leadership from the two-party duopoly. That project demands education through agitation and exposure. Workers need to understand how the ruling class operates. One section of the bourgeoisie makes appeals to the workers to further its own power struggle against other sections, just as the Democrats appeal to the masses against Trump in the name of democracy and protecting the Constitution.
The bourgeoisie are opportunists who thrive on fear, confusion, and obfuscation. Creating a viable party for democracy and socialism demands honesty and clarity. We must take advantage of every opportunity, including those provided by sections of the ruling class in their own struggle for power, to foster a “Social-Democratic point of view” through timely and all-sided [political indictments](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/iii.htm?ref=marxistunity.com). Agitating for proportional representation and an end to our oligarchic government in the face of Democratic and Republican Party gerrymandering schemes is one such opportunity. This perspective can teach workers to “analyse how various institutions and laws reflect this or that interest,” and recognize “the catchwords and the sophisms” by which “each class and each stratum conceals its selfish desires and its actual essence.”
Like Glass, Gaynor warns us about fascism. But as with gerrymandering, the rise and persistence of right-wing authoritarianism is a [symptom of the constitutional regime](https://jacobin.com/2025/05/constitution-trump-oligarchy-democracy-scotus?ref=marxistunity.com). Trump first entered the White House despite losing the popular vote. Once in office, his Supreme Court justices were confirmed by a Senate majority that represented a minority of Americans. In return, the Supreme Court has expanded Trump’s already [broad powers](https://www.aljazeera.com/opinions/2025/2/26/the-us-constitution-was-not-made-to-protect-against-trump?ref=marxistunity.com). Impeachment is the Constitution’s final safeguard against a rogue president, and charges were twice leveled against Trump. Both times, the senators who voted for impeachment — forty-eight for abuse of power and forty-seven for obstruction of Congress in 2019, and fifty-seven for incitement of insurrection in 2021 — represented more Americans than those who voted against it. But the Senate represents states, not people, and it would have taken an unimaginable sixty-seven votes to convict.
Like his first campaign, Trump’s second and third runs were fueled by the fears, resentment, and disillusionment of a population ravaged by poor government policies which originate in the Senate, where Republicans and Democrats have blocked efforts to expand voting rights, improve healthcare, restrict guns, protect the environment, raise the minimum wage, and advance many other issues favored by the left. Far from fighting fascism, the Democrats have allowed its growth by sticking to the constitutional system that created this crisis and keeps us stuck.
And a point of clarity. Cauthern argues chapters can support gerrymandering while advocating for “more fundamental reforms” in the state, including proportional representation, multimember districts, ranked-choice voting, and political pluralism. However, anyone hoping for a local solution has it wrong: [federal law prohibits states](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uniform%5FCongressional%5FDistrict%5FAct?ref=marxistunity.com) from implementing proportional representation for congressional districts. The changes we need must come from a national law applied universally — something consistently blocked in the Senate. To create a new national political system, we need a *nationwide* party united around a program for democracy.
I’m also not convinced by Andrew and Ian. Socialism is too narrow an appeal to create a mass political movement in the United States. Agitation that centers on socialism while dismissing the struggle for proportional representation and political rights more broadly as a “liberal assumption” won’t go very far. And their discussion of “capitalist politics” versus “socialist politics” tells us nothing about what *kind* of state the working class needs and, therefore, what concrete political demands DSA should be putting forward.
Barnett Newman, *Who’s Afraid of Red, Yellow, and Blue III* (1970)
### **What’s Missing**
Contrary to Cauthern, Glass, and Gaynor, the United States is not a democracy based on universal and equal suffrage. Contra Andrew and Ian, that absence is crucial. Missing from both tendencies is the demand for a democratic constitution that — paraphrasing DSA’s [Workers Deserve More program](https://2024.dsausa.org/program/?ref=marxistunity.com) — establishes civil, political, and democratic rights for all, and is based on proportional representation in a single federal legislature. This is an [orthodox Marxist position](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-us-lefts-rediscovery-of-democratic-853?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) applicable in all countries lacking universal and equal suffrage. Marx, Engels, Lenin, Kautsky, Luxemburg, Debs — everyone understood that to make inroads on capital and create a socialist economy *and* [fend off threats](https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1564-karl-kautsky-on-democracy-and-republicanism?ref=marxistunity.com) from the far-right, the working class needed to win the battle for democracy by achieving a democratic republic.
The democratic republican strategy has a political component. Condemning the constitutional system explains how a capitalist minority dominates the majority and why Trump has been able to accumulate such immense power. Demanding a democratic alternative provides a concrete vision of the kind of state we need — one capable of placing the working class in command — and clearly distinguishes us from the Democratic Party.
It also has an ideological component. The strategy draws on the ideas and language of justice, equality, and universal rights — the animating values behind the country’s greatest mass movements, from the Civil War and Reconstruction to the civil rights and anti–Vietnam War movements. We cannot allow the Democrats to co-opt these ideals. Socialists have always fought against every social injustice and, in the words of [Jean Jaurès](https://www.marxists.org/archive/jaures/1898/socialist-interest.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), struggled to preserve the “pitiful progress of humanity, the modest guarantees that \[the working class\] has little by little conquered through centuries-long effort and a long series of revolutions.” The Democratic Party’s legitimacy and Newsom’s growing stardom depend on playing Trump’s foil by posing as defenders of democracy while crushing any dissent within their ranks. But the bourgeoisie has always hated democracy and fought tooth and nail to preserve the system of unequal rights.
There’s a programmatic component, too. As the Workers Deserve More program notes, “Relying on the Democrats to defeat Republicans isn’t working. An independent political party, rooted in the working-class majority, is necessary to build a future free from exploitation and oppression.” [Without a party, we have nothing](https://cosmonautmag.com/2020/11/without-a-party-we-have-nothing-2/?ref=marxistunity.com). The demand for a democratic republic creates a point of unity — a minimum demand around which socialists of all persuasions can rally behind in the name of creating a favorable political playing field and bringing much-needed light and air to our movement.
### **The Alternative**
Newsom’s gerrymandering scheme is a race to the bottom. Endorsing it spoils a chance to argue for a nationwide system of proportional representation and brings us no closer to resolving the issue of political independence from the Democratic Party. One tendency within DSA, represented by Cauthern and company, struggles to imagine challenging the whole Constitution. It ignores the issue by working within the Democratic Party’s orbit to finagle the rules and elect better people to high positions. Another tendency, represented by Andrew and Ian, also doesn’t know what to do with our obstructionist and immovable political system. It too ignores the issue, choosing instead to shun the language of equality and democracy and demand full communism. Both tendencies attempt to hide the crippling flaw in their respective strategies — the rejection of democratic republicanism — behind empty slogans like “collective power” and “socialist politics.”
Instead of endorsing Prop 50, we should seize the opportunity to advocate for proportional representation and a new constitution. Chapters can host public discussions and political education night schools, as East Bay DSA did in 2024 with its [two-part event](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/ian-forgie-how-the-constitution-works?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) on the Constitution. Members can also advance resolutions, as San Diego DSA did with its “[For a Democratic Constitution](https://dsasandiego.org/dsa-san-diego-passes-resolution-for-a-democratic-constitution/?ref=marxistunity.com)” resolution last year. Signs should be made, and t-shirts should be printed. Following YDSA’s “[Winning the Battle for Democracy](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1eBmtHUha1G72fGmSpwLVWbOG750IzqsR/view?ref=marxistunity.com)” resolution, elected officials should be encouraged to stand as tribunes for democracy. We demand our electeds be socialists — but they must also champion proportional representation and constitutional change. Because single-member districts are federally mandated, none of this advocacy can be restricted to California. DSA must lead a nationwide campaign for proportional representation and a democratic constitution.
Ultimately, the direction of DSA and the American left more broadly will be determined by both debate and action. Discussion has its place. Lenin’s *What is to be Done?,* a book-length polemic against other Social Democrats, lies at the heart of the critique I’ve presented in this article. But while Lenin tried to win people over to his ideas, he also pursued an [independent path](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/feb/01.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) of action to build a movement for democracy.
Marxist Unity Group members are already convinced democratic republicans. The best response to Prop 50 — and to the broader tendencies we’ve observed in DSA — is to continue winning people to our ideas and increase our democratic agitation. Let’s lead by example and fill *Light and Air* and the monthly bulletin — two growing, indispensable projects — with sharp, fearless arguments for democracy. When it comes to indicting the Democratic Party and connecting every social abuse to the need for a new political system, no opportunity should be wasted.
The American left is slowly — oh, so slowly — returning to socialism’s [democratic republican roots](https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/p/the-us-lefts-rediscovery-of-democratic-853?utm%5Fsource=publication-search) and everything that entails. Let’s use this moment to assert what Marxist Unity Group stands for and connect with others who agree.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Party-Building In Times of Co-Governance: A Reply to Eric Blanc and Co.
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/party-building-in-times-of-co-governance-a-reply-to-eric-blanc-and-conbsp/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:56:54.000Z
This is a remarkable moment for the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Our membership now tops 80,000 for the first time in our history, beating the previous high from 2021\. In the wake of our National Convention in August, a [flurry](https://working-mass.com/2025/08/22/opinion-2025-dsa-convention-winners-losers-bread-and-roses/?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) [of](https://electoral.dsausa.org/reflecting-on-the-2025-national-convention/?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) [articles](https://internationalviewpoint.org/spip.php?article9127&ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) [have](https://socialistcall.com/2025/08/27/we-have-work-to-do/?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) [been](https://prospect.org/politics/2025-08-14-dsa-convenes-argues-and-celebrates/?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) written about the organization’s program and direction, in addition to a [similar](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/09/opinion/zohran-mamdani-mayor-power.html?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) [volume](https://jacobin.com/2025/06/mamdani-mayor-socialism-nyc-strategy?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) [of](https://jacobin.com/2025/08/mamdani-municipal-socialism-history-cities?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) [writing](https://www.forever-wars.com/this-is-the-beginning-of-the-end-of-the-9-11-era/?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) [on](https://jacobin.com/2025/08/zohran-bernie-party-power-strategy?ref=light-and-air.ghost.io) the prospects of the increasingly inevitable victory of Zohran Mamdani in the New York mayoral race. But few of these commentaries seriously examine the relationship between the two. That is to say, what does a Zohran administration mean for DSA, in particular its New York City chapter? What new responsibilities and opportunities arise for our proto-party?
### **Party or Movement?**
A recent article [published in *The Nation*](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/zohran-mamdani-organizing-plan?ref=marxistunity.com) by three members of the Bread and Roses (B&R) caucus stakes out an ambitious strategy to winZohran’s platform. But although written by DSA members, this article defines DSA’s position more by its omissions than through its stated argument. Comrades Eric, Emily, and Wen propose the creation of a new organization, Movement for an Affordable New York (MANY), designed to provide the broad, grassroots support that a nascent Zohran administration needs in order to freeze the rent, fund fast and free buses, and tax the rich. The authors argue, “even if all of New York’s progressive organizations unite, we’re still not anywhere near influential enough to win Mamdani’s agenda.” But it remains unclear how this new organization could live up to DSA’s strengths, or overcome its weaknesses.
DSA recruited Zohran, an active member of the NYC chapter, to run for State Assembly in 2020\. At the 2024 NYC-DSA Convention, Zohran presented his vision for a mayoral campaign. It was overwhelmingly approved by delegates, and later staffed and organized by DSA members in the field. DSA, through this campaign and others, has successfully reached far beyond our membership, and some 50,000 New Yorkers volunteered for the Zohran campaign. Yet the proposal for MANY dismisses the role of DSA in building the mass movement to implement Zohran’s agenda. In fact, there is no mention of DSA whatsoever.
Over a century ago, the children’s fable *The Little Red Hen* told the story of a humble hen finding scarce help in the tough work of making bread. “Who will help me plant and mill the wheat?” she asked, receiving no reply from her neighbors. Only when she asked “Who will help me eat the bread?” did she receive a reply. This is not a dig at the many organizations that did put in the work. But simply put, without DSA, there is no Zohran for Mayor campaign.
The authors argue that we need a bigger tent to seize upon the energy of those tens of thousands who canvassed for Zohran but who are unprepared to join a socialist organization. This strategy is not only impractical, it's condescending. Impractical because the work of building this organization would most likely fall onto the shoulders of the “Red Hen” of NYC-DSA. Condescending because, if millions of working people are willing to vote for a socialist for mayor, who are we to proactively decide that they are unwilling to support or join a socialist organization? Socialism *is* the fully realized self-activity of the working class; DSA, as a socialist organization, should be the home and engine of that self-activity. Acting as if we are not worthy or capable of organizing the wider working class is to forfeit our historical task.
As Democratic Socialists, we are also left to wonder exactly how democratic, and how socialist, an organization like MANY would be. How will it differ from any of the existing progressive coalitions, dominated by non-profit directors, full-time staff, and union presidents? There is no mention of how this coalition will allow for rank-and-file leadership and genuine mass democracy. Rather than a new organization (modeled after the false promise of Obama’s volunteer machine), why not seek to build a 50,000-member strong NYC-DSA, and a million-strong national party?
The authors, through their omission of DSA, imply that our primary responsibility as socialists is nothing other than to win Zohran’s bread-and-butter platform. In this world, our fate is joined at the hip to our handsome socialist mayor-to-be. But is this actually the case? As it stands, Zohran remains publicly noncommittal to endorsing NYC-DSA picks for office. When pressed by media about DSA’s platform, Zohran neither defended the old platform nor advanced the recent [Workers Deserve More](https://2024.dsausa.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) program that Convention passed with supermajority support. He instead chose to [distance himself](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/28/nyregion/mamdani-dsa-socialist-mayor.html?ref=marxistunity.com) from the national organization. It is increasingly necessary to outline our interests as they overlap with and diverge from a mayor responsible for, and by all accounts intent on, governing for *all New Yorkers*,including those expressly antagonistic to us as workers and socialists
Our goal isn’t to criticize Zohran or his platform through pointless purity tests, and we should avoid hanging onto his every word. But our primary objective is to build a nationwide, independent, mass socialist party that can win the working class to a program for democratic socialism. This is not identical to achieving a particular set of economic reforms, important as they are, in a single city. Comrades Emily, Eric, and Wen do not situate their proposal within the context of any larger political goal and by doing so, they lose sight of the forest—political freedom and socialism—for the tree of economic reform.
Our recent Convention affirmed this focus on party-building. Delegates adopted [Resolution 07: “Principles for Party-Building,”](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r07-principles-for-party-building/41437?ref=marxistunity.com) which states that “DSA orients itself in opposition to all ruling class political forces. DSA’s project is to unite workers to win the battle for democracy and bring about socialism, not to seek a governing coalition with a perceived lesser evil under the current undemocratic political system.” The proposal for MANY is exactly an attempt to build such a governing coalition, and its horizon goes no further than a return to the New Deal-era welfare state. Winning Zohran’s platform is a part of our duty as socialists, but efforts to do so must be **a)** in-step with the struggle to build a genuine nationwide workers party and **b)** situated within a broader framework of democratic and socialist transformation.
Zohran’s campaign has clearly been a boon for the organization. NYC-DSA surpassed 10,000 members, and we are, every month, adding what amounts to a mid-sized DSA chapter (around 300 to 400 people) into our ranks. Chapters around the country have felt the Zohran Bump, and our organization has leapt back into the national spotlight. If nothing else, our growth can be felt in the[ increasingly bizarre attacks](https://x.com/andrewcuomo/status/1960072690636570896?ref=marxistunity.com) lobbed at us by our class adversaries. The campaign has shown that the people of New York are hungry for a clear platform that addresses our deteriorating economic conditions. It has also shown that the politics of Palestinian liberation are firmly electable. It has proven NYC-DSA capable, like no other organization in the city, of activating masses of politically-motivated volunteers to reach broad swaths of the electorate and transform electoral possibilities. The contrast between [the Zohran faithful](https://www.tiktok.com/@cassiewillson/video/7515662625779289387?ref=marxistunity.com) and [Cuomo’s paid canvassers](https://x.com/notchrisvolpe/status/1935077208676331949?ref=marxistunity.com) speaks to the DSA difference.
### **(Co-)Governing Without a Mandate**
We cannot presuppose a simple continuity between campaign and administration. And DSA’s interests as an independent organization must not be subsumed uncritically into those of a Zohran mayoralty. It is inevitable, however, that a failure to achieve Zohran’s popular platform would expose a deep weakness in our movement
Comrade Sid CW warned of this explicitly in “[Run Zohran?](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/run-zohran),” published in August of last year. “Victory,” he wrote, (at a time when this was regarded as a fully implausible scenario), “would thrust DSA into a governing coalition without a mandate to govern.” This runs the dire risk of discrediting socialism. DSA does not have anything near a majority on either the City Council or the State Assembly, and a neoliberal governor lives in the Executive Mansion in Albany. Though Governor Hochul’s [recent endorsement](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/09/14/opinion/hochul-endorsement-mamdani.html?ref=marxistunity.com) might signal the previously hostile Democratic establishment warming up to Zohran, it may also merely reflect the inevitability of his election and a maneuver to shape his tenure.
And it is not only that political allies are hard to come by, but that in their place are forces actively hostile to Zohran, DSA, and socialist politics. Quoted in [a recent Jacobin article](https://jacobin.com/2025/08/new-york-tax-rich-mamdani?ref=marxistunity.com), NYC-DSA co-chair Gustavo Gordillo rightly points out that the state legislature is full of people who “owe their power and their seats to the billionaire class.” And because of our undemocratic political system, and the fact that the municipal budget comes from either the state or (worse) from municipal bonds, dramatic political maneuvering and negotiations are objectively necessary for a Zohran administration to achieve its policy platform.
What leverage then does a Mayor Mamdani have in convincing these hostile forces to tax the rich? And how might that negotiation square with our socialist organization’s mandate to oppose all ruling-class political forces? This basic problem motivates the authors of the MANY proposal. Because of its lack of emphasis on either DSA’s role or rank-and-file democracy, it promotes an inside-track “governing coalition” strategy, which relies on compromises struck with politicians, union leaders, and non-profit executives within the Democratic Party establishment fold.
We counterpose this with a strategy of political independence, which relies on working-class organizations pushing forward a democratically determined program. Building DSA into a party with its own program is at the center of this strategy. But outside of DSA, this necessary work includes organizing the rank-and-file in the trade union and tenant movements. It means transforming groups like City Workers for Zohran, and the nascent Tenant Assemblies organized under DSA auspices into permanent, deliberative, rank-and-file organizations. This work is necessary to produce a bottom-up mandate for Zohran’s platform. It is also an organic means of keeping him in check, productively channeling discontent with the administration’s inevitable compromises, and preventing a drift to the right.
The strategy of political independence also comes with principled united front work; New York City is home to a rich ecosystem of militant independent working-class organizations—anti-imperialists, communists, socialists; worker centers, street vendor organizations, deliveristas. It should be a chapter priority to work within this milieu to convene popular assemblies that can serve to delegitimize the capitalist state while infusing working-class self-activity with the direction of socialism, and constantly creating pathways for the merger of the two. Rather than tack to our right and tail professional staffers and union presidents, our aim must be to consolidate the active and fighting worker movement of the city, without liquidating into the Democratic Party coalition. Our project to actualize Zohran’s agenda should be, at the same time, an argument for the working-class movements of New York City to join DSA.
We recognize the likely outcome will be a combination of both strategies, with both chapter leadership and the Zohran administration opting for the insider Democratic Party coalition approach. We view our role as building up the capacity of independent working-class organizations to develop and win their demands, to pose an alternative to the bourgeois municipal state, while fighting to democratize the “governing coalition” and make it more responsive to the demands of the rank-and-file in the workers’ movement. Alongside these tasks, we view our principle responsibility to build NYC-DSA into a fighting party organization, accountable to its members and unified around a democratically-decided program.
Advancing a political program apart from Zohran’s platform is particularly important because it is the responsibility of socialists, and socialist politicians specifically, to *delegitimize* the capitalist state; and by all appearances, Zohran’s administration is set to do precisely the opposite through its single-minded pursuit of economic reforms. The state under capitalism is not merely a terrain of struggle like any other, but the mediating architecture for our lack of political freedom and the reproduction of our exploitation and misery.
Vietnamese Communist Party Headquarters
### **Special Bodies of Armed Men**
The road ahead is perilous, and there is no guarantee of success. “Zohran Mamdani,” comrade Sid continues [in his 2024 essay](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/run-zohran), “would more than likely go down as one of the ‘least effective’ (to use bourgeois political terms) mayors in city history as the forces of capital muster against him. At best, he would be able to govern as a progressive while critics punch left and accuse us of attempting to sabotage his administration if our democratic processes put us into disagreement with his actions.” While we hold out hope for, and are committed to the possibility of, an unprecedented upswell of popular support that might transcend such dreary constrictions, we are wary of the compromises inherent to executive office—already forecasted in [Zohran’s rapid retreat from his defund the police positions](https://www.cnn.com/2025/08/30/politics/zohran-mamdani-police-nypd-defund?ref=marxistunity.com) of just a few years ago.
The more explicit contradictions of municipal executive governance are similarly ignored by comrades Eric, Emily, and Wen. Nowhere do the authors address the looming fact that Mayor Mamdani will be the functional boss of the largest police force in the country, one infamous for its brutality, its brazen lack of accountability, and its proactive hostility to mayors deemed ‘unfriendly.’ In this context, Zohran’s signal that he would apologize to the NYPD for previously calling the agency “racist, anti-queer & a major threat to public safety,” reflects these structural challenges. DSA-member Michael Lange [writes convincingly](https://www.michaellange.nyc/p/zohran-mamdanis-first-big-decision?ref=marxistunity.com) that the question of whether Zohran retains NYPD Commissioner Jessica Tisch, daughter of billionaire Loews Hotel CEO James Tisch, constitutes “the most consequential appointment of Mamdani’s early administration,” as well as his “most fraught.” Yet, nowhere in this analysis does he consider what any of this means for our purportedly abolitionist socialist organization.
An NYPD overseen by Zohran Mamdani will almost certainly murder not just one but many New Yorkers. It will brutalize protestors and quell dissent, harass homeless people, enforce evictions, lock up black and brown teenagers, and act as an occupying force in impoverished neighborhoods across the city—all while juicing crime stats to suit its political needs. It will even threaten Mamdani’s personal safety. Zohran’s compulsion to court the cops is less a mark on his character than it is a reflection of the political constitution of the city. Whether or not Zohran flies an ACAB flag is not important. What matters is that Zohran has signalled he will not wield his bully pulpit to educate New Yorkers on *why* the cops are so powerful, *how* they stand in the way of working-class democracy, and *what we can do* to work together to change this reality. Unfortunately, the win-at-all-costs approach, an approach the campaign shares with NYC-DSA leadership, obscures the fundamental antagonisms that define this city and capitalism writ large.
Our responsibility as NYC-DSA, and more broadly as a socialist party, is a vexing one. We should denounce loudly and plainly the carceral state and its punitive, reactionary violence, articulating an alternative positive vision for a democratic city. This also means defending our Mayor from the very institution that he is ostensibly in charge of. But we will have to recognize that Zohran, as mayor, will be Mayor before he is DSA cadre; that there will be an increasingly wide distance between the positions of our organization and those held by our elected official; and that we will have to include Zohran’s administration *in* our critiques of the carceral state and the city’s lack of democracy. Just as Zohran makes clear the distinctions between himself and DSA, we must make clear those distinctions between ourselves and his administration, even as we defend it against forces of reaction.
### **Conclusion: DSA for the MANY**
As a result of all these difficulties, the key task of the partyist wing of NYC-DSA for the duration of Zohran’s administration is to bridge the divide between national DSA and the local chapter, and advance the project of nationwide party-building. We recognize that our chapter leadership, representing a minority in DSA at large, is using Zohran’s success to drive a wedge between the NYC chapter and the national organization.
Partyists in NYC-DSA must fight for formal structures of accountability and communication between the chapter and the administration. It is less important that we have a particular ‘mechanism’ to communicate with Zohran than it is that we have open, democratic, collective deliberation over the positions staked out by our organization. These conversations have largely happened behind closed doors, and that must end. We can democratize our chapter through fighting for reforms like proportional representation, deliberative member meetings, a chapter-wide communications platform, and a chapter Democracy Commission, so that our orientation to Zohran, and any other political issue, is fully directed by the rank-and-file membership and not steered by cliques.
We must organize to place our chapter at the center of a militant working-class opposition within the city. This means to prioritize working with fighting organizations and with our comrades across the socialist left. It means building rank-and-file working-class organizations that can simultaneously produce democratic mandates *and* present alternatives to the bourgeois municipal state.
Zohran’s economic platform must be complemented by political struggle. We must stake out an alternative vision for governance, fighting for reforms like city charter revision and genuine municipal democratization. A rent freeze should be paired with a transformation of the Rent Guidelines Board into an unambiguous class instrument of tenants against their landlords, instead of merely mediating tensions between them. Socialists should campaign for a dramatic overhaul of city government, devolving the concentrated powers of the Mayor to the City Council, and reintroducing proportional representation. All the while, we should be honest about the challenges we face, and rail against barriers to enacting our program in the state and national government.
Finally, we must fight alongside Zohran against the inevitable reaction by the capitalist and landlord classes to even modest reform, against the propaganda of the police and the reactionary press, and resist whatever violence Trump’s government imposes on the City. This requires the growth and development of the chapter as a whole, and its ability to inspire creative organizing to build bastions of local, militant self-activity. To take advantage of the deep resonance of Zohran’s campaign with communities previously disconnected from DSA, we must develop deep roots in these communities, creating intentional pathways to bring them into the socialist movement through active membership in our party. Through chapter democratization, deep community organizing, and a growing capacity to organize New York’s multiracial and multinational working class, DSA can become a *party for the MANY*.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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[Printable Copy here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XafC0i-BTNdUay8Xg4W-pKl4Bq9dEdfdqEJBBHerw3E/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com)**.**
### Which of Marx’s Social Republics would you choose?
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/which-of-marxs-three-social-republics-would-you-choose/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:58:39.000Z
There is no longer any doubt that Marx’s conception of socialism was democratic republican through and through. Hal Draper and Richard N. Hunt made this claim in the 1960s and 1970s, and Bruno Leipold builds on and further substantiates their original insights in Citizen Marx. So this review will not be directed at those holdouts on the left who refuse to acknowledge these historical findings. Mike Macnair’s [review](https://jacobin.com/2025/05/republicanism-karl-marx-leipold-review?ref=marxistunity.com) of Citizen Marx in Jacobin took care of that. My focus will be on the three different versions of a social republic that Marx constructed at different points in his political career and the implications of each for us today.
MUG members have been studying and discussing Bruno Leipold’s writings for a number of years. His 2020 essay, “[Marx's Social Republic](https://brunoleipold.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/04/leipold-marxs-social-republic-2020.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com),” is in the MUG Reader, and *Citizen Marx* has been a subject of debate on the MUG Discord since it was published late last year. But for those not already familiar with Leipold’s writings, it is necessary to understand from the start that the “social” in Leipold’s “Marx’s Social Republic” does not refer to socialism or to some set of social policies that must be implemented for a republic to qualify as a “social republic.” That is what Marx meant by a “social republic” in *The Class Struggles in France* (1850)*,* but that is not what the “social” in “social republic” stands for in *The Civil War in France* (1871)or in *Citizen Marx.* As Leipold explains:
> Much of *The Civil War in France* is taken up with a moving defense of the Commune’s actions and corresponding condemnation of the atrocities committed by the Versailles government. But its theoretical appeal comes from its third section, where Marx gave a glowing endorsement of the Commune’s political institutions and identified them as the appropriate political form to bring about a socialist society. In one of many statements of this core idea, Marx argued that ‘the Communal Constitution would . . . serve as a lever for uprooting the economical foundations upon which rests the existence of classes, and therefore of class rule.’ It was this political breakthrough that Marx thought was the signal contribution of the Commune rather than any of its social reforms. He maintained that ‘The great social measure of the commune was its own working existence’ and what few ‘special measures’ it had introduced (such as the abolition of night work and workplace fines) flowed precisely from it being ‘a government of the people by the people.’ Or, as he otherwise summarized it, ‘the actual “social” character of their Republic consists only in this, that workmen govern the Paris Commune!’....(pp. 355-6)
>
> For Marx, the social republic of the Commune was ‘social’ not because it was a socialist economy but because it had the right political and constitutional features to reach it…. (p.356)
Leipold continues:
> This represents an important shift from Marx’s usage of ‘social republic’ in his 1848 writings. To return to the three aspects of a republic we outlined in Chapter 4 \[p. 221\], Marx there understood a ‘social republic’ to mean either (i) workers forming the governing class in a republic or (ii) that the economy of the republic was a socialist one. There was no sense in his 1848 writings that a social republic referred to (iii) a republic with a constitution that was particularly suited to maintaining or bringing about those first two aspects. By comparison, in his 1871 writings on the Commune, Marx explicitly dropped the economic meaning he attached to a social republic, while continuing to use it to refer to the working class being the governing class….(356-7)
Leipold’s comments are accurate in three important ways, but seriously misleading in another. First, it is true that Marx thought the Commune was “social” because of its constitutional structure and working-class governing composition, even though it did not implement major economic and social reforms, much less socialism. Second, Marx’s use of the word “social” to apply to constitutional structure rather than economic and social policies was a change from \[most\] of his writings on the 1848 French Revolution. Third, the addition of the category of constitutional structure in his writings on the Commune means Marx began to analyze the nature of republics from three different angles: constitutional structure, governing class composition, and the content of social policy, rather than from just the two angles of governing class composition and social policy. The misleading part is that Marx did in fact discuss the “social” character of democratic constitutions in his writings on the 1848 French and German Revolutions and the Chartists, but Leipold considers these earlier constitutional discussions “bourgeois” in contrast to the genuine working-class character of the Communal Constitution. Why?
### **Marx and Engels on the Working-Class Character of Universal Suffrage, 1846-52**
Leipold’s review of Marx’s and Engels’ writings on universal suffrage begins with Chartism (pp. 245-6):
> In addition to civic freedoms, the other key political institution of the bourgeois republic that Marx saw as a critical weapon in the struggle for communism was manhood suffrage (which he refers to as ‘universal’ suffrage). Though universal (manhood) suffrage might initially lead to the rule of the bourgeoisie (as it had in the Second \[French\] Republic), Marx was confident that its introduction would eventually lead to the working class coming to political power, especially once it had become the majority of the population and properly organized itself. That was particularly pronounced in his and Engels’s lavish praise of Chartism. We saw in chapter 3 \[p. 170\] that in 1846 they had already aligned themselves with its goal of ‘a democratic reconstruction of the Constitution upon the basis of the People’s Charter,’ by which the working class ‘will become the ruling class of England’...That enthusiasm continued once they were both exiled to Britain \[after the 1848 revolutions\]. Marx argued that since ‘the proletariat forms the large majority of the population . . . Universal Suffrage is the equivalent for political power for the working class of England.’ Marx is so sure of this consequence that he asserts that universal suffrage’s ‘inevitable result here is the political supremacy of the working class.’ He places such importance on this political goal that he even holds that achieving universal suffrage would ‘be a far more socialistic measure than anything which has been honoured with that name on the Continent.’ Engels similarly proclaimed that the English working class had no ‘guarantee for bettering their social position unless by Universal Suffrage, which would enable them to seat a Majority of Working Men in the House of Commons.’
Leipold immediately follows with a catalogue of Marx and Engels’ similar comments on the importance of universal suffrage in France (pp. 246-7):
> Marx and Engels’s confidence in universal (manhood) suffrage similarly extended to France (though its less advanced class composition meant they thought that universal suffrage would initially bring a broader popular coalition of proletarians, peasants, and petty bourgeoisie to power). Particularly emblematic for them were the important by-elections of 10 March 1850, in which left-wing Montagnard candidates won several important victories despite repressive measures against them. Marx and Engels saw the elections as a prime example of how universal (manhood) suffrage would necessarily lead to a continual expansion of political power for the left….
> The 10 March elections were indeed a severe political shock to the party of order, who concluded that the Second Republic’s brief experiment with universal (manhood) suffrage was too dangerous to continue. They introduced a number of technical measures on 31 May 1850 that effectively excluded much of the working class and limited the franchise to two-thirds of its previous size. Marx saw in this further confirmation of the threat universal (manhood) suffrage posed to the bourgeoisie, commenting that on ‘March 10 universal suffrage declared itself directly against the rule of the bourgeoisie; the bourgeoisie answered by outlawing universal suffrage.’ The experience had shown that though ‘\[b\]ourgeois rule is the outcome and result of universal suffrage, . . . is the meaning of the bourgeois constitution,’ their democratic commitment crumbles the ‘moment that the content of this suffrage, of this sovereign will, is no longer bourgeois rule.’
and then Germany (p. 247):
> For Marx, the bourgeoisie’s retreat from universal (manhood) suffrage captured the central tension of the bourgeois republic—that it tried to reconcile political equality with social inequality, i.e., representative democracy in the political sphere and capitalism in the economic. In a striking and under-appreciated passage in *Die Klassenkämpfe in Frankreich*, he argued that: "The fundamental contradiction of this constitution \[the bourgeois republic\], however, consists in the following: the classes whose social slavery the constitution is to perpetuate, proletariat, peasantry, petty bourgeoisie, it puts in possession of the political power through universal suffrage. And from the class whose old social power it sanctions, the bourgeoisie, it withdraws the political guarantees of this power. It forces the political rule of the bourgeoisie into democratic conditions, which at every moment help the hostile classes to victory and jeopardize the very foundations of bourgeois society…."
### **Why Does Leipold Believe Universal Suffrage is Bourgeois?**
Marx’s characterization of the Charter as “socialistic,” even though its demands were purely political, seems similar to his characterization of the Communal Constitution as “social.” But Leipold sees a fundamental difference between the two. In an extended discussion (pp. 241-50), Leipold explains why Marx’s confidence in the Chartist version of a democratic republic was “too optimistic”:
> Marx’s account of the ideological and political advantages to the working class of the bourgeois republic’s civic freedoms and democratic suffrage is an important counter to some of the tired antidemocratic stereotypes of Marx’s thought. Marx was evidently supportive of their introduction and very optimistic about their eventual consequences. The irony is that Marx may in fact have been too optimistic. More extensive experience with bourgeois republics than Marx had access to produces a less encouraging picture. On the ideological front, Marx certainly makes a plausible case that a republic would sweep away some of the ideological protection provided by a monarchy. But he also underestimates the degree to which bourgeois republics could and would develop their own ideological safeguards. The removal of formal political and legal inequalities might help focus struggle on continuing social inequalities, but it can also make those social inequalities appear to be the result of individual talent and effort. Generations of twentieth-century Marxists have, of course, traced the myriad ways in which ideological legitimation and pacification in bourgeois republics is maintained through the cultural sphere. Moreover, the political structures of a republic can themselves provide a useful ideological shield, particularly the status that comes from being a regime elected by the people. (p. 248)
In the above passage, Leipold is no longer discussing what Marx thought representative democracy would produce, but what Leipold thinks it has produced—a “bourgeois republic” that combines a constitutional representative democracy with the continuing rule of the bourgeoisie. This disappointing result leads Leipold to conclude:
> In Marx’s eagerness to distinguish himself from the various antipolitical socialisms, he overlooked some of the more radical insights on representation and political participation from his own early republicanism. In taking much of the political structure of the bourgeois republic as given and advocating for the working class to take power within its strictures, Marx might also be seen to have insufficiently developed a key aspect of his own 1848 constitutional analysis—that the bourgeois republic was constitutionally set up to ensure bourgeois rule. That insight might have led to the conclusion that if the working class was to emancipate itself socially, it would require its own republic, with a more radically democratic constitution. (p. 250)
That “more radically democratic constitution” was the Commune, which in Marx’s account included the democratic election of representatives, like the Charter, but went further and specified that representatives should be bound by specific instructions from the electorate, subject to recall, and serve short terms. Marx also specified that the legislature should carry out the executive functions of the state; members should be paid workmen’s wages; and all judges, administrators, militia, and police officials should also be elected and subject to recall. In Leipold’s view, Marx’s writings on the Commune, after two decades dedicated to the problems of “bourgeois republics,” marked a return to his earlier (1843) theory of "True Democracy,” a concept that combined modern representative electoral democracy with elements of direct democracy drawn from Rousseau and the Athenian polis. (pp. 109-18)
### **Two Flaws in Leipold’s Analysis**
I have two major disagreements with Leipold’s analysis:
1. The Commune in reality never functioned according to the ideal that Marx constructed in *The Civil War in France.* Leipold recognizes that Marx exaggerated the Commune’s accomplishments but retains Marx’s ideal of the Commune as a model for current politics because he believes the version of democratic republicanism represented by the Chartists has been achieved but has failed; and
2. We can only assume Leipold believes the United States is one of those representative democracies because he says nothing to the contrary. Using the three dimensions for analyzing republics outlined above, it seems Leipold thinks the US has a democratic constitutional structure combined with a bourgeois governing class overseeing bourgeois social policies. But the US has never had a democratic constitution. For that reason, the traditional Chartist goal of universal and equal suffrage in elections to a single legislature is still relevant in the US and should not be denigrated as a bourgeois stricture. (Though we have learned since the Chartists that proportional representation in multi-member districts is a much better system than Britain’s single-member districts.)
Here is what Leipold has to say about Marx’s exaggerations:
> Marx’s account of these political institutions—supposedly based on the Commune—did not always correspond to what the Commune had in fact implemented. The discrepancy might partly be explained by his imperfect access to information from Paris. But the more pertinent explanation lies in that Marx was not trying to provide ‘an account of what the Commune was, but of what it might have become.’ With *The Civil War in France*, Marx was making a political intervention into how the Commune should be interpreted. With anarchists, Blanquists, radical republicans, and even Comtean Positivists vying to appropriate the Commune, Marx wanted to stamp his own account on what it implied for radical politics. That meant highlighting those aspects that he endorsed and seizing on tendencies that he believed should be developed in future revolutionary iterations. (pp. 361-2)
One example of Marx’s exaggeration is the claim that the Commune paid its officials only “workmen’s wages”:
> The Commune had in fact only limited the salaries of public officials to a maximum of 6,000 francs a year when workers (in 1871) earned about 5 francs a day, giving them roughly 1,500 a year. Marx was aware of the actual figures, so his bending of the facts was a deliberate exaggeration of what the Commune had in fact achieved (an already radical step), in the direction of what he hoped future communist regimes would do. (pp. 382-3).
Another example is Marx’s omission of the Commune’s provision that officials might be appointed after competitive examinations rather than only by election:
> Marx’s repeated call for all public officials to be ‘elective, responsible, and revocable’ can be seen as a pithy formulation of this demand. But Marx’s account also subtly departs (perhaps deliberately so) from the Commune’s declaration by omitting its specification that public officials might be appointed ‘by election or competitive examination.’ (p. 381)
Marx himself gave a considerably more modest assessment of the Commune’s accomplishments ten years later, a period during which he continued to support the demand for universal and equal suffrage:
> \[A\]part from the fact that this was merely the rising of a town under exceptional conditions, the majority of the Commune was in no sense socialist, nor could it be. With a small amount of sound common sense, however, they could have reached a compromise with Versailles useful to the whole mass of the people – the only thing that could be reached at the time. The appropriation of the Bank of France alone would have been enough to dissolve all the pretensions of the Versailles people in terror, etc., etc. ([Marx to Domela Nieuwenhuis, 2/22/1881](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1881/letters/81%5F02%5F22.htm?ref=marxistunity.com))
The Commune survived for only two months while under siege by a much more powerful military force. Everyone must draw their own conclusions about the Commune’s actual accomplishments and how successful its vision of democracy would have been had it survived and then been integrated into a larger republic encompassing all of France. My judgment is that the Commune has been over-romanticized, not least by Marx himself, and any realistic present-day attempt to implement Marx’s proposals for deprofessionalization and citizen participation depends on first winning the battle for universal and equal suffrage.
### **Next to Last Words**
For the reasons given above, *Citizen Marx* is not a politically useful book for us in the United States. It takes no notice of the undemocratic structure of our constitutional system and dismisses universal and equal suffrage as a bourgeois ploy designed for ideological pacification.
Leipold’s historical accounts of the French and German Revolutions of 1848 are interesting and informative, but *Citizen Marx* is not a comprehensive chronological narrative like Richard N. Hunt’s *The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels*. The history in *Citizen Marx* is selective and deployed mainly as a vehicle to illustrate Leipold’s particular conception of political theory, which is derived from an academic circle formed around the study of Machiavelli’s republicanism. This strand of republicanism is elitist in its origins and differs from the equal liberty form of democratic republicanism created by the Levellers during the English Civil War. It has little or nothing to offer to our democratic socialist movement, but for those curious about what is currently going on in this academic arena, a few additional comments follow.
### **Leipold’s Republican Theory**
Leipold’s conception of republicanism is derived from the “foundational works \[of J. G. A. Pocock, Philip Pettit, and Quentin Skinner\] that unearthed the buried history of the tradition \[in Machiavelli and English ‘commonwealthmen’ like Harrington and Sydney\] and established it as the thriving field of study that exists today.” (quote, p. 17; citation of foundational works and the buried tradition, fn 58, p. 17) This is an odd intellectual project to draw from because these authors, although they criticize the Lockean liberal/market notion of “freedom as noninterference,” share with market liberals a suspicion of what Pettit calls “populist democracy” and generally agree with traditional constitutional separation-of-power arguments favoring safeguards against an excess of democracy. And, to the best of my knowledge, all of these authors classify the US as a democracy.
It’s not as if a general theory of freedom as nondomination is wrong, but that general theory needs to be concretized by commitments to specific political goals and institutional forms. Pettit et al. generally think modern liberal “democracies” just need nudges and reforms. Leipold is for nondomination in the ideal form of the Paris Commune and thinks universal suffrage is bourgeois. I’m for the Leveller-Paine-Rights of Man-Chartist-US Radical Republican theory of nondomination that focuses on first establishing universal and equal suffrage as the precondition for the longer-term aim of maximizing the spread of democracy into all other political, social, and economic institutions. Engels invokes this third republican tradition in the following passage. It was the strongest influence on Marx and Engels’s political thinking and the tradition we should continue today:
> In October 1846, while disseminating his own tactical ideas among the German artisans in Paris, Engels defined the proper road to communism as a ‘forcible democratic revolution.’ A month later, in an article chastising the French democrat Alphonse de Lamartine for proposing *indirect* elections, Engels appealed to the legendary Constitution of 1793: ‘The principles, indeed, of social and political regeneration have been found fifty years ago. Universal suffrage, direct election, paid representation— these are the essential conditions of political sovereignty. Equality, liberty, fraternity— these are the principles which ought to rule in all social institutions.’ (Hunt, *The Political Ideas of Marx and Engels*, vol. 1, p. 136)
### **Are the Chains of Capitalist Economic Domination Visible or Invisible?**
Leipold also has a chapter on economic domination titled “Chains and Invisible Threads,” which reviews Marx’s writings on wage slavery. But there is an anomaly in Leipold’s account and Marx’s theory that Leipold does not clarify. It involves the fact that wage workers themselves and other social observers understood the nature of wage slavery years before Marx and Engels entered politics. Leipold cites E. P. Thompson’s *The Making of the English Working Class* and quotes from the writings of Felicite de Lamennais as evidence for the existence of this common understanding:
> Lamennais in his hugely popular 1839 pamphlet *De l'esclavage Moderne* (*On Modern Slavery*)...argued that their reliance on wages to survive… meant that between ‘the capitalist and the proletarian, therefore, almost the same actual relations exist as between the master and the slave in ancient societies.’ Though proletarians enjoyed the freedom to sell their labor, which Lamennais considered ‘an immense advantage over the ancient slave,’ the proletarian’s dependency on a capitalist meant that ‘this freedom is only fictitious.’ (pp. 29-30)
Of course, Marx took up the concept of wage slavery and subjected it to minute analysis in *Capital*, but the anomaly is that Marx characterized these wage relations as “invisible”:
> ‘The Roman slave was held by chains; the wage-laborer is bound to his owner by invisible threads.’ (*Citizen Marx,* p. 15, 304, 315).
Leipold chooses Marx’s characterization of invisible threads as the title of his chapter, even though he cites other evidence in the same chapter that the constraints of the wage-labor relationship were apparent to many workers and other social observers. How did an understanding of wage slavery that was once commonplace become invisible? Did it actually become invisible, or was Marx exaggerating? Or perhaps his argument was aimed instead at a particular part of the working class that was not as politically advanced as those workers who could see capitalism’s chains?
Partial answers to these questions are that Marx did exaggerate for dramatic and political effect (whether he was aware of it or not), and his argument was in part aimed at English trade unionists and French Proudhonists in the First International who proposed inadequate solutions for wage slavery. But the fact is, there were always advanced parts of the working class who were never duped by capitalist notions of freedom and continued to believe in the necessity of democracy and socialism. It was these advanced workers and their representatives who created the Commune and the later Marxist political parties.
The belief that something invisible in the wage labor relationship was uncovered by Marx is questionable and is generally associated today with the further belief that capitalists maintain their rule by ideological mystification of the working class through cultural mechanisms, a belief Leipold also holds. Such beliefs and theories, in my opinion, are part of a larger “[dominant ideology thesis](https://api.pageplace.de/preview/DT0400.9781317652380%5FA24448706/preview-9781317652380%5FA24448706.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)” that shifts the main responsibility for the weakness and disorganization of the US left from intellectuals who fail to see the political importance of our undemocratic political system onto a working class supposedly blind to its own enslavement.
### **Universal and Equal Suffrage Is Not Part of the Old State Machinery**
*The Civil War in France* is famous for Marx's declaration that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes;” and Leipold repeats it several times in *Citizen Marx.* Marx and Engels reemphasized this point in their 1872 Preface to a new edition of the *Manifesto*, saying they would now want to change the text of a revised *Manifesto* if it had not already become a historical document which they no longer had any right to alter. These remarks have been taken by many, including Leipold, to be a self-criticism by Marx and Engels of their own previously held views on the state and revolutionary strategy. Here are Leipold’s comments:
> Marx himself recognized that this insight—that the state needed to be fundamentally transformed—represented a shift in his own thinking. When the *Manifest der Kommunistischen Partei* was republished in 1872, Marx and Engels made sure that this insight was reflected in a new preface: "In view of the practical experience gained, first in the February Revolution, and then, even more so, in the Paris Commune, where the proletariat for the first time held political power for two whole months, this program has in places become antiquated. Particularly, the Commune delivered the proof that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made State machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.”
> Marx and Engels’s public admission that they had been mistaken in their earlier political program is a rare example of explicit self-criticism and self-correction (especially in the case of Marx, who was not usually given to such reflective displays). Marx clearly thought the Commune was a historical breakthrough important enough for him to publicly revise his views. (pp. 358-9)
This interpretation is wrong.
The strongest evidence that Marx’s views on the state had not changed is his April 1871 [Letter to Kugelman](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/letters/71%5F04%5F12.htm?ref=marxistunity.com), where he recalled his statement in *The Eighteenth Brumaire* (1852) that “the next attempt of the French revolution will be no longer, as before, to transfer the bureaucratic-military machine from one hand to another, but to *smash* it.” If Marx had always believed the bureaucratic-military machine had to be smashed, who did not? In *The Civil War in France,* Marx identifies the bourgeois revolutions of 1830 and 1848 as instances of the transfer of the machine rather than its destruction. Marx was only referring to previous bourgeois revolutions, not working-class revolutions, because there hadn’t been any. Only the Commune, the first working-class republic, was able to destroy it for a short time. But within the Commune itself, there were elements who, prior to the establishment of the Commune, did advocate seizing the old state machinery and using it. Marx only alludes to these elements obliquely in *The Civil War* *in France,* but Engels explains in his 1891 [Introduction](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/1871/civil-war-france/postscript.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) that:
> The members of the Commune were divided into a majority of the Blanquists, who had also been predominant in the Central Committee of the National Guard…. The great majority of the Blanquists at that time were socialist only by revolutionary and proletarian instinct…And did the opposite of what the doctrines of their school prescribed \[which was to seize centralized state power themselves and impose a temporary dictatorship of an elite few\].
Marx and Engels’s criticism was aimed at the Blanquists, not themselves.
Leipold’s particular twist on the “Marx and Engels were criticizing themselves” interpretation involves defining universal and equal suffrage retrospectively as bourgeois, a position never held by Marx and Engels themselves after the mid-1840s. Leipold rejects the Chartist universal and equal suffrage model of the social republic and focuses instead on the largely unrealized Communal ideal of imperative mandates, elections of officials, and recall, even though the latter are impossible without the former.
We in the US have to choose which parts of Marx's writings on democracy we should emphasize: his and Engels's lifelong advocacy of universal and equal representation in a single legislative body or his more speculative projections of what he hoped maximum citizen participation might look like in the future after the battle for democracy had been won. Leipold focuses on the speculative projections, apparently because he thinks universal and equal suffrage already exists. I disagree. Winning universal and equal suffrage is still our first priority.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Review: Stars in My Crown
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/film-review-stars-in-my-crown/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:59:32.000Z
Jacques Tourneur’s Stars in My Crown ends as it begins, with a puzzling formal gesture. Instead of pushing the camera in on the church, it pulls it away, giving the master shot an even wider frame rather than the expected cut to a close-up. The film is a closed loop, driven by conflicts that magically seem to find their way to religious harmony, matching the rosy-eyed tone of adult John’s voiceover, tainted with the ahistorical and delusional sentimentalities of childhood memory. Whether or not we as an audience receive Walesburg as such is a separate matter, informed by that very choice to pull the camera away. As Chris Fujiwara notes in his book on Tourneur, “watching the film is not going to be a progressive enlightenment; one might even say that to begin the film with this shot precludes the possibility of progress.” And to end the film with this same shot is just a further affirmation that no great realization of either justice or plain reality is in store for these small town residents. As for us, a literal physical distance is being enlarged, abstracting whatever sympathies we might have for these characters.
This formal unity of beginning and end is paralleled in a more delicate social unity, so tenuously suggested by the film’s celebratory conclusion. Josiah Gray, after saving a black man from being lynched by hooded white laborers, has finally roped every skeptic into Sunday service. He ostensibly accomplished this through the peaceful honesty of his actions, channeling the will of God. Of course, we know that Reconstruction didn’t play out through grace notes like this. In Alabama, the home state of the film’s original author Joe David Brown, the planters and poor whites allied to place their concentrated social weight on other white people who sided with freed slaves. W. E. B. Du Bois elaborates, “Such persons were warned and attacked until they fled the state or made peace with the new masters.” It can’t be as simple and cordial as Josiah makes it out to be, or at least how John remembers it.
Nonetheless, the film does synchronize with history in other ways. It’s fitting that Lon Backett wants to deprive Uncle Famous of his land specifically for mining purposes, just as Northern capital wanted to with the help of white convict labor. Famous’ refusal to give up his land reflects a widespread understanding among freedmen that “this land hunger – this absolutely fundamental and essential thing to any real emancipation of the slaves” had to be fulfilled and protected. Unfortunately, this basic demand “was met by ridicule, by anger, and by dishonest and insincere efforts to satisfy it.” In other words, there is nothing surprising about Famous’ ultimate defenselessness, especially given his lack of a visible black community, let alone a militarized and organized one. The planter capitalists, on the other hand, could easily initiate their counterrevolution of property “by eagerness on the part of the poor whites to check the demands of the Negroes by any means, and by willingness to do the dirty work of the revolution that was coming, with its blood and crass cruelties, its bitter words, upheaval and turmoil. This was the birth and being of the Ku Klux Klan.” And this upheaval and turmoil will heed no laws, as long as they remain mere words on paper. As Famous says himself after being initially accosted by Backett: “Just saying a good thing don’t make it so.”
Is this to suggest that Tourneur was half-clueless, that he failed to realize the limitations in his own material? Fujiwara’s citation of John Keats’ negative capability is a worthwhile starting point to answering this question. Following such logic, Tourneur’s images are a negation of his personality, a commitment to a certain filmed objectivity that basks in uncertainty and rejects the straightforward application of imposed reason. The role of John’s voiceover is an indication of this negative capability, since we are made privy to events far outside his individual point of view. Although nostalgia informs the film’s tone, the camera retains an autonomy beyond it, much as it does in John Ford’s *How Green Was My Valley.* And what the camera captures and shows us are details that might complicate the surface of what we immediately see.
Let us return to that final scene in the church, where Josiah is victorious in uniting the town. The second shot we get in this sequence is one of Backett, who just the night before was in a white hood ready to kill an innocent black man for his land. Now, he is singing forcefully with his head tilted up, an almost mocking faux reverence in his expression, overcompensating for the obvious sins he has committed, not unlike the dramatic gestures of Creon in Straub-Huillet’s *Antigone*. But Backett only occupies half the frame. Right beside him is a large window, made to look like a portal to another world by the shallow focus. Out in that other world, conveniently excluded from this joyous occasion, we see a blurry figure attending to animal duties. We can only surmise that this is Famous. Josiah’s liberal pacificism may have temporarily saved him, but it did nothing to grant him a place in this false social unity. Instead, his would-be murderer keeps his stature and his power and, by extension, his capacity to enact violence again. A powerful speech cannot defeat the demands of capital.
Seen in the broader context of Tourneur’s filmmaking, “Famous’s appearance in the window is related to those unaccountable moments, like the hand on the balustrade in *Night of the Demon*, that turn Tourneur’s films inside out and open them to an alternate reality.” In this instance, that alternate reality is simply the reality of how Reconstruction failed to bring an industrial democracy and dictatorship of labor not only to freed slaves but all American citizens, a reality so damning and potent that it continues to haunt us even in moments of success and celebration. Take the immediate aftermath of Josiah reading out Famous’ phantom will. What exactly can be discerned from faces cloaked in white cloth is at best enigmatic. Are they holding their head down out of shame or frustration? Have they really changed their minds or do they only feel temporarily embarrassed? The Klansman carrying a rope throws it down like a petulant child and storms off, instigating the others to quietly leave as well. It’s easy enough to make our enemies look pathetic like this. Actually defeating them and ending their terror permanently is a separate matter. Maybe Famous understands this. It’s why he keeps his head down and shakes Josiah’s hand with a blank expression. Josiah is the one who gets the self-satisfied quip, not Famous. Bear in mind, Josiah is the same man who established his presence in Walesburg by pulling two guns on a bar full of men and who later punishes a bully by physically humiliating him. He grasps the value of violence and power, how it can set things definitively. How is it not justified in the face of a lynch mob?
With these ambiguities, *Stars in My Crown* poses an important question to its audience: are such ambiguities generative or are they an act of ethical negligence? Phrased more directly, does negative capability actually apply to such politically explicit material? In the concluding chapter of *Seven Types of Ambiguity*, William Empson uses the final two lines of “To Celia” by Ben Jonson as an example of an ambiguity that has no real critical relevance. They say the opposite of what they mean because it is lyrical to do so, not so they can create further contradictions in thought, an aesthetic choice for aesthetic purposes. Empson clarifies, “This is not to say that the last two lines are an accident, and should be altered; you may feel it gives a touching completeness to his fervor that he feels so sure no one will misunderstand him.” To then reverse this criteria and reapply it to *Stars in My Crown* is to determine whether or not the film’s ending is merely an outpouring of sentimentality owing to the tonal fervor of the rest of the film or if a more deliberate complication is at play. Without delving into autobiographical information or gaining access to behind-the-scenes material, we can only make this determination based on the film and its choices. The interpretative responsibility of criticism thus reasserts itself against the handwaving of negative capability.
That isn’t to say that a certain openness shouldn’t remain in how we engage with films, especially in our initial viewings, where we can be overtaken by the emotional force of what we’re experiencing. But we must permit our critical faculties to gradually make their intervention, to question why it is that we respond certain images and scenes in the ways that we do. Empson lays out this procedure, saying, “When you have made a quotation, you must first show the reader how you feel about it, by metaphor, implication, devices of sound, or anything else that will work; on the other hand, when you wish to make a critical remark, to explain why your quotation takes effect as it does, you must state your result as plainly (in as transferable, intellectually handy terms) as you can.” At a certain point, the mysticism should drop and give way to something more concrete and grounded. Films are constructed with discernible reasoning, sophisticated as they might be, just as history unfolds as a consequence of discrete causes and actions.
The uniting of these two tendencies within criticism brings to mind a similar issue that Jacques Rancière contended with, specifically the problem of “how to engineer an equivalence between the pleasure derived from shadows projected on a screen and the intelligence proper to an art or a worldview.” Placing this problem within the explicit realm of cinema and its relationship to Marxist politics, he elaborates that in order “to bring them together one needed to postulate a mysterious equivalence between the historical materialism underlying the workers’ struggle and the implicit materialism of the cinematic relation of bodies to their environment.” Mysterious is the key word here since such an equivalence is not something that can be taken as a given. The literal materiality of mise en scène doesn’t necessarily entail a grasp of historical materialism and its application to a particular narrative. If the connection is to be drawn, it must be explained.
In that shot of Backett singing, there is a physical relation established between him and Famous, one in the foreground and the other in the background, separated on set by a window and in-camera by shallow focus. The man with economic and political power dominates the far more visible plane of this shot on virtually all axes, while the man with little of either is obscure enough to be unnoticeable even with multiple viewings. In an almost straightforward manner, the craft of cinema has embodied the relations of production of this period of counterrevolution and reaction. At least with this one shot, Tourneur is able to bridge the gaps posited by Rancière. And yet, it remains tethered to a scene of seemingly uncritical celebration, foreclosing a historical trajectory that hasn’t ended at all.
The sobering limitations of cinema start to present itself, not least of all in a Hollywood production from 1950\. A Marxist film critic naturally demands from cinema “that it should reveal at the same time all the ambiguity of the world and how to deal with that ambiguity. The obscurity of the relationship assumed to exist between clarity of vision and the energies of action is projected onto it. Cinema can illuminate action, but perhaps only by casting doubt on the obviousness of that relation.”And so I follow the path of *Stars in My Crown*, looping back around to where I started. The camera pulls away from the church just as we will move away from the film, walking out of the theater or out of our homes into the world. We gain this distance not just to look back on the film with clearer eyes but to look elsewhere, the revolutions betrayed and incomplete, the actions that our present situation demands of us. Cinema has its truths, its capacity to clarify and rouse. The rest is still up to us.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Political Freedom: Its Allies & Its Enemies
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/political-freedom-its-allies-amp-its-enemies/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:04:26.000Z
In the nearly two years since October 7, 2023, the growing movement for Palestinian liberation has been met by harsh backlash. [Universities](https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/apr/26/university-student-protesters-discipline?ref=marxistunity.com), [police](https://www.nytimes.com/2025/08/12/nyregion/nypd-gaza-protest-suit.html?ref=marxistunity.com), and [prosecutors](https://theappeal.org/pro-palestine-campus-protesters-harshest-charges/?ref=marxistunity.com) across the U.S. crack down on calls to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza using spurious accusations of antisemitism and support for “terrorists.” Just weeks ago, in my city of Cambridge, MA, police violated the city’s longstanding ban on chemical weapons, [using pepper spray on BDS protestors](https://www.thecrimson.com/article/2025/8/4/capital-one-protest-arrests/?ref=marxistunity.com) opposing Capital One’s funding of Israeli arms dealers. Non-citizens are particularly vulnerable to political repression. [Rümeysa Öztürk](https://www.wbur.org/news/2025/04/11/tufts-student-rumeysa-ozturk-detention-transport?ref=marxistunity.com) was kidnapped in Somerville and imprisoned by federal agents after she wrote an op-ed criticizing Israel’s genocide.
While freedom of speech, assembly, and press are widely regarded as core civil liberties in the U.S. political system, the Palestine exception looms large. This begs the question: if the U.S. government can disregard nominally essential civil liberties in service of the U.S. empire and its client states, what recourse do working and oppressed people have to protect their right to full social and political participation?
Our political system has many tools to suppress working-class power at its disposal. They include, among others: our unelected Supreme Court—which recently gave a green light to [mass human trafficking](https://www.npr.org/2025/06/23/g-s1-71529/supreme-court-south-sudan-deportation?ref=marxistunity.com) and imprisonment of immigrants in concentration camps—our imperial President’s authority to wage war on working-class people from [Yemen](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/world/u-s-strikes-yemen-oil-port-in-deadly-escalation-of-trumps-campaign-against-the-houthis?ref=marxistunity.com) and [Iran](https://www.npr.org/2025/06/21/nx-s1-5441127/iran-us-strike-nuclear-trump?ref=marxistunity.com) to [LA](https://www.npr.org/2025/06/09/g-s1-71640/trump-mobilizes-marines-for-duty-in-los-angeles?ref=marxistunity.com) and [DC](https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/cy7ypm6zxp2o.amp?ref=marxistunity.com), our aristocratic Senate privileging [land over people](https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/27/learning/whats-going-on-in-this-graph-nov-9-2022.html?ref=marxistunity.com) and abetting Republican minority rule, and our brutal carceral and immigration systems which create an underclass of workers without voting rights.
These are not simply the unintended consequences of a flawed “democracy”—they are features of a constitutional system designed to suppress majority political participation by workers and enslaved people. While most in DSA agree that the Constitution has elements which impede our fight for democratic socialism—a proportional legislature and universal suffrage are included in DSA’s 2024 [Workers Deserve More](https://2024.dsausa.org/democracy/?ref=marxistunity.com) program—some members argue that it is dangerous to openly undermine the Constitution because we must defend its civil protections like freedom of speech and press.
To be clear, social and political freedoms are essential. But they are not protected by a piece of paper—they were won, and are protected, by powerful class interests. The capitalist courts at best only provide flimsy and temporary safeguards, and at worst actively undermine our rights. For lasting social and political freedoms of the working class, we must fight to overthrow the whole constitutional order and win pluralistic working-class rule in a democratic socialist republic.
**\* \* \***
In the popular understanding of U.S. history, the Bill of Rights—the first ten amendments to the Constitution—was passed as a check on government interference against individual liberties. When it first went into effect in 1791, though, no one understood it as protecting an individual’s freedom of speech or press, their right to an attorney at trial, or any of the other protections therein. The Bill of Rights merely prohibited the *federal* government from restricting these freedoms. State governments, on the other hand, were given free rein. The Bill of Rights was not about individual liberties—it was a set of concessions to the Jeffersonian anti-federalist local elites in the name of “states’ rights.”
This limited legal interpretation was affirmed by *Barron v. Baltimore* in 1833, in which the Court ruled the Fifth Amendment “not applicable” during a dispute over harbor rights because, compared to the federal government, states are “distinct governments framed by different persons and for different purposes.” The Court justified its decision using a specific history of Constitutional ratification—anti-federalists in several states demanded, as a condition of ratification, “security against the apprehended encroachments of the General \[Federal\] Government—not against those of local governments.” The Court’s unanimous decision reflected the common sense of the time.
The legal foundations for the eventual “incorporation”—or applicability of the Bill of Rights to state and local governments—were laid during early Reconstruction, when the power of the Radical Republicans was at its peak. During the Civil War, enslaved people in Confederate states [refused to work](https://files.libcom.org/files/black%5Freconstruction%5Fan%5Fessay%5Ftoward%5Fa%5Fhistory%5Fof%5F.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) and crossed enemy lines in droves, worsening the economic woes of the Confederacy and bolstering the ranks of the Union’s military and labor force. As the war drew to a close, Republicans controlling Congress saw formerly-enslaved people as a new base of power in the flailing Confederacy. In an attempt to safeguard the political participation of this base, they passed Reconstruction amendments like the Fourteenth Amendment, which purported to block states from depriving “any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law” (“Due Process Clause”) or denying “to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws” (“Equal Protection Clause”).
Some proponents of the Reconstruction amendments, like Sen. Charles Sumner, [argued](https://texaslawreview.org/the-second-founding-and-the-first-amendment/?ref=marxistunity.com) these amendments should be understood to dramatically reshape “every clause and every line and every word” of the Constitution to “be interpreted uniformly and thoroughly for human rights.” Other conservative or moderate Republicans, and Democrats like President Andrew Johnson, [believed](https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/july-19-1867-message-regarding-reconstruction-legislation?ref=marxistunity.com) in keeping as much of the pre-war Constitutional order as they could salvage. In any event, the practical effects of Reconstruction were not decided by politicians’ wordsmithing and clever argumentation, but by the capacity of various classes and factions within them to mobilize economic and military power.
\* \* \*
Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Courthouse and Sherman’s devastating march to the sea demonstrated the Confederacy’s inability to continue large-scale military resistance to the Union’s armies. With the collapse of the Confederate military, the Republican-controlled Congress was able to dictate conditions of re-entry of Confederate states to the U.S., obliging their approval of the Reconstruction amendments.
Throughout and following the Civil War, many Black leaders and some of their white allies connected legal equality to calls for redistribution of slaveholders’ land to the families that worked it. Sherman heeded these calls in some areas under control of his army, issuing his [Special Field Order No. 15](https://www.georgiaencyclopedia.org/articles/history-archaeology/shermans-field-order-no-15/?ref=marxistunity.com) to grant 400,000 acres of Confederate land to freedmen. Within a year of Sherman’s redistributive attempt, however, Johnson [ordered](https://www.zinnedproject.org/news/tdih/special-field-15/?ref=marxistunity.com) most of the land returned to its former white owners and sent in federal troops to evict freedmen. Without land redistribution, the agricultural labor force of the south shifted from enslaved labor to sharecropping. This maintenance of the economic status quo all but ensured the eventual restoration of legal white supremacy across the former Confederacy.
President Johnson consistently intervened to frustrate Reconstruction, and his [1867 annual message to Congress](https://millercenter.org/the-presidency/presidential-speeches/december-3-1867-third-annual-message-congress?ref=marxistunity.com) was a broadside against Congress’s decision, over his veto, to split the former Confederacy into military districts subject to martial law. He referenced the Constitution more than 50 times in the speech, primarily to argue Congressional Reconstruction violated Confederate states’ constitutional rights. He also came out in favor of the eradication of the fiat currency system adopted by Lincoln to finance the Civil War. In doing so, Johnson sided with the northern banker segment of the Republican coalition and against expansionist western farmers and impoverished southern freedmen.
A few months after his speech, Johnson was impeached by the House. Were Johnson removed, he would have been succeeded by Benjamin Wade, a leader of the Senate’s Radical Republicans. Wade was a former laborer who drew the ire of northern capital for his ties to labor unions and support for fiat currency, which threatened bankers’ profits on loans and represented a reprieve for debtors. When several Republican senators flipped and Johnson was acquitted by a single vote, Wade’s support for fiat currency was a key factor. *The Detroit Post* [wrote](http://www.thelatinlibrary.com/chron/civilwarnotes/wade.html?ref=marxistunity.com) that “Andrew Johnson is innocent because Ben Wade is guilty of being his successor.”
Johnson finished out his term to the end, and was succeeded by former Union General Ulysses Grant. Grant was somewhat more willing than Johnson to impose Reconstruction on the former Confederacy, and used Congress’s Enforcement Acts and Ku Klux Klan Act to stamp out the first iteration of the Klan. However, with rising unemployment from the financial panic of 1873, repeated [uprisings](https://www.ausa.org/sites/default/files/LWP-66-Anatomy-of-a-Failed-Occupation-The-US-Army-in-the-Former-Confederate-States-1865-to-1877.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) by white southerners against Republican voters and elected officials began to overwhelm the political will of northern Republicans. Reconstruction formally ended when Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was handed the presidency by southern Democrats in exchange for his promise to withdraw the remaining federal troops from the South.
Jacob Lawrence, **Soldiers and Students* (1962)
\* \* \*
As Reconstruction wound down and southern landowners reasserted control over the levers of political power, the Supreme Court again weighed in on the applicability of the Bill of Rights to states in *United States v. Cruikshank* (1876). This case involved the federal prosecution of white perpetrators of the Colfax massacre, where dozens of Black freedmen assembled to uphold Louisiana’s disputed gubernatorial election were slaughtered. The Court ruled in favor of the murderers, holding that the right to free assembly “was not intended to limit the powers of the State governments in respect to their own citizens.” It reiterated this limited view of the applicability of the Bill of Rights in *Presser v. Illinois* (1886), where it upheld convictions of socialist militia members, arguing the Second Amendment did not prevent states from prohibiting their residents from forming militias.
According to these decisions, citizens had no right to protect themselves, and the federal government had no authority to intervene to protect citizens’ rights to speech and assembly. When considering the property rights of railroad tycoons, however, and not the political rights of Black southerners or socialist militants, the Supreme Court held a different opinion*.*
In *Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad Co. v. City of Chicago* (1897), the Court broke with established precedent and “incorporated” the Fifth Amendment’s prohibition on taking property without compensation—previously applied only to the federal government—to apply to state and local governments. Incorporation rests on the idea that the Due Process Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment gives local governments some obligation to follow constitutional restrictions. This ruling—granting a titan of industry’s request to raid Chicago’s coffers—is indicative of the Court’s willingness to change its tune when appealed to by the ruling class.
In 1925, the Court theoretically extended incorporation to the First Amendment’s free speech and press protections in *Gitlow v. New York*. This case involved the prosecution of a socialist politician for publishing his faction’s revolutionary literature in violation of New York’s “Criminal Anarchy Law” during the first Red Scare (1919-1920). The Court ruled that, in theory, the First Amendment protected the right to publish free of repression by state or local governments. However, the Court also took the opportunity to distinguish revolutionary socialist ideas from protected discourse which does not threaten capital’s hegemony over the state. Noting that Gitlow was “a member of the Left Wing Section of the Socialist Party, a dissenting branch or faction of that party formed in opposition to its dominant policy of ‘moderate Socialism,’” the Court ruled that his printing and distribution of the faction’s manifesto and program could be outlawed. First Amendment protections did not include “publications or teachings which tend to subvert or imperil the government.” Here, the Court made explicit that it would only tolerate speech that does not threaten the ruling class.
\* \* \*
In October 1929, the stock market crashed, plunging much of the world into the Great Depression and shaking the foundations of capitalist governments. The spiking unemployment rate empowered socialist and communist groups like the Communist Party’s Unemployed Councils, which held [over 700 protests](https://depts.washington.edu/moves/unemployed%5Fmap.shtml?ref=marxistunity.com) across the country in the early 1930s. In this context, lawyers from CPUSA’s International Labor Defense twice appealed the death sentences of nine Black teenagers convicted by all white juries in *Powell v. Alabama* (1932) and *Norris v. Alabama* (1935). The teenage boys, accused of rape, were nearly lynched before being rushed through show trials with attorneys who refused to help them. The Court, facing militant working-class pressure, twice sided with CPUSA’s lawyers and ordered retrials—first, because the teenagers were not adequately represented, violating the thus-incorporated right to counsel in capital cases, and second, that Black people were excluded from the juries, violating the Equal Protection Clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.
While the trials of the boys dragged on for years, these rulings created precedent for the right of the accused to be represented by attorneys in state—and not just federal—capital cases, and judged by a jury of their peers. Once this precedent was set, and with no desire to spark additional unrest, the Court incorporated additional rights. These included the freedom to exercise religion for conscientious objectors to mandatory conscription in *Hamilton v. Regents of University of California* (1934), and freedom of assembly for the Communist Party (when not advocating for revolution) in *De Jonge v. Oregon* (1937).
\* \* \*
Following WWII, the U.S. looked to promote its national identity as an opponent of the U.S.S.R. U.S. politicians [contrasted](https://www.trumanlibrary.gov/library/public-papers/56/special-message-congress-greece-and-turkey-truman-doctrine?ref=marxistunity.com) “individual liberties” with Soviet “totalitarian\[ism\]” and “our [western Christian world](https://pages.uoregon.edu/eherman/teaching/texts/McCarthy%5FWheeling%5FSpeech.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)” with “the atheistic Communist world.” Along these lines, further incorporation of rights continued in the immediate post-war period. In *Everson v. Board of Education* (1947), the Court ruled that individuals had nominal freedom from state or local government establishment of religion. It also found, however, that bussing students to Christian schools did not represent state establishment of religion. *In re Oliver* (1948) extended the right to a public trial to state and local courts.
With the ramp up of the Cold War and the second Red Scare, the U.S. ruling class decided to temper its liberal “democratic” national identity with active suppression of the organized left. The Court followed Sen. Joseph McCarthy and his allies in both ruling parties, backtracking on its decision in *De Jonge v. Oregon*. In *Dennis v. U.S.* (1951), it upheld convictions of eleven Communist Party leaders under the Smith Act, holding that even without specific evidence of calls for revolution, all Communist Party activities were part of a “conspiracy to advocate” for “an attempt to overthrow the Government by force and violence.”
By the 1960s, however, the rise of the civil rights movement and, later, the anti-war movement stretched state capacity for repression increasingly thin as both movements faced harsh treatment by the police and prosecutors. The Court issued a string of incorporation rulings designed to limit abusive police and prosecutorial practices in response. These included *Mapp v. Ohio* (1961), prohibiting “unreasonable” searches and seizures; *Robinson v. California* (1962), prohibiting cruel and unusual punishment; *Gideon v. Wainwright* (1963) and *Argesinger v. Hamilin* (1972), expanding right to counsel; *Malloy v. Hogan* (1964), incorporating freedom from self-incrimination; *Pointer v. Texas* (1965) and *Washington v. Texas* (1967), granting rights to compel and confront witnesses; *Parker v. Gladden* (1966), *Klopfer v. North Carolina* (1967), and *Duncan v. Louisiana* (1968), promising a speedy and impartial jury trial; and *Benton v. Maryland* (1969), prohibiting multiple state prosecutions for one offense. With these rulings, the doctrine of incorporation largely reached its modern form and covered most of the Bill of Rights.
**\* \* \***
Even now, though, the words of the Constitution do not protect us. Centuries of U.S. history show us that, unless forced to concede, the courts protect capital and white supremacy and repress the efforts of working and oppressed people to fight back. Despite the nominal protections of the First Amendment, we have all borne witness to the Palestine exception to free speech, with opposition to Israel’s genocide recast as antisemitism and used to exact academic, professional, and even criminal repercussions.
Despite the slew of newly-incorporated rights in the criminal legal system, the U.S. prison population has ballooned from [198,870](https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcsus5084.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) in 1970 to [1,230,100](https://bjs.ojp.gov/document/p22st.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) in 2022\. So long as social and political liberties are subject to the whims of the ruling class and their lapdogs on the Supreme Court, they will be used to weaken working-class efforts to resist capitalism, imperialism, and carceral violence—whether through removing checks on capital, placing revolutionary speech, press, and assembly outside the bounds of protected discourse, or by granting nominal concessions to ease class tensions.
Until workers assume democratic control over both the engines of the economy and the halls of political power, any protections we win will be temporary bandages for the wounds of capitalist exploitation, ready to be ripped away at the first sign that our class is not prepared to defend them.
Popular misconceptions about the origins and nature of U.S. social and political liberties persist, supported by classroom history curricula and the near-religious devotion to the Constitution demanded by much of U.S. society. The Constitution and Bill of Rights are still broadly looked upon favorably. Some DSA members, recognizing the uphill battle required to shake this social misunderstanding, dismiss pro-democracy agitation against the Constitution as hopeless or, more generously, untimely.
But politics does not simply reflect majorities—it creates them. We cannot hope to build a truly democratic society, with full social and political rights for all, by tailing the state propaganda that our imperial presidency, aristocratic Supreme Court, and the like somehow advance democracy and individual liberties. In order to build a majority to seize power, socialists must be consistent, principled opponents of the capitalist rule perpetuated by the Constitution. We must be consistent proponents of democracy—uniting the economic, political and social demands of working-class and oppressed people. Only a workers’ democracy, backed by a workers’ economy, can truly safeguard our rights.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Whither YDSA?
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/whither-ydsa/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:06:40.000Z
YDSA had an unprecedented level of internal political organization at its National Convention, held this August. Unlike past years, dominated by the rivalry between Bread and Roses (B&R) and Constellation, there was no clear “two-caucus system.” Multiple well-established political tendencies, and some newer arrivals, competed for YDSA’s political center of gravity. Who won, and who lost?
### **The Balance Sheet**
**Reform & Revolution** was the most obvious winner. The caucus won one-third of the seats on the National Coordinating Committee (NCC), including a national co-chair (Daniel SC) and two at-large members (Eli K and Sofia B). Whereas the last two NCCs were split between similarly-sized B&R and Constellation blocs, R&R is now the unrivaled plurality faction on YDSA’s national leadership body, giving it a clear mandate to set the agenda for this term. Convention also adopted all of R&R’s proposals by wide margins.
**Marxist Unity Group** also secured major victories, expanding our political footprint in YDSA for the third consecutive year. Where we lost an NCC bid in 2022, won an NCC seat as a junior partner to Constellation in 2023, and defended our seat with a small but dedicated base of our own in 2024, this year our candidate Claire IJ crushed the win number for an at-large seat with over a quarter of the total first-choice votes in a crowded field. All MUG proposals passed by large margins, including our flagship resolution, “R19: Building Socialist Sanctuaries to Win the Battle for Democracy.” Two years ago, MUG fought hard to win close votes on symbolic resolutions advocating our political line; this year, concrete proposals reflecting MUG’s revolutionary-democratic theory of change passed overwhelmingly. From R19:
> **RESOLVED**, the purpose of the Socialist Sanctuaries campaign shall be to explicitly challenge the legitimacy of the undemocratic capitalist state and the Democratic Party’s false opposition to Trump’s war on working and oppressed people. Through social media, internal messaging, campaign materials distributed to chapters, and earned media when applicable, YDSA national comms promoting the campaign will focus on:
> (1) The illegitimate authority of the imperial Presidency, unrepresentative Congress, and unelected court system carrying out these attacks,
> (2) The struggle for democratic student-worker control of our campuses against undemocratic administrations and police repression,
> (3) The need for an independent mass party of the working class and a new democratic political system.
This resolution was adopted unanimously—196 votes for and 0 against. YDSA also adopted a national political program, which, while drafted by the multitendency Program Committee, contains aspects of MUG’s programmatic vision. It was heavily associated—derisively—with MUG during debate on the floor before passing with 85% of the vote. MUG’s politics, marginal only a few years ago, are approaching cultural hegemony in YDSA.
**Springs of Revolution**, an informal slate of delegates united around anti-Zionist politics, also notched victories. SOR played a key role in electing its favored co-chair candidate (Sara A), and passed all of its endorsed proposals. A decisive bloc of delegates, more than ten percent of the total delegation, followed the slate’s voting recommendations in the NCC race.
**Bread & Roses** suffered a clear defeat. Its flagship resolution, “R23: Building Campus Consciousness, Democracy, and Militancy Through Student Unions” was rebuked nearly two-to-one, and B&R proposals on student-centered internationalism and cooperation with the non-DSA Rank and File Project were likewise voted down. The caucus elected neither of its co-chair candidates and won only two NCC seats, its smallest bloc on the body since it first began its organized intervention in YDSA over five years ago.
**Constellation** has officially been retired from YDSA. Once half of the two-caucus system that dominated YDSA in 2023-2025, Constellation went from one-third of the NCC and one of two co-chairs to zero NCC seats in a single convention. After winning and successfully implementing much of its vision to build a national YDSA bureaucracy over the last two convention cycles, the caucus was unable to reproduce its leaders or convince a new generation of YDSA members that its politics and leadership style are suited to steer the organization they helped build into a new era. Convention passed the proposals Constellation brought forward this year—and entrusted others with implementing them.
The **Communist Caucus** deserves an honorable mention. Despite only fielding one delegate and one resolution, CC secured a hearing on the floor for its proposal to refocus YDSA’s labor organizing efforts from on-campus student worker organizing to Amazon salting. In the process, it passed a version of the resolution and proved that a large base of YDSA’s active membership desires a bold labor strategy beyond what Bread & Roses and its historical monopoly on labor organizing expertise has to offer.
### **YDSA’s Third Period**
To understand why YDSA’s highest decisionmaking body voted the way it did this year, we must take the long view to provide historical context for what was at stake in the 2025 Convention. From the vantage point of 2025, we can divide the modern history of YDSA into two periods, bookended by the end of the first Bernie Sanders campaign in 2016 and the aftermath of last year’s Palestine solidarity encampments. After this year’s convention, YDSA is now entering a new period with a new set of tasks.
### **2017-2022: The Uneven Period**
The “Bernie bump” that multiplied DSA’s membership by an order of magnitude from 2016 to 2020 also took hold in YDSA: The number of campuses with YDSA chapters grew exponentially from around 12 before the first Sanders campaign to around 130 after the second.
In this period, YDSA attempted to organize its first national priority campaign under the banner of College For All, but lacked the organizational infrastructure to build nationwide buy-in. Some of the principal organizers involved in this effort joined the Bread & Roses caucus as it coalesced in 2019 out of the recently dissolved Spring Caucus and external organizations like Solidarity. B&R and its forerunners were the first organized tendency in DSA to recognize campuses as a strategic site of organizing and dedicate serious energy to YDSA. As a result, B&R achieved hegemony over YDSA’s internal politics during these early years.
Along with the Sanders-era revival of democratic socialism in the electoral arena, the first wave of undergraduate labor organizing was the other major trend that shaped YDSA in this period. It was during this time that Bread & Roses led the fight to establish the Youth Labor Committee to mentor student worker union drives and build a pipeline for recruiting graduating members into the labor movement as rank-and-file organizers—two of the caucus’s most enduring contributions to YDSA which form the bedrock of our labor strategy today.
YDSA’s growth from 2017 through 2022 was massive but highly uneven. Because national-level infrastructure was limited, the skills and knowledge needed to reproduce a chapter’s core organizers were not universally distributed. The rapid proliferation of chapters, especially as Students for Bernie chapters began affiliating with YDSA en masse after 2020, was counterbalanced by a high rate of turnover. YDSA lacked institutional means to consistently develop members into national leaders. As a result, the layer of members that stepped into national leadership was primarily composed of Bread & Roses cadre or individual uncaucused members from a handful of strong chapters who lacked a unifying political vision.
### **2022-2025: The Bureaucratic Period**
The balance of forces in YDSA began to shift during the 2022-2023 NCC term. The first “Basics of Organizing” training calls, spearheaded in the fall 2022 semester by uncaucused members of the NCC, were YDSA’s first move towards systematic, institutionalized cadre development on the national level. Meanwhile, a cohort of former 2022 convention delegates polarized against B&R’s leadership coalesced into Constellation, a new formation united by its positive program of building out YDSA’s national bureaucracy and deepening its integration with DSA.
The 2023 convention moved YDSA decisively into a new period. Constellation and members of the massive University of Central Florida chapter, approximately representing the left and right wings of the emerging bureaucratic-developmentalist tendency in YDSA, elected one co-chair and one at-large member of the NCC each. This bloc of four formed a loose majority coalition with the support of Marxist Unity Group’s first NCC member (Hailey S). Convention passed most of the bureaucrats’ agenda, chartering the Youth Growth & Development Committee (YGDC) and Campaign Organizing Committee (COC), standardizing the national committee and working group infrastructure, and defining the responsibilities of the NCC. For two NCC terms, the bureaucrats became the drivers and shapers of YDSA’s national project.
Bread & Roses, meanwhile, lost both co-chair seats and fell out of the majority on the NCC for the first time. During this period, B&R’s outlook on YDSA was shaped in large part by experience in undergraduate worker union drives at places like the University of Oregon and the University of California system, developing a theory of change that the caucus implemented as the driving force behind the YLC’s labor mentorship program and Red Hot Summer training series.
As a dual convention year, 2023 was also significant for the cross-tendency effort to pass a historic budget for YDSA at that year’s DSA convention. Among the provisions won that year—and defended during the 2024 DSA budget crisis—were monthly stipends for the NCC, fundamentally transforming the way the national organization related to chapters by making the NCC a full-time organizing body. Over the ‘23-‘24 and ‘24-‘25 terms, the NCC reoriented itself to function more like a union OC, dividing YDSA’s chapters into organizing turf and forming deep one-to-one relationships with chapter leaders. This made it possible, in theory, for the organization’s political leaders to move large numbers of YDSA chapters to take concerted action around national priorities, which had been lacking during the College For All era.
Theory did not immediately translate into practice. The ‘23-‘24 “Trans Rights and Abortion–No Surrender!” (TRANS) campaign culminated in a relatively high-participation national day of action, but failed to live up to the ambition of a “mass socialist campaign for trans rights and bodily autonomy,” even with the attention of the COC and a newly stipended NCC. YDSA briefly caught lightning in a bottle with the Palestine solidarity encampments in April 2024, but again failed to translate that energy into a sustainable, nationally coordinated campaign in the following NCC term, leaving the organization at a crossroads.
In the ‘24-‘25 term, the NCC had to cope with the steady disintegration of the national Palestine focus adopted at the 2024 convention. The failure of DSA’s National Political Committee to adopt a complementary election strategy that could have helped develop YDSA’s “No Votes For Genocide” orientation into a meaningfully coordinated pressure campaign, the stagnation of most campus BDS campaigns in the fall, the lack of chapter buy-in for executing convention’s mandate to build towards a nationwide student strike for Palestine, and the shift in membership’s priorities towards reactive mobilizing against the new Trump administration all culminated in YDSA’s official pivot to sanctuary campus organizing as a national priority at the 2025 Winter Conference in March.
### **2025: New Tasks for a New Period**
This year’s YDSA convention was, in a sense, the first “post-encampments” convention. In 2024, delegates were elected by members who joined YDSA at least a month before the encampments began, and at the time of convention in July the tenor of discussion reflected a belief that the encampment moment—the “Student Intifada”—was ongoing, not dissipating.
In 2025, YDSA members who had enrolled during and after the encampments and the second “Trump bump” had an appreciable role in delegate elections for the first time, and the major tendencies of YDSA all oriented their interventions, explicitly or not, around the need to adapt to what is now self-evidently a post-encampment era of campus organizing.
The various political groupings in YDSA, more diverse and well-organized than ever before, proposed to chart a number of different courses forward: *(You can read all 2025 YDSA convention proposals* [***here***](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTrKyl8QJrhr4VE7YspAoz51fIDInqKHtwRbB0sFjhBIXxDk4REEQ2w2Prk8jqDUU%5Ft%5Fds0hm4N1TUl/pub?ref=marxistunity.com#h.eds7hlki6ht7)*.)*
In **Marxist Unity Group**’s analysis, the most successful aspect of the Student Intifada was the unity of diverse tactics (encampments, occupations, referenda, strikes) around a set of universal demands (BDS). The encampments ultimately failed, in part, because the isolation of students from the broader working-class movement left the energy on campus with nowhere to go during the summer recess.
MUG’s interventions in 2025 centered around the need to construct a mass socialist party to bridge the gap between student activism and what Lenin called the “class point of view”—the battle for democracy on the road to socialism. For MUG, YDSA is already the organization with the best shot at becoming a political home for masses of working-class youth. It should seize that opportunity by embracing nationwide struggle against the police state (R19), unifying under a political program to connect sanctuary campus and city campaigns to our long-term horizons (R7), and taking a revolutionary defeatist, campaign-focused approach to internationalism in order to translate the spontaneous energy of upsurges like the encampments into long-term organizing against empire (R12).
**Bread & Roses** diagnosed the failure of the encampments as a case of acute disorganization. They focused their analysis on the lack of structure-based mass organizations of students and workers on college campuses, and put forward the thesis that YDSA is a cadre organization (not a mass one) that suffers from a preoccupation with organizing within the narrow activist layer of the student body at the expense of the unactivated majority. To remedy this, the caucus proposed transcending the activist coalition model by focusing on building student strike power in classrooms and academic departments through student unions (R23) alongside strike power in the workplace through labor unions (R13-2) in the leadup to May Day 2028.
**Reform & Revolution**’s diagnosis of the failure of the encampments was situated in its broader analysis of the “triple crisis” facing the left today: the lack of working-class organizations, the lack of broad socialist consciousness, and the lack of clear socialist leadership. As part of the “dual task” of resolving this crisis by both building up an organized working-class movement and building the hegemony of socialist politics within it, R&R proposed adjusting YDSA’s national bureaucracy to the needs of nationwide campaign work (R17), committing to recruiting masses of non-student youth by constructing municipal all-youth YDSA chapters (R25), and taking a united-front approach to coalition work to bring YDSA into struggle alongside mass workers’ organizations (R22).
**Springs of Revolution** approached the collapse of nationwide Palestine work in the ‘24-‘25 term as a problem of misplaced priorities. They sought to guard against the danger of opportunism and revive the spirit of the encampments in three main ways: reprioritizing BDS campaigns (R16 as amended by R16-1), seeding YDSA chapters on new campuses to open up new fronts in the struggle (R24), and electing a veteran Palestine solidarity organizer (Sara A) to oversee the next NCC term as co-chair.
As the organization faces the paramount question of how to deploy the organizational capacity built up during the outgoing bureaucratic period, these contending strategies reflect three broad trends in YDSA: **Partyism**, embodied by MUG and R&R’s aim to construct the youth wing of a mass socialist party through programmatic campaign work; **base-building**, defined by B&R’s aim to overcome student-worker disorganization on as broad a basis as possible; and **Third-Worldism**, best reflected by SOR’s aim to ground YDSA’s organizing work in the continuation of the Student Intifada.
The other formations openly contesting convention this year—Constellation, Communist Caucus, and the Libertarian Socialist Caucus—lacked distinct and comprehensive visions of their own, and largely fell into the three categories in their respective order. The delegation as a whole was majority-uncaucused and not always cleanly split between partyist, base-builder, and Third-Worldist poles, but the debates this year bore out along those lines more often than not.
### **Partyism Rising**
If one thing is clear after this convention, it’s that partyism is ascendant. The long arc of YDSA since the first Bernie Sanders campaign has bent slowly, painstakingly, towards the creation of a nationwide party infrastructure, nationally coordinated campaign work, and a unifying program. We have arrived at a consensus theory of change: the working class can, will, and must create a new socialist world by forming an independent mass party that can win the battle for democracy, and youth have a unique role to play in that transformation by building new labor unions in our workplaces, industrializing to revitalize socialist militancy in the labor movement, and leading struggles for reforms to turn our peers into lifelong socialists.
Visions of the year 2028 loomed large over convention. If we want to seize the potential of a coordinated mass strike wave in May 2028, enormous tasks await us over the next three years. But what is to be done?
Most immediately, the gains YDSA has made over preceding periods of development must be defended and expanded. YDSA needs stipended national leadership, staff support, a discretionary budget, and the ability to build our chapters through dues sharing to fulfill our potential as the youth wing of a socialist party. All of this is contained in CR07, the YDSA consensus resolution deferred from this year’s DSA convention to the new National Political Committee (NPC). The NPC must pass CR07 in full and invest in the future of the socialist movement.
With those gains secured, we must make good on the promise of the socialist sanctuaries campaign. In the uneven period, YDSA was unable to move chapters to fight for shared demands on a national scale. In the bureaucratic period, we struggled to sustain that national work in a coordinated way. A unanimous convention mandate building on work dozens of chapters are already engaged in is an unprecedented opportunity to do both.
Nearly 1.3 million students and tens of thousands of staff and faculty live, study, and work at schools where YDSA chapters are already running or planning socialist sanctuary campaigns. Millions more non-student youth live in cities where multiple chapters are running or planning some form of noncompliance campaign. Through a nationwide socialist sanctuary campaign, YDSA will have a potential audience of millions to agitate against the antidemocratic system that gave us Trump, and more than that, to offer a concrete solution: join us in YDSA to fight this reign of terror and create a political crisis that can bring that system down.
We should throw ourselves into the fight for sanctuaries without illusions, knowing full well that any concessions we win will not, on their own, be durable checks on the power of the Trump administration. The military occupation of Los Angeles proves that institutional noncompliance with ICE is only real insofar as regular people are prepared to enforce it in a mass, organized, sometimes extralegal way. Our school administrations and city governments cannot offer us genuine sanctuary from ICE raids, anti-trans laws, or austerity no matter how much pressure we put on them. But by organizing our peers, neighbors, and coworkers to win those concessions and enforce them through collective action, YDSA *can*. The socialist movement and the mass party we are building can become the sanctuary that working and oppressed people deserve.
Amassing strike power in the workplace will be critical to defending and expanding whatever victories we win as YDSA. The NCC and YLC should help chapters recruit new workplace leads and salts through their campaign work so that, in addition to bringing masses of students into the battle for democracy, the nationwide socialist sanctuary campaign also accelerates the campus labor movement. The YLC is already mentoring union drives in workplaces with a combined total of nearly 150,000 student workers. That number will only grow with redoubled efforts to translate campaign work into new workplace organizing in the coming years.
Coordinated recognition strikes by hundreds of thousands of student workers could give socialist labor organizers a platform to politicize the 2028 strike wave with common-good demands connected to YDSA’s fight against the police state. If this model proves successful, it could be replicated beyond 2028, as organizers graduating out of YDSA make inroads in the logistics industry and teachers’ unions, making progressively larger strike waves possible—and with them, progressively deeper crises for the capitalist state and riper conditions for a mass socialist party to put forward an alternative.
Delegates departing from this year’s convention set out into uncharted territory. These are demanding times. The possibilities are vast, the difficulties in rising to meet them no less so. There are questions to be called and no certain answers. Every member of YDSA, from the incoming to the graduating, should swell with pride—you have the rare opportunity to change the course of world history, and to confer that grave and thrilling responsibility to countless others by welcoming them to your side in the youth wing of a mass socialist party.
Youth, lead the way!
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Special Convention Issue, August 10th
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/special-convention-issue-august-10th/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:07:20.000Z
View the print issue [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1CNgjcjVHQ4C79VGKeTh4x8LYf0Nc2IPl/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com).
---
### **Why Did We Do This?**
This is a pretty odd document to hold in your hands, right? This daily bulletin took a tremendous amount of work and has a ton of articles, and it’s so odd for that to exist alongside so many other kinds of literature which are so much more direct. Vote for this resolution, vote for that slate, support us with this motion--these are the normal forms of campaign literature you’ll see at convention. It’s tempting to see this newspaper as just a more abstract version of these other pieces of paper. And yet the bulletin team has gone every convention night sleepless getting this together, editing, printing, reformatting, having printer problems, etc, pulling herculean work to make sure that every day you are reading these very articles. We could have just printed our best pieces alongside our palmcards and called it a day. So why did we do this?
At MUG we really believe in the power of writing. That sounds like nerdy nonsense, but what that really means is generalizing our arguments and making them apply to as broad a context as possible. Convention often narrows our thinking down to a single point--we want our motions to win, our enemies to lose, and to elect the people we like. The writing around convention shrinks itself to fit that narrow purpose. It’s understandable why we do this, but it also limits us and makes us mean. Democracy is more than a battle of wills, and writing should be more than trying to overwhelm our enemies.The most beautiful part about DSA is that many of us would never otherwise meet each other, and yet because of this organization we are forced to engage with each other as equals. That process is annoying, and it’s very easy to close ourselves off to that, to replace persuasion with browbeating, rank-pulling, and credentials checking. That might win you an argument, but it doesn’t advance our knowledge, doesn’t help us understand our condition, does not do much more than say “I’m right”. As editor in chief, I’ve spent untold hours making sure Light and Air’s articles advance not just the resolutions MUG members have written and not just our NPC slate, but the knowledge of the organization as a whole. That’s MUG’s strength; that’s all of our strength.
MUG are a bunch of weird nerds, and as a faction we are both a newcomer and an odd ball out. But I hope that in the next term our comrades understand that the reason this group of spastic weirdos is doing so well is because for years we have worked on turning our experiences into a consistent and general set of ideas. I think that if everyone took this to heart, we would return to Chicago in 2027 with an immeasurably stronger organization. Until then, I’ll see you in the battle of ideas.
In loving solidarity,
\-Jean RD Allen
---
### **Principles of Independence**
Almost everyone in DSA says they want a party, but disagreement on what that means - and on what timeline - makes that statement almost meaningless. MUG wrote *R07: Principles of Party-Building* to allow convention to clarify what building a party means and how we should work towards that goal. The resolution commits DSA to the goal of becoming an independent, mass socialist party, then provides a set of principles which define a party and how we should build it. In this piece, we will explore what a party is and how we should approach the ballot line.
**What is a party?**
The very first principle of the resolution gives the definition of “party” that we think DSA should use:
> *1\. The fundamental purpose of a socialist party is to be a mass association of the working class formed for collective political action. The party will be united around a democratically created program that outlines goals that, enacted together, will allow the working class to rule and end capitalism.*
The conversation about “the party” in DSA is muddy because we collectively refer to several *different matters* with the *same word*. “Party” can refer to all manner of items: the ballot line that candidates run on, the kind of legal structure DSA is registered as, or the character of the organization’s operation in a broad sense. Most often, when people say, “DSA is not a party!”, they are referring to the type of nonprofit DSA is registered as, as well as the fact that we do not have a ballot line of our own. However, **a party in the Marxist sense is a mass association of the working class for collective political action, which works to carry out a program that has been democratically set by members**. MUG believes that DSA *already* functions as a political party in the Marxist sense. The fact that we lack official recognition from the state and an independent ballot line does not have to prevent us from *acting as a party*. The questions of ballot line and legal form matter, but are less important than organizing for our own program, having a distinct public identity based on that program, and refusing to take direction from the capitalist class.
**Party Surrogate**
One of the key debates about party building is how we choose to contest elections. Our resolution states that:
> *5\. Because of an undemocratic and uneven electoral system designed to maintain capitalist rule, DSA fights on unfavorable terrain and is pulled between the necessity of independent political action and using the ballot line of the Democratic Party. DSA’s approach is the party surrogate, acting as a party but without a dedicated ballot line.*
We do not lack a ballot line out of preference. The US electoral system is designed to keep power out of the hands of the people and protect the two dominant parties of capital. In most of the world, political parties are membership organizations that control who is a member and who runs in elections. Political parties like this simply do not exist in the US, which has a state-run registration and primary system. Restrictive ballot access requirements are not an impossible barrier, but they are a drain on member capacity and financial resources. They can also create perverse incentives that commit you to running for certain offices or endorsing less preferred candidates to maintain the threshold of votes needed to maintain your ballot line.
Unfavorable electoral terrain is nothing new for socialists, who have been navigating barriers placed by the state all along. Some ballot line restrictions were put in place to suppress socialist and communist electoral efforts, and we should expect more as our successes grow. DSA’s approach to elections is most heavily influenced by Seth Ackerman’s 2016 essay “A Blueprint for a New Party.” Ackerman proposed a plan to contest elections on different ballot lines while building up the strength to succeed in a system designed for two parties. This has become known as the “party surrogate” approach. It is easy to remember the insight of Ackerman’s piece crudely as “ballot line flexibility,” but it is worth rereading to see how much of the piece discusses membership and the need for a program:
“In a genuinely democratic party, the organization’s membership, program, and leadership are bound together tightly by a powerful, mutually reinforcing connection. The party’s members are its sovereign power; they come together through a sense of shared interest or principle. Through deliberation, the members establish a program to advance those interests. The party educates the public around the program, and it serves, in effect, as the lodestar by which the party is guided. Finally, the members choose a party leadership — including electoral candidates — who are accountable to the membership and bound by the program.”
Ackerman’s piece goes far beyond mere ballot line choices and outlines how to operate as a membership-based party despite the legal barriers in the US. Without membership control and a unifying program, the party surrogate model falls apart. If you have ballot line flexibility without the other elements of the party surrogate, you are just running as Democrats.
**Dirty Stay and Clean Break**
Another disagreement about DSA’s electoral approach is timeline on when to leave the Democratic Party ballot line, if at all. The party surrogate approach recognizes we need to be able to maintain control of our project and move away from the Democratic Party line over time:
> *6\. While DSA must move away from use of the Democratic Party ballot line and primaries, a ballot line is not the primary goal or indication of political independence. What matters most is bringing our independent organization and program to races whether on a Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot line.*
>
> *7\. When considering whether to create a ballot line of our own, losing control of our candidates to an open state-run process is a non-negotiable red line. Our ability to take independent political action is essential to preserve above all other considerations.*
Most electoral positions in DSA fall somewhere on a spectrum of the party surrogate model. The two exceptions are the SMC-promoted “dirty stay”, in which we “stop pretending we are building a third party \[and admit\] we are fostering a left wing faction of the Democratic party”, and the Clean Break, which calls for immediately dropping use of the Democratic ballot line. The dirty stay sets our horizon too low, the clean break overweights the importance of the ballot line and emphasizes it over our program and identity.
It is possible to run as an independent and prop up the Democratic establishment. It is equally possible to run as a Democrat and be fiercely oppositional, use the ballot line for our own purposes, and promote DSA and its program. Nothing about the label next to the checkbox guarantees this, it depends on the campaigns DSA members choose to run. Decisions about our electoral work are not only who to run and with what message, but where and with what prioritization. With an open primary system, anyone could run as a “DSA candidate” with or without our endorsement. Unless the election laws in a given area are changed so that we can maintain control of our candidates, we should not seek a ballot line at the cost of losing our ability to control our project.
**Party Surrogate in Form, Clean Break in Content**
MUG’s electoral orientation can be described as “party surrogate in form, clean break in content.” Party surrogate means our priority should be our program and organizing operations, rather than the secondary tactical question of ballot line. “Clean break in content” means that we will not take direction from the capitalist class through the structures of the Democratic Party. While the party establishment does not have direct control, they are able to exert pressure in many ways. We should use the Democratic Party infrastructure without submerging ourselves into its ecosystem once in office. Socialists in office can refuse to join Democratic Party caucuses, even at the cost of committee assignments. They do not have to prop up the Democratic establishment, by paying party dues or otherwise.
**Building the Party**
As the resolution says, “Our ability to take independent political action is essential to preserve above all other considerations.” Political independence is a fundamental value shared across the organization. Every time someone makes a recruitment ask or gives a dues drive presentation at a chapter meeting, we are reinforcing the importance of political independence. We are funded by member dues because this means we are not bound to the whims of wealthy patrons or foundations. Nobody can buy influence in DSA; you have to persuade the members who both make up our collective activity - “doing the work” - and participate in our internal democracy. DSA’s electoral program needs to be determined by our membership, or else we are no different than the hollow capitalist parties that only serve their donors. Our independence is a matter both of resolutions at convention and the collective choices we make in our organizing in the two years in between. We hope that *Principles of Party Building* may be a useful guide.
\-Connell H
---
## **Let Your Red Flag Fly**
DSA has arrived at the point where practically the entire organization is willing to say that its goal is to build a Socialist Party that can contend for political power. Whether we are for the “dirty stay”, the “clean break in content, party surrogate in form”, or the plain old “dirty break”, the notion of the party as a horizon seems to have a consensus among our ranks.
Yet while we approach a consensus on this issue, the question “What kind of party do we aspire to be?” becomes even more important and divisive. This question was the center of gravity for today’s debates around recruiting candidates to run for office from the Labor Movement, particularly in response to amendments and *R20-A01: Democratic Socialists and the Labor Movement Need Each Other,* as well as *CR10-A01: A Partyist Labor Strategy*, which was put forward collaboratively by members of Reform & Revolution and Marxist Unity Group. As always, we emphasized leading with open socialist politics: fighting for class independence, naming the problems with both sectarian and economistic approaches to the labor movement, and laying out a strategy to both build and politicize the labor movement in collaboration with the partyist project. As Comrade Lavender Ciao put it in her article [*All Together Now* ](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/all-together-now)that motivated *Partyist Labor Strategy*,
> *“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.”*
What was truly revealing was the *opposition* to these amendments. As one of the most important strategic areas of our politics as well as a source of careers and livelihoods for many of our members, relations with the labor movement are always controversial in DSA. Yet arguments made in opposition to these labor strategy amendments, particularly those made by members of the Socialist Majority Caucus, tended to take the most issue with the notion of an emphasis on socialist identity - in other words “Socialist Identitarianism”.
Arguments against “Socialist Identitarianism” tended to be as substantial as simply saying that it is more important that a given candidate win a race than they identify as a socialist, or as part of a collective socialist project. Dan Osbourne, an independent populist from Nebraska who was able to have electoral success in MAGA country, was even appealed to as a potential example of a “non-socialist identitarian” - without any mention of the fact that the Omaha Nebraska DSA chapter neglected to endorse Osborn because of his conservative position on the border. Another potential candidate who was apparently under threat of exclusion due to the resolution was Shawn Fain, whose lackluster record regarding the Gaza genocide was not forgotten by another chapter delegate. Even a questionable quotation of the Communist Manifesto was brought forth, claiming that a forthright socialist strategy was violating Marx’s creed to “not form a separate party opposed to the other working-class parties” - as if there is already a working class party in the US that we are forming a sect in opposition to!
Ultimately what these arguments illustrate is DSA’s lack of confidence - both in our ideas, and in our ability to *lead* rather than *follow* the labor movement’s existing leadership. For example, an SMC comrade said that “running candidates from labor is how we align with labor”; yet, the existing labor movement is categorically not socialist - it is stuck in the conformist and often chauvinist politics of the two-party system (when it isn’t simply depoliticized). Our goal is different: we seek to **merge** the fight for socialism with the labor movement, a process that will necessitate DSA members overcoming misunderstandings on both sides of the aisle. This challenge calls us to stop hiding our “socialist identity” and hoping that “wins” uncoupled to advances in widespread political education can magically conjure a mass proletarian political subjectivity.
While the theorists of SMC see their disdain for “socialist identitarianism” as an adherence to a hard-nosed materialism, too busy with “action” to be distracted by flighty abstractions, the reality is that “materialism” in no way necessitates underplaying the role of symbolic communication and rhetoric in the socialist movement. Language mediates, determines, and is determined by the material worlds - it isn’t a separate dimension of physical life. If we wish to build a socialist party, we must achieve a socialist intersubjectivity, which can only arise through open and honest communication with the masses on a symbolic level. In other words, “socialist identitarianism.” This will not be easy, but it is the only way. **We must fly our red flags proudly.**
\-Donald P.
---
## **Why I Joined MUG**
To start, a moment of transparency: In the five and a half years I’ve been a DSA member, I’ve had public doubts about both the necessity of caucus politics and whether DSA could be the foundation of a principled, mass party. Perhaps not my *strongest* opener to a piece on why I joined MUG, but I promise, I’ll land this plane without turbulence.
As a fledgling DSA member in late 2020, one orthodox Marxist caucus dominated the political thought and direction of my chapter. Being immature in my own politics, I was under the impression that the caucus in question – and, unfairly, all caucuses – were intent to undermine the “big tent” of DSA and alienate anyone who didn’t align with them precisely. After becoming a chapter leader, however, I actually found myself agreeing with many of those comrades; it was through dedicated organizing with members I thought I disagreed with that I learned we had fewer political differences than I imagined. Though those members and I still have areas of disagreement, I realized that caucus politics help DSA members articulate their positions and theories of change, rather than expressly acting as antagonists to the larger organization.
After reconciling my imagined differences with caucus politics and concurrently straining against growing reformist tendencies in our chapter, there came DSA’s budget crisis. This prompted larger questions of how the organization would survive under increased financial scrutiny, in addition to rapid political and economic decline across the world. *Would this organization even exist in a few years? Have I spent years organizing in an org failing to complete its political project?*
In retrospect, this existentialism resulted from lacking deeper ties to comrades nationally *and* from having a limited vision of the organization’s potential. Through 2024 and now this year, DSA is stronger than it has been. Still, though, I’d felt that something was missing in my “DSA life” to keep me feeling anchored in the organization.
It was around the time of this realization that I contacted Siobhan, whom I’d briefly known through Buffalo DSA, about MUG. From what I read and saw online, *if* I were to join a caucus, this one made the most sense. It had a set of principles and vision that are clear enough to apply to both DSA’s internal organizing and to our larger task of organizing the working class. Armed with those principles, members across the country are now translating their radically democratic, Marxist politics to struggles across the country. Galvanized by our vision, we are nurturing an underlying hope for the organization-as-party.
The reading group affirmed my decision to apply. I felt grounded in theory, but not overwhelmed by it, and I now feel more able to articulate my politics and positions both within and outside of DSA spaces. I have a fuller vision of our tasks ahead and an optimism that we can harness the latent energy of our class into a lasting political revolution. MUG’s vision, to me, balances the urgency of our struggle with the patience and discipline needed to build a movement that will stick.
In short, a great deal of political self-exploration and maturation of my political philosophy over five years brought me from caucus-and-DSA-skeptic to the most dedicated I’ve ever been to DSA. Discovering and joining MUG has been an integral part of that process, and I’m not sure if other caucuses could have convinced me with the same fervor.
\-Taylor F.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Special Convention Issue, August 9th
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/special-convention-issue-august-9th/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:09:37.000Z
Read the print issue [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Icusu08Wt-ErPXzkmzJMkn7Q2slPwY-n/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com).
---
### **Vote MUG (And Sarah M)!**
Comrades: as we gather for convention, the country faces outright class warfare, racist deportations and the further vilification of trans people. We have the opportunity to elect four outstanding organizers, leaders, and principled socialists to our highest elected body who can ensure our organization will meet the moment and fight the horrors of capitalism run amok. We must assure that our leaders for the next two years will put democracy and mass proletarian politics to the fore, in DSA and on the NPC; therefore, we ask that you rank Amy W., Sid C.W., Cliff C. and Sarah M. #1-4 on your ballot.
**Sid C.W.** has done outstanding electoral work in NYC DSA: working on a state legislative campaign and tenant union work in Bed Stuy in 2024 (which would go on to pay dividends one year later, then spending the spring and summer of 2025 organizing volunteers to knock on thousands of doors for the triumphant New York Mayoral primary campaign of Comrade Zohran Mamdani. Sid believes that the socialist movement is driven not by singularly-exceptional candidates, but by a principled program determined through deliberative democracy. The programmatic points that united the working class in support of the Zohran campaign - expanding tenant protections, Palestinian solidarity, and reversing the power of the NYPD - must be treated as such; not as mere talking points, or soon-to-be-disavowed utopic ideals. To that end, we must hold the Mamdani administration accountable to our demands, and to do that we need a leader who knows what it takes to run an organization. Serving on the Central Brooklyn Organizing Committee, comrade Sid’s administrative work has prepared him for the task. A Sid term on NPC will ensure that the electeds we spend our precious time and resources on *actually pursue* our socialist agenda, as he wields the gavel on the side of democracy to strengthen our organization.
**Cliff C.** is a tireless champion of democracy in DSA. A veteran of five DSA chapters, Comrade Cliff has seen the merits of true member democracy in chapters and the turmoil that fills the space of its absence. As a steering committee member of Orlando DSA, multiracial organizing has been the bread and butter of his work targeting strategic communities for break light clinics, abortion rights canvassing, and DSA 101s. On Thursday, during Marxist Unity Group’s breakout panel, Cliff mentioned something that few other NPC candidates have mentioned, but that we must recenter: the *necessity* of childcare. Furthermore, according to his NPC questionnaire, there are three premiere threats looming over DSA: Trump, the Zionist hegemony he represents, and our own disunity in the face of that question which threatens a split. The organization's unity through democratic deliberation and decision making is the key to fighting the first two and the resolution of the third. We face a tremendous uphill battle, and Cliff is dedicated to building a democratic mass socialist party strong enough to summit any peak.
**Amy W.** has spent the last two years working tirelessly on the NPC. Coming into her term, she faced a culminating budget crisis and grabbed it by the horns - digging in at the moment it came to a head and leading our organization and staff through to safety. She often describes DSA as “200 chapters in a trench coat”. But she doesn’t mean that she wants a paternalistic relationship between DSA National and the chapters that comprise it; rather, she means DSA as a national organization needs the capacity to act like one. Cross-chapter organization and national coordination will be necessary for our movement to combat Trump and the rising tide of fascism in the U.S. As the democrats waffle and fuck around with trans lives, Amy believes - as a trans woman - that DSA must stand firm on our commitment to trans rights. Building a multicultural and multi-racial mass party with a foundation in democratic values will be instrumental in this fight. Amy W. has proven and will continue to exhibit her ability to forward that aim on the NPC.
Finally, as a national communications co-chair, **Sarah M.** (Reform and Revolution) has led the way toward member input regarding representative communications on the election of 2024, Palestine, and the current anti-ICE movement - a tall political task. As a trans woman, Sarah knows that the marginalized are the first to bear the brunt of capitalism’s reactionary viciousness. That is why it is *essential* to build an organizational home for the marginalized and a multicultural force to push back against that marginalization. After 100 nights of protest in Portland, Comrade Sarah M. understands that well. She’s visited dozens of chapters and knows that the Trump bump has put chapters at capacity to onboard and activate new members. On the NPC, Sarah M. is committed - like Amy W. - to use her NPC seat and National to help chapters with coordination and development.
Today we decide who not only who will lead the largest socialist organization in the country, but also how that organization will stand up to the fascism creeping into our everyday lives, as well as how best to grow our democratic, multi-tendency, multi-racial, multi-cultural, proudly socialist organization… to defeat it *once for all*.
We humbly ask for you to vote MUG #1-3 and Sarah M. #4.
Thank you!
\-Aliyah VP & Cale E
---
### **Motion Sickness**
Motion sickness — that’s what some of us were feeling Friday morning after the avalanche of procedural motions that rocked the convention floor. Motion to appeal the ruling of the chair. Motion to divide the question. Motion to divide the house. Motion to *literally* divide the house? The cumulative effect of these dizzying divisions, magnified by some very unfortunate tech troubles, was to depoliticize the convention and, almost worse, to waste delegates’ time.
First was the struggle around 1 Member 1 Vote For Federal Endorsement; then, the motion to change the agenda, several dissatisfactions with vote counts leading to motions to divide the house, all culminating in the motion to divide the question on the DemComm proposal. This motion was, of course, planned well ahead of time; Red Star caucus and others had floated the issue ever since the consent agenda came out. This caused frustration well before Chicago, and confusion yesterday on the floor, as multiple clarifications had to be made on how precisely delegates should vote if they supported or opposed the splitting of the DemComm proposal.
What was the cause of this avalanche? Depoliticization!
What do we mean by “depoliticize”? We mean deprioritizing and obscuring the real issues that are up for debate at convention, making them secondary to factional warfare. Of course, there’s nothing wrong with making motions, even complicated ones. But procedures done to waste time, obscure the point, and force through certain positions at the expense of questions that would really benefit from deliberation, only serve to center who can maneuver most efficiently against their factional opponents, who can take advantage of loopholes and technicalities rather than presenting their politics directly before the body, debating, and trying to convince the democratically-elected delegates! *Doing politics* is, seemingly, not always what some want to do.
And the frustration and confusion with this depoliticizing, procedurally-centered approach came out clear in the votes! CB01-DIVIDE-1, the position of the chair to not allow the DemComm proposal to be broken up, was sustained with a strong margin of 77.7% to 22.2%! The agenda change failed with 43.8% yes to 56.2% no! Of course, the problem is not motions themselves. Last convention the agenda change vote, which MUG supported, was a moment of major political development. But, the issue comes when the focus is on procedural shenanigans over putting forward politics and convincing the delegation.
Depoliticization pokes its ugly head up in more places than floor motions to divide the question and overturn the decision of the chair. During debate for CB02, 1 Member 1 Vote for National Leadership Elections, a comrade from Socialist Majority Caucus spoke in favor of the resolution and declared that those who vote against the resolution are no better than John Adams and the rest of the elites who penned the slaveholder’s constitution, who denied the right to vote to enslaved people and wage workers, which Adams, of course, declared “talk and vote as they are directed by some man of property, who has attached their minds to his interest.” And we’re supposed to believe that having a vision of member democracy in DSA that is different from theirs is no different than what Adams thought!
Escalatory rhetoric which straightforwardly says that those who vote a certain way are racist, elitist, and basically slaveowners, replaces persuasion with browbeating and eliminates the space we can do politics in. Deliberation requires parties engaging with each other with a desire to change and be changed, and using thought-terminating cliches and attempts to win points against factions identified as enemies blocks that possibility of internal change, and turns conversation into a pure battle of wills.
That speech added onto the opposition to 1 Member 1 Vote, which we have opposed on open, honest, principled political disagreement. Once all was said and done, the body rejected CB02, with 39.8% yes to 60.2% no. The mood in the room was shifted completely by overt attempts to depoliticize the proceedings.
What we need is to put politics in command, and to really engage with each other in a political manner. The decisions of the floor yesterday were major victories in really making substantive decisions that matter, that assert politics and democracy over depoliticization. Procedures are important, but they exist to facilitate deliberation, not to be a cudgel for asserting that there’s only my way or the highway. Let’s openly disagree, let’s openly debate, and let’s get over our motion sickness and get moving!
\-Lavender C & Sam M
---
### **Stand for Palestine! Yes on R-22!**
This convention, DSA has a duty to stand in absolute solidarity with the Palestinian people and ensure that the org is through and through anti-Zionist, in word and action.
R22: “For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA” makes important contributions towards exactly this. It makes the struggle for Palestinian liberation a priority, endorses or reaffirms support for important Palestine solidarity campaigns, develops chapters’ campaigning abilities, and puts in place essential electoral discipline stipulations. A great step forward for the org.
The proposed amendment (R22-A01: “Align with the BDS Movement”) to this resolution, however, is quite concerning. For one, as some comrades have noted, there seems to be some unexplained petty politicking with the emphasis around the inclusion or omission of particular campaigns. Most concerning, however, it deliberately strikes some of the most important provisions in the original around the aforementioned electoral discipline.
R22 contains several important stipulations that build on the provisions of “Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis”, ratified by the 2023-2025 NPC. Importantly, it ensures that *every* DSA electoral candidate *must* adhere to basic anti-Zionist principles (support for BDS, no affiliation with or support for the Israeli settler colony or Zionist lobbies, oppose all Zionist legislation, and materially support Palestinian liberation). It is important to stress that these requirements “must hold true for all candidates endorsed by national DSA or a DSA chapter.” R22-A01 makes this resolution’s stipulations toothless locally by striking these requirements for solely chapter-endorsed DSA candidates. What is the rationale behind this cut? This can only be interpreted as giving DSA chapters without “Make DSA an Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Praxis” resolutions in place the ability to endorse Zionist candidates. In no way, shape, or form should we as an organization enable colonialist, white-supremacist, genocidal (i.e., Zionist) candidates to run under our banner or be in our party. This stands in complete contradiction to our socialist and democratic convictions; a betrayal of not only these principles, but of the Palestinian people.
This is, unfortunately, a defence of the status quo. Most recently, NYC-DSA endorsed elected Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez refused to vote for blocking military aid to Israel’s so-called “Iron Dome”, a mechanism which directly enables them to perpetuate terror, genocide, and ethnic cleansing across the region with impunity. This cannot go on.
We should aim to have our candidates be really *ours*, principled socialists adhering to a common DSA platform, disciplined cadre who vote as a bloc. We need real *tribunes of the people*, the most advanced fighters for socialism and democracy who tirelessly expose every instance of oppression, not social-colonialist candidates opportunistically endorsed to tail behind their existing “popularity”.
This is the time for DSA to take a serious step forward, not retreat into the darkness of its past.
\-Brad H & Mike V
---
### Mother Jones Was An Open Socialist
Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) has put forward a resolution that, in essence, proposes that DSA liquidate the distinctly socialist identity of our electoral program by running “labor candidates” instead of open democratic socialists, despite DSA proving time and again that socialist candidates can win the support of working-class constituencies.
Without question, DSA should run union members for office. Those of us in the labor movement know that our union comrades are some of the most dedicated, politically developed members of the working class. They know better than anyone what it's like to live with a boot on your neck. And with the union bureaucracy unable to shift the policies of the Democratic and Republican Parties, no formation is better equipped than DSA to run rank-and-file candidates for office on a platform of political freedom and social transformation for working people. That platform, in two words, is democratic socialism.
This is why members of Marxist Unity Group (MUG), Springs of Revolution and Bread & Roses put forward an amendment to SMC’s resolution: *R20-A01: Democratic Socialists and the Labor Movement Need Each Other*. Our amendment redefines labor candidates as *democratic socialists* drawn from the *rank-and-file* of the labor movement. Our amendment would integrate these candidates into DSA’s broader electoral project by making them part of the National Electoral Committee’s priority slate, rather than siloing them from this successful model into a separate slate.
Confusingly, David Duhalde, a member of SMC, hinged his response to the amendment on a series of historical socialist candidates who emerged from the labor movement of the late 19th century, all of whom ran on a Socialist Party ballot line (or, in the case of Mother Jones, its precursor the Social Democratic Party). MUG are eager students of Eugene Debs, but his case and that of other Socialist Party candidates prove our point: it is possible and desirable to run labor candidates as open socialists, and unnecessary to downplay our politics in campaigns for office. Duhalde argues for more “flexibility” to choose candidates outside DSA’s active layer who are not committed to what he calls “socialist identitarianism.” However, our amendment would not preclude DSA from running a candidate who is less active in DSA, and Duhalde himself contradicts his argument against “socialist identitarianism” by pointing to candidates who ran as open socialists. Despite his examples, Duhalde’s “flexibility” doesn’t come from the history of the Socialist Party, nor from DSA’s existing electoral program, but from the moribund period from the collapse of the Soviet Union to the rise of DSA, when left electoral projects (like Ralph Nader’s 2000 Presidential campaign) largely eschewed socialism in favor of progressivism. It is an argument to return to a strategy that downplays socialism to the point of irrelevance in both the electoral sphere and the labor movement, rather than principled democratic socialism in both. Debs himself took an even sterner stance than our amendment when he said that:
> *Of course we want the support of trade-unionists, but only of those who believe in socialism and are ready to vote and work with us for the overthrow of capitalism.*
Duhalde muddles the issue by framing it as a question of whether socialists and the labor movement are equal partners. The actual question is much more straightforward—will we endorse candidates who do not publicly identify as socialists? Or will we endorse candidates who identify as socialists, just like Eugene Debs and Mother Jones, just like Zohran Mamdani and Shaun Scott and dozens of other high-profile, successful DSA electeds across the country?
In addition to the harm it would cause our electoral program, R20 makes no distinction between the rank-and-file of the labor movement and the union bureaucracy. DSA members are not neutral in the labor movement. We are always on the side of democracy, power for union members within their unions, and class struggle on and off the shop floor. The labor movement is no stranger to careerists who use staff positions to jump into elected office, and union Political Action Committees that have poured money for decades into anemic Democratic Party candidates in exchange for nothing. Our strategy for running labor candidates needs to align with the rank-and-file movement, not the bureaucracy.
The unamended resolution also encourages chapters to “consider developing joint SIO projects with closely allied unions.” Socialists in Office Committees, or SIOs, are the means through which chapters communicate with endorsed electeds and support their cohesion as a socialist bloc against the status quo pressures to compromise. While SIOs are far from perfect, a strong SIO committee is the difference between collapsing into business-as-usual irrelevance and building an effective socialist caucus. By contrast, unions are politically divided, with members falling on all sides of the socialist, liberal, and reactionary spectrum. While we can work to bring the majority of union members over to socialist politics and to win union endorsements, “joint SIO projects” with unions are a recipe for spoiling DSA’s cohesive political strategy.
Lastly, R20 undermines one of the strongest sections of the *National Electoral Commission Consensus Resolution*: “Focused National Endorsements,” which stipulates that national endorsements should be given to open socialists with deep relationships to DSA. This is what allows us to create a unified slate that DSA can fight for nationally and ends the practice of paper endorsements. By siloing labor candidates into a separate slate, R20 does them a disservice, pushing them out of our unified electoral project and limiting their access to crucial organizational resources.
For the sake of uplifting openly socialist union members, rooting our electoral interventions in the rank-and-file of the labor movement, and protecting the strength and independence of our electoral program, we urge delegates to vote no on R20 unless amended by *R20-A1:*
\-Marisa M.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Special Convention Issue, August 8th
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/special-convention-issue-august-8th/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:10:25.000Z
Over the course of convention, MUG published a daily newspaper as a part of our goal of elevating the conversation and putting forward complete arguments. Comrades tirelessly printed through the night, making hundreds of copies which were put in the hands of delegates and which, we hoped, directly spoke to the issues we were debating. Over the next three weeks, alongside other articles reflecting on convention and the moment we are in, we will republish these Convention Special Issues for posterity’s sake.
Read the print issue [here](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1-O2lO57V1MTyNnIcd3asbiGPw4tF-r46/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com).
---
### **Let Convention Reign**
Comrades, I’m honored to be here with all of you at our Convention, DSA’s highest ruling body. This weekend we’ll debate and decide the direction of DSA for the next two years, based on proposals from members around the country, and elect our next term of the National Political Committee (NPC) to carry it out. All members are entitled to make proposals to Convention, and are entitled to stand to be elected as delegates for Convention. Chapters and at-large members proportionally elect delegates to represent them.
Convention is sovereign–decisions made at Convention are binding on all of DSA, and the NPC and chapters alike are subject to its decisions. But there is one proposal to Convention this year that risks undermining that: CB02, “One Member, One Vote for National Leadership Elections.”
#### **Split Mandate**
DSA currently most resembles a parliamentary system, where a representative body is elected and appoints an executive body from among itself. The comparison is not exact - Convention doesn’t quite work like a parliament because it only sits for one weekend, and the NPC is charged with not only execution but steering between Conventions - but I argue it holds. Convention reigns supreme, and the NPC’s power is delegated from Convention.
Separate elections would more closely resemble the American system of government, where a powerful executive is elected separately, often with significant political differences between the representative body (which is really just the House) and the executive. As the philosophy of a powerful and more or less independent executive has gained ground through both Republican and Democratic administrations and the courts (which are appointed by the President), we’ve seen how this tends to empower the Presidency to the detriment of Congress.
Electing the NPC separately from Convention means that the NPC, which is a partially executive and partially legislative body, will have a split mandate with Convention. Proponents claim that CB02 would make DSA more democratic, which implies that Convention is not and further confuses the issue of where supreme power in the organization rests.
Some proponents have even argued that this is a good thing, that a 16 person (or 25, if CB01 passes) body directly elected by membership would inherently be more representative than a body of over 1000 delegates directly elected by membership in proportion to chapter size.
#### **False Comparisons**
Proponents of the 1m1v system cite its use in unions and the UK Labour Party. But they don’t articulate how our current democratic processes are dysfunctional or undemocratic, instead arguing from an axiom that leadership elections by delegates are inherently undemocratic. But the important context missing is that these organizations functioned significantly differently from DSA.
In UK Labour, delegate seats are reserved for labor unions, with only half of votes going to delegates appointed (not elected!) by "Constituency Labour Parties,” Labour’s local structures. In many unions, delegates are appointed from staff or from local officers, many of whom are themselves appointed by leadership. This functions to entrench existing leadership through patronage or sheer momentum.
In contrast, DSA members directly elect all of our delegates. There are no special privileges for members of the NPC or local chapter leaders.
#### **Conclusion**
In the book *Democracy Is Power*, the authors note that “direct elections in the Steelworkers or Machinists do not seem to stimulate, let alone guarantee, a democratic culture \[...\] Conversely, some unions that use the convention system–UE, OCAW, CUPW–are among the more democratic unions, not because of their election method but because of other reasons that have promoted a more democratic culture.” (pp. 206-207)
Direct leadership election is not something that is inherently more or less democratic than delegated elections, or a core principle. It is a tactic that has been successfully used in unions to oust entrenched leadership-bureaucracies, which function through methods that are not possible in DSA.
DSA’s democratic structures are built for a deeply democratic culture, one where all members are entitled to contribute to and stand for our highest decision-making body. We should not risk undermining that.
Let Convention reign. Vote no on CB02.
\-Amy W.
---
### **Defanging the Beast**
Members of Reform and Revolution have been working alongside Marxist Unity Group to reconcile our two programs into R34-A01: A Fighting Socialist Program. The last part of the program’s preamble is what we call the *minimum program,* and it presented below:
*The Minimum Program*
The minimum program is about **what it would take for the working class to rule**. This framing gives a clear sense of our current conditions, which socialists oppose not out of the goodness of our hearts but from a collective desire for self-governance of the working class and the eventual rule of society by the working class majority. The demands are:
- A Democratic Socialist Republic
- A Worker’s Economy
- An End To Empire
#### **A Democratic Socialist Republic**
Our current society divides us up into categories: race, immigration status, gender, etc. Based on which categories you find yourself in, it may be harder to seek medical care, get a job, or live a free life. This system gives the US empire a mechanism to oppress some of us more than others, and serves the purpose of dividing the working class against itself.
Legal distinctions based on these divisive categories are not necessary for a functioning society. Furthermore, we see these features of our government as baked in, not accidental, and stemming from interest of agrarian elites founders. For this reason, we call for a new government—a democratic socialist republic—where the same civil liberties apply to everyone irrespective of these legal categories. It will be based on the democratic control by and for workers through a mix of a unicameral legislature, and local councils and assemblies.
#### **A Worker’s Economy**
We know that this isn’t enough. Flawed as our government may be, it is ostensibly democratic. The same can not be said of the workplace, which is a dictatorship of capital with no pretense of democracy. A democratic government alone makes no sense if people are forced to spend ever-increasing amounts of time submitting to the tyranny of capital.
Major structural changes are also required in the economic realm if a worker’s government is to succeed: worker councils replacing executive boards; nationalization of the commanding heights of the economy (transportation, energy, internet, food, etc.); decommodification of housing and healthcare. We also call for reparations and the end of segregation, as well as a just transition away from fossil fuels.
#### **An End To Empire**
The logic of internal division also applies to the international scale. The United States stands at the top of a vast network of alliances, trade agreements, and military coercion designed to empower the US ruling class at the expense of the US and international working class. The years-long genocide in Palestine is just the latest example of how far the US empire is willing to go to protect its power, and we would be foolish to believe that this brutality is only reserved for people abroad. Thus, for the survival of the working class and the human race, it is imperative that we end the US’s part in the division of the international working class by ending our imperial ambitions and the role of the military and police as political forces in this country.
If socialists are interested in fighting against division anywhere, we must defeat the US empire which divides us everywhere. We can do this by opposing the current treaty regime up to and including NATO, and the replacing of America’s police and military with a new force accountable to working class democracy. This force would be tasked with self-defense, building out our infrastructure, and responding to natural crises. The program also calls for the end of foreign military bases, supports self-determination and right to return for indigenous peoples and all oppressed nations within the US, and ends both military aid for countries involved in apartheid and genocide and the use of sanctions as a tool for strongarming.
#### **Conclusion**
These things must be demanded *together.* The point of the minimum program is to preclude the possibility of compromising with the ruling class and measure our ability to bring about revolutionary change, which can only come about by uniting and empowering the working class as a class. In isolation, these demands lose their coherence and revolutionary character.
If our convention passes R34-A01, we would be able to take it to every oppressed community in the US, every workplace, and use the fight for these changes to unite the working class around DSA. Together, these changes would give us the beginning of a socialist society, where everyone can live meaningful, dignified lives, free to be themselves.
\-Jean A. & Juno C.
---
### **In support of Deliberative Federal Endorsements (CR05: A03)**
Bourgeois electoralism has manifested such in the minds of citizens that merely casting a vote is both democratic and representative. This is apparent in the structures of many non-governmental organizations, such as the Democratic Party, who send out email lists with the tag line “your voice matters!”, while maintaining a bureaucracy of decision makers. There is no involvement, there is no discussion, there is no debate on the role and direction of the organization. Democracy is an active process, requiring engagement with members, discussion on how an issue affects our organization, the relationships internal and external to our organization that we build, and how we hold ourselves accountable to ourselves, which strengthens our programmatic discipline.
[CR05- A03](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/cr05-a03-towards-deliberative-federal-endorsements/45890?ref=marxistunity.com): *Towards Deliberative Federal Endorsements* treats revolutionary democracy as an active process. Rather than an unconnected, “mass email list” model of democracy (as suggested by GW’s proposed 1M1V resolution), this amendment provides a process of establishing social relationships with our candidates in the electoral arena. It opens up transparency with our organizational objectives ([or Program](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r34-a01-a-fighting-socialist-program-for-dsa/41058?ref=marxistunity.com), as proposed by R34-A01) and communicates expectations of behavior while in a highly visible position.
The specifics of the amendment:
- Chapter leaders must participate in a Q&A with NEC SC and NPC members (not applicable for presidential candidates).
- Candidates must participate in a Q&A with NEC SC and NPC members.
- NEC recommendations for endorsements are decided via simple majority vote by NEC rank-and-file at a general meeting, observable for any member in good standing.
- NPC holds at least one open member discussion forum regarding the candidate’s endorsement, observable for any member in good standing.
- NPC deliberates and votes on endorsement synchronously, observable for any member in good standing.
As the National Electoral Commission (NEC) has developed into a more democratic body, this resolution continues to develop the principles of active participation by the membership to engage in the endorsement process. It shifts endorsement recommendations away from the NEC Steering Committee and into the membership itself, giving the (currently hundreds) of members an onus to actually attend the endorsement meetings and have a say in active deliberation. This is in stark contrast to the 1M1V resolution, which dissolves any sort of deliberation and active discussion that engages members in the endorsement process.
Points on Programmatic Unity
- Puts National and locals in direct contact to coordinate potential campaigns
- Shifts endorsement recommendations away from the NEC SC and to the membership itself, giving NEC members an onus to actually attend the endorsement meetings
- The endorsement meetings are open to any DSA member in good standing, giving an open look to what the NEC is like
- Second set of eyes that look at the candidate from a more objective perspective
\-Megan R. & Mike B.
---
### **All Together Now**
\-Lavender C
[Found here](https://www.marxistunity.com/all-together-now/)
---
### **Yes On DemCom!**
The strength of DSA is unity in diversity. It's easy to lose sight of this when you have different political tendencies fighting across the org for their priorities. However political debate, political struggle deciding the direction of the organization in a comradely good faith manner is healthy for the organization. Factions are good, and that has been a hard lesson to learn for the American left. For decades the American left were split into sects fighting a perpetual battle royale to be the one true vanguard of the working class with their “perfect politics.”This approach has done nothing to build power for working class liberation. A great strength of DSA is the fact that we reject this approach, opting instead for a mass model that allows anyone who is aligned and willing to participate.
Every faction and tendency you will find in the 2025 convention has their strengths and weaknesses, their weird hills to die on, their jerks, and their saints. And this is what makes DSA beautiful, no tendency is allowed to live in isolation if they wish to be relevant, and their politics have to engage with serious work and a serious movement. Unlike sects, you will never find a DSA caucus attempting to disprove the big bang theory as "undialectical.”
The challenges come in trying to make everyone in a large diverse organization happy, and the fact is that you can’t make everyone happy. However we are all DSA, and we can come together and find common ground to move the organization forward. This was what DSA’s Democracy Commission is: a collection of representatives from different tendencies coming together to bring a reform proposal to bring the organization closer together, standardizing practices and agreements to create Democratic baselines for the organization. This proposal consists of many planks, from expectations put on a chapter to uphold minimal standards of democracy to reforming the NPC. The proposal was written to improve DSA’s transparency, connection, and coherence. It focuses on the chapters which are our political homes and makes sure chapter meeting discussion is at the heart of our organization’s nationwide debates. The proposal explicitly protects DSA’s multitendency nature and the ability to disagree with each other and the decisions of the organization, intentionally setting us apart from the stifling party lines of the sects and structurally valuing what keeps DSA dynamic.
No organization should consist solely of compromise, but for a diverse range of people and groups with the common goal of bringing about a socialist future and all the different ways such a phrase can be interpreted, compromise sometimes becomes a necessity. Commissioners put forward their ideas on how to make DSA a better organization, we argued and debated to find the best consensus we could. Some issues we could not come to an agreement on. For what is in the proposal we found the common ground where we could, and where there was not easy common ground made amendments to find a way to meet in the middle. Commissioners moved towards each other where we were persuadable out of a desire to work together and build something for the entire organization.
Nobody is obligated to agree with the proposal the commission wrote, and the text belongs to convention. Members always have the right to move to consider pieces of a proposal separately for things that need to be debated. We wish that those who wish to divide the question had submitted amendments, but we are here now. We believe that the proposal as a package will improve DSA and bring members together across the organization. We hope that delegates will vote yes on CB01, whether as the single proposal or divided.
\-Nick W.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### All Together Now!
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/all-together-now/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:11:36.000Z
### **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](https://communistcaucus.com/our-moment/?ref=marxistunity.com) , 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](https://drive.google.com/file/d/1n3z9dD7EHpX8RRZ6FCaBiZGHsfMqMlwr/view?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com),” 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%](https://cepr.net/publications/union-density-continues-to-decline/?ref=marxistunity.com) 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](https://www.epi.org/publication/271500-workers-went-on-strike-in-2024-current-labor-law-doesnt-adequately-protect-workers-fundamental-right-to-strike/?ref=marxistunity.com) 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](https://inthesetimes.com/article/afl-cio-israel-palestine-ceasefire-resolution-gaza?ref=marxistunity.com) 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](https://jacobin.com/2025/05/afl-cio-cold-war-imperialism?ref=marxistunity.com) 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](https://x.com/TeamsterSOB/status/1860118006820479289?lang=en&ref=marxistunity.com) of Trump and the Republican Party, including its [racist](https://youtu.be/12zT582IjU8?t=3752&ref=marxistunity.com) 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](https://uaw.org/everything-the-working-class-has-ever-won-weve-had-to-fight-for-uaw-releases-new-video-endorsing-kamala-harris-for-president/?ref=marxistunity.com) of Kamala Harris for President last year, dismissing the genocide she helped to [subsidize](https://www.democracynow.org/2024/8/30/harris%5Fmiddle%5Feast%5Fgaza%5Fisrael%5Fpalestine?ref=marxistunity.com). 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](https://labornotes.org/2025/04/uaw-reformers-close-caucus-launch-new-organization?ref=marxistunity.com) and [disputed dissolution](https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=d98S3ftwVSg&ref=marxistunity.com) 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](https://archive.org/details/somereasonsforc00labogoog/page/n16/mode/2up) 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](https://archive.iww.org/history/resolutions/Convention%5Fwar%5F1916/?ref=marxistunity.com).
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](https://www.bargainingforthecommongood.org/?ref=marxistunity.com), 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?**
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Mother Jones Was An Open Socialist
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mother-jones-was-an-open-socialist/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:14:35.000Z
Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) has put forward [a resolution](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r20-workers-will-lead-the-way-join-with-unions-to-run-labor-candidates/43205?ref=marxistunity.com) that, in essence, proposes that DSA liquidate the distinctly socialist identity of our electoral program by running “labor candidates” instead of open democratic socialists, despite DSA proving time and again that socialist candidates [can win the support](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/zohran-mamdani-democratic-socialist-mayor/tnamp/?ref=marxistunity.com) of working-class constituencies.
Without question, DSA should run union members for office. Those of us in the labor movement know that our union comrades are some of the most dedicated, politically developed members of the working class. They know better than anyone what it feels like to live with a boot on your neck. And with the union bureaucracy unable to shift the policies of the Democratic and [Republican](https://www.newsweek.com/teamsters-labor-union-supports-tariffs-donald-trump-2057151?ref=marxistunity.com) Parties, no formation is better equipped than DSA to run rank-and-file candidates for office on a platform of political freedom and social transformation for working people. That platform, in two words, is democratic socialism.
This is why members of Marxist Unity Group, Springs of Revolution and Bread & Roses put forward an amendment to SMC’s resolution: [*R20-A01: Democratic Socialists and the Labor Movement Need Each Other*](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r20-a01-democratic-socialists-and-the-labor-movement-need-each-other/43496?ref=marxistunity.com). Our amendment redefines labor candidates as *democratic socialists* drawn from the *rank-and-file* of the labor movement. Our amendment would integrate these candidates into DSA’s broader electoral project by making them part of the National Electoral Committee’s priority slate, rather than siloing them from this [successful model](https://actionnetwork.org/event%5Fcampaigns/socialist-cash-takes-out-capitalist-trash?ref=marxistunity.com) into a separate slate.
Confusingly, David Duhalde of SMC has hinged [his response to the amendment](https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/towards-a-socialist-labor-slate?ref=marxistunity.com) on a series of historical socialist candidates who emerged from the labor movement of the late 19th century, all of whom ran on a Socialist Party ballot line (or, in the case of Mother Jones, its precursor the Social Democratic Party). Marxist Unity Group are eager students of Eugene Debs, but his case and that of other Socialist Party candidates prove our point: it is possible and desirable to run labor candidates as open socialists, and unnecessary to downplay our politics in campaigns for office. Duhalde argues for more “flexibility” to choose candidates outside DSA’s active layer who are not committed to what he calls “socialist identitarianism.” However, our amendment would not preclude DSA from running a candidate who is less active in DSA, and Duhalde himself contradicts his argument against “socialist identitarianism” by citing examples of candidates who ran as open socialists. Despite the examples he provides, Duhalde’s “flexibility” doesn’t come from the history of the Socialist Party, nor from DSA’s existing electoral program, but from the moribund period between the collapse of the Soviet Union and the rise of DSA, where left electoral projects (like Ralph Nader’s 2000 Presidential campaign) largely eschewed socialism in favor of progressivism. It is an argument to return to a strategy that downplays socialism to the point of irrelevance in both the electoral sphere and the labor movement, rather than principled democratic socialism in both. Debs himself took an even sterner stance than our amendment when he said [that](https://www.marxists.org/archive/debs/works/1911/danger.htm?ref=marxistunity.com):
> *Of course we want the support of trade-unionists, but only of those who believe in socialism and are ready to vote and work with us for the overthrow of capitalism.*
Duhalde muddles the issue by framing it as a question of whether socialists and the labor movement are equal partners. The actual question at stake is much more straightforward—will we endorse candidates who do not publicly identify as socialists? Or will we endorse candidates who identify as socialists, just like Eugene Debs and Mother Jones, just like Zohran Mamdani and Shaun Scott and dozens of other high-profile, successful DSA electeds across the country?
In addition to the harm it would cause our electoral program, R20 makes no distinction between the rank-and-file of the labor movement and the union bureaucracy. DSA members are not neutral in the labor movement. We are always on the side of democracy, power for union members within their unions, and class struggle on and off the shop floor. The labor movement is no stranger to careerists who use staff positions to jump into elected office, and union Political Action Committees that have poured money for decades into anemic Democratic Party candidates in exchange for nothing. Our strategy for running labor candidates needs to align with the rank-and-file movement, not the bureaucracy.
The unamended resolution also encourages chapters to “consider developing joint SIO projects with closely allied unions.” Socialists in Office Committees, or SIOs, are the means through which chapters communicate with endorsed electeds and support their cohesion as a socialist bloc against the status quo pressures to compromise. While SIOs are [far from perfect](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/what-is-the-nyc-dsa-socialists-in), an effective SIO committee makes the difference between collapsing into business-as-usual irrelevance and [building an effective socialist caucus](https://www.wweek.com/news/2025/07/16/one-thing-has-changed-in-portland-city-hall-the-socialists-are-setting-the-agenda/?ref=marxistunity.com). By contrast, unions are politically divided, with members falling on all sides of the socialist, liberal, and reactionary spectrum. While we can work to bring the majority of union members over to socialist politics and to win union endorsements, “joint SIO projects” with unions are a recipe for spoiling DSA’s cohesive political strategy.
Lastly, R20 undermines one of the strongest sections of the [*National Electoral Commission Consensus Resolution*](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/cr05-national-electoral-commission-consensus-resolution/43611?ref=marxistunity.com): “Focused National Endorsements,” which stipulates that national endorsements should be given to open socialists with deep relationships to DSA. This is what allows us to create a unified slate that DSA can fight for nationally and ends the practice of paper endorsements. By siloing labor candidates into a separate slate, R20 does them a disservice, pushing them out of our unified electoral project and limiting their access to crucial organizational resources.
For the sake of uplifting openly socialist union members, rooting our electoral interventions in the rank-and-file of the labor movement, and protecting the strength and independence of our electoral program, we urge delegates to vote no on R20 unless amended by *R20-A1: Democratic Socialists and the Labor Movement Need Each Other*.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Principles of Independence
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/principles-of-independence/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:20:33.000Z
> *What we need in the United States is not a third party, a second party, or a first party, but a party. That is to say, we have in the United States no political institution in which members work out a program which is presented to the public and in which the elected officials of that institution then follow out the program and pass it into law, it doesn’t exist.*
—Michael Harrington
This August, DSA members from all over the country will gather for our national convention to determine the direction of DSA for the next two years. The theme for this year is “Rebirth and Beyond: Reflecting on a decade of DSA’s growth and preparing for a decade of party building.” A convention theme can be a forgotten slogan, or it can represent an important moment in DSA’s progress towards becoming a party if we choose to make it so. Almost everyone in DSA says they want a party, but disagreement on what that means and on what timeline makes that statement almost meaningless. Marxist Unity Group has put forward the resolution “[Principles of Party-Building](https://www.marxistunity.com/principles-party-building/)" to allow convention to clarify what building a party means and how we should work towards that goal. The resolution commits DSA to the goal of becoming an independent, mass socialist party, then provides a set of principles defining a party and how we should build it. In this piece, we will explore a few of the principles determining what a party is and how we should approach the ballot line.
### **What is a party?**
The very first principle of the resolution gives the definition of party that we think DSA should use:
> *1\. The fundamental purpose of a socialist party is to be a mass association of the working class formed for collective political action. The party will be united around a democratically created program that outlines goals that, enacted together, will allow the working class to rule and end capitalism.*
The conversation about the party in DSA is muddied by referring to several different matters with the same word. Party can refer to the ballot line that candidates run on, what kind of legal structure DSA is registered as, or how the organization operates more broadly. Most often, when people say DSA is not a party, this refers to the type of nonprofit DSA is registered as and that we do not have a ballot line of our own. However, a party in the Marxist political tradition is not defined by official recognition by the state through a ballot line or other legal forms. A party in the Marxist sense is a mass association of the working class for collective political action, which works to carry out a program that has been democratically set by members. This is the definition we establish in the resolution as DSA’s goal. The questions of ballot line and legal form matter but are less important than organizing for our own program, having a distinct public identity based on that program, and not taking direction from the capitalist class. A program is not just a list of campaign slogans, but a long-term strategy for what we need to win for the working class to rule.
MUG believes that DSA already functions as a political party in the Marxist sense. Chapters campaign in elections in the name of DSA across the country. Coordination of our electoral work nationally has been increasing within the National Electoral Commission, which has been working on [more active support of campaigns across chapter lines to make national endorsement more meaningful](https://electoral.dsausa.org/socialist-cash-takes-out-capitalist-trash/?ref=marxistunity.com). A program as the unifying banner for DSA has not yet been totally solidified, but positive steps have been taken these past few years. While imperfect, the publication of the [Workers Deserve More program](https://2024.dsausa.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) and its use by chapters can be seen in a way as the beginning of DSA as a party that is unified around a program. DSA has member-based democracy, from the local chapter meetings happening regularly across the country to our convention every two years. Any program adopted by DSA is the decision of members, and all our activity and campaigns are the decisions of members. The only thing we are missing is official recognition from the state on the legal form of our organization and an independent ballot line.
### **Party Surrogate**
One of the key debates about party building is how we choose to contest elections. Our resolution states that:
> *5\. Because of an undemocratic and uneven electoral system designed to maintain capitalist rule, DSA fights on unfavorable terrain and is pulled between the necessity of independent political action and using the ballot line of the Democratic Party. DSA’s approach is the party surrogate, acting as a party but without a dedicated ballot line.*
We do not lack a ballot line out of choice or preference. The United States’ electoral system is designed to keep power out of the hands of the people and protect the two dominant parties of capital. In most of the world, political parties are membership organizations. They control who is a member and who runs in an election. Political parties as voluntary membership organizations like this simply do not exist in the United States, which has a state-run registration and primary system. Ballot access or party registration requirements are extremely restrictive compared to other countries. While not an impossible challenge, these requirements are a drain on member capacity and financial resources. They can also create perverse incentives that commit you to running for certain offices or endorsing less preferred candidates to maintain the threshold of votes needed to maintain your ballot line. This leads to unfortunate situations like a [Working Families Party endorsement of Andrew Cuomo in order to stay a party](https://jacobin.com/2022/02/working-class-politics-without-the-working-class?ref=marxistunity.com).
As an extra twist of the knife, electoral systems are different state by state, putting us in a minefield of legal compliance traps. Those regulations will be selectively enforced against us, as seen in the $300,000 fine for a [NYC DSA slate following Board of Elections guidance](https://indypendent.org/2024/02/boe-vs-dsa-state-election-authorities-target-socialist-group/?ref=marxistunity.com). Naked corruption and significant campaign finance mistakes are business as usual for establishment candidates of both major parties, but socialists raising a comparatively piddly sum are a prime target for enforcement. Some ballot line restrictions were put in place to suppress socialist and communist electoral efforts, and we should expect more as our successes grow.
Unfavorable electoral terrain is nothing new for socialists, who have been navigating barriers placed by the state since the mass socialist parties of the 19th century ran for Reichstag and Duma. The question of how to approach elections and the ballot line on such a skewed playing field has challenged leftists since the American party system took shape. DSA’s approach to elections is most heavily influenced by Seth Ackerman’s 2016 essay “[A Blueprint for a New Party](https://jacobin.com/2016/11/bernie-sanders-democratic-labor-party-ackerman?ref=marxistunity.com).” Ackerman described the different problems with the ballot line and the traps it sets for third party attempts, and proposed a plan to contest elections on different ballot lines while building up the strength to succeed in a system designed for two parties. This has become known as the “party surrogate” approach. With a few exceptions, almost all electoral approaches within DSA are some variety of party surrogate.
It is easy to remember the insight of Ackerman’s piece crudely as “ballot line flexibility,” but it is worth rereading to see how much of the piece discusses membership and the need for a program:
> *“In a genuinely democratic party, the organization’s membership, program, and leadership are bound together tightly by a powerful, mutually reinforcing connection. The party’s members are its sovereign power; they come together through a sense of shared interest or principle. Through deliberation, the members establish a program to advance those interests. The party educates the public around the program, and it serves, in effect, as the lodestar by which the party is guided. Finally, the members choose a party leadership — including electoral candidates — who are accountable to the membership and bound by the program.”*
Ackerman’s piece goes far beyond mere ballot line choices and outlines how to operate as a membership-based party despite the legal barriers in the US. Without membership control and a unifying program, the party surrogate model falls apart. If you have ballot line flexibility without the other elements of the party surrogate, you are just running as Democrats.
### **Dirty Stay and Clean Break**
Another disagreement about DSA’s electoral approach is timeline on when to leave the Democratic Party ballot line, if at all. The party surrogate approach recognizes we need to be able to maintain control of our project and move away from the Democratic Party line over time:
> *6\. While DSA must move away from use of the Democratic Party ballot line and primaries, a ballot line is not the primary goal or indication of political independence. What matters most is bringing our independent organization and program to races whether on a Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot line.*
>
> *7\. When considering whether to create a ballot line of our own, losing control of our candidates to an open state-run process is a non-negotiable red line. Our ability to take independent political action is essential to preserve above all other considerations.*
Most electoral positions in DSA fall somewhere on a spectrum of the party surrogate model, where we work towards being a party (in all senses) by acting as a party (in the Marxist sense). We build our independent identity and operational strength in elections across different ballot lines until we no longer need to use the Democratic Party ballot. One exception to this party surrogate consensus is the SMC-promoted "[Dirty Stay](https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/staydirty?ref=marxistunity.com)” strategy. The dirty stay approach advocates that DSA should “stop pretending we are building a third-party when a better and more honest orientation already exists, one in which we are fostering a left-wing faction within the Democratic Party.” The other main exception to the party surrogate approach is the “clean break.” The clean break approach advocates for immediately stopping use of the Democratic Party ballot line in favor of independent or third party ballot lines. The clean break overweights the importance of the ballot line and emphasizes it over our program and identity. It is possible to run as an independent and not actually represent DSA, or even to prop up the Democratic establishment. It is equally possible to run as a Democrat and be fiercely oppositional, use the ballot line for our own purposes, and promote DSA and its program. Nothing about the label next to the checkbox guarantees this, this entirely depends on the campaigns DSA members choose to run.
Michael Kinnucan’s piece “[Political Parties are Illegal in the United States](https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/political-parties-are-illegal-in-the-united-states?ref=marxistunity.com)” correctly brings up many of the pitfalls of the state-run registration and primary system that would come with official party status and a ballot line of our own. We agree with Kinnucan’s assessment of the problems with the ballot line, but part of our disagreement on solutions comes from using a different definition of party. Neal Meyer of Bread and Roses responded with [a piece arguing that the impossibility of removing members from a given party registration is overstated](https://www.left-notes.com/p/political-parties-usa-regulated-not-public-utilities?ref=marxistunity.com). This is interesting, but unenrolling members or candidates only addresses a piece of the problem. It may be *legal* to remove members from state-run party registration, but this seems certain to be an impractical administrative burden even presuming the state is cooperative. Decisions about our electoral work are not only who to run, but where and with what prioritization. With an open primary system, anyone could run as a DSA candidate with or without our endorsement. Unless the election laws in a given area are changed so that we can maintain control of our electoral program, we should not seek party status or a ballot line at the cost of losing our ability to control our project.
### **Party Surrogate in Form, Clean Break in Content**
MUG’s electoral orientation can be described with the shorthand “party surrogate in form, clean break in content.” As described above, the party surrogate aspect means our priority should be our program and organizing operations, rather than the secondary tactical question of ballot line. “Clean break in content” means that we will not take direction from the capitalist class through the structures of the Democratic Party. While the party establishment does not have direct control as in other countries, they are able to exert pressure in many ways, seen and unseen. We should use the Democratic Party ballot and primary infrastructure without submerging ourselves into its ecosystem once in office. Socialists in office can refuse to join Democratic Party caucuses, even at the cost of committee assignments. They do not have to fund the Democratic establishment, by [paying party dues](https://www.dsausa.org/blog/ocasio-cortez-is-committed-to-the-democratic-party-not-dsa/?ref=marxistunity.com) or otherwise.
Using the Democratic ballot line without limiting ourselves to being a faction of the Democrats is about both candidate actions and messaging. Running as a Democrat is a temporary tactical necessity rather than an identity to embrace. The campaigns members select should be clear that their priority is building DSA, not reforming or realigning the Democratic Party. The idea of the “cadre candidate,” or someone who has come up through DSA as an organizer, is often presented as how to find someone who will promote DSA first. A background organizing in DSA is excellent but not a silver bullet. A basic step chapters can take is asking potential candidates if they agree to the four criteria inspired by the [proposed 1-2-3-4 plan](https://convention.socialists.nyc/member-portal/october-2022/proposals/the-1234-plan-to-build-a-partylike-structure/?ref=marxistunity.com):
1. If they do not get the chapter endorsement, they pledge not to run if the chapter endorses another candidate in that race
2. If they get the endorsement, they will downplay their identification as a Democrat as much as possible
3. If they get the chapter endorsement, they will endorse all other chapter-endorsed candidates at the same time
4. If elected, join the chapter Socialists in Office committee and vote as a bloc with the other socialist legislators
These are four common sense guidelines that chapters can use to start putting the “clean surrogate” approach into practice and identify if candidates are here to build DSA.
### **Building the Party**
As the resolution says, “Our ability to take independent political action is essential to preserve above all other considerations.” Political independence is a fundamental value shared across the organization. Every time someone makes a recruitment ask, makes calls on a renewal phonebank, or gives a dues drive presentation at a chapter meeting, we are reinforcing the importance of political independence. We are funded by member dues because this means we are not bound to the whims of wealthy patrons or foundations. Nobody can buy influence in DSA; you have to persuade the members who both do the work making up our collective activity and participate in our internal democracy. DSA’s electoral program needs to be determined by our membership, or else we are no different than the hollow capitalist parties that only serve their donors. Our independence is a matter both of resolutions at convention and the collective choices we make in our organizing in the two years in between. We hope that Principles of Party Building may be a useful guide.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Democracy Is More Than Voting
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/democracy-is-more-than-voting/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:12:31.000Z
### **The Case for Parliamentary Democracy**
DSA’s democratic structures typically operate under parliamentary procedure; from the National Political Committee (NPC) and its subcommittees to chapter committees and other formal bodies. They usually use Robert’s Rules of Order Newly Revised (RONR), but some bodies instead use an alternative or derivative parliamentary authority such as Rusty’s Rules, a simplified RONR developed by the IWW which is adequate for small meetings. I prefer consistency and am most familiar with RONR, but in my opinion the exact authority is less important than the general shape of the practice.
One can make legalistic arguments about the *why*: RONR is our rules, that’s how we work, you have to follow them. But I’m a firm believer in the principle that the law was made for man, not man for the law, and instead hope to make a more rational and ultimately positive political argument.
Despite its name, parliamentary democracy when implemented in a mass organization is a form of *participatory* democracy. Participatory democracy means all members have equal rights, not just to vote (as in *plebiscite* democracy, including referenda and absentee voting), but to propose and shape motions. Through this method we can reach agreement on action collectively, and avoid both the minority rule of consensus methods (which allow a small group to hold up making a decision) and the constrained choice of referenda (which often represent binary choices devised by leadership).
We need an argument for why *how* we do democracy in DSA matters. Why vote in meetings? Why not simply poll members?
Often when arguing for parliamentary methods, like voting in meetings, we cite the importance of debate. And while it is important, (I’ve had my mind changed by debate many times), it's only one aspect of parliamentary procedure. The goal, especially in organizations like DSA, is to move from combative to collaborative. Proposals can be amended in response to criticisms, or delayed or referred if they require further input. The agenda and the meeting itself are subject to the democratic will of the membership.
Our model of organizing means we develop ideas collectively. We don’t exclusively depend on leaders to guide and members to follow; we discuss problems we’re facing and develop plans to address them together. This distinguishes us from bureaucratic organizations like most unions and other socialist parties. Although this process can also take place outside of meetings (collaboration is an important part of the resolution-writing process), taking proposals to the general body means that there is opportunity for all members to weigh in.
Participatory democracy also serves our strategic goals. Any organization is doomed to produce an outcome in its own image. If we seek to build a society that truly believes that every cook can govern, we have to put those beliefs into practice. Just as we argue for democracy in society or for participants in movements and coalitions, we need democracy for our members.
Through this process we develop members as political actors: not just as voters, but as confident participants in governing the organization. We help them build skills that go beyond DSA; that they can take home to their workplaces, apartment blocks, and other sites of struggle. Through both recruitment of workers into the organization and building member capacity and experience in decision-making, we develop a society and a working class ready for self-governance.
I will now discuss some common alternative voting methods in DSA and analyze them through this lens of democratic practice.
### **But sometimes it isn’t?**
Many DSA bodies regularly practice *absentee voting*, including the NPC. Absentee voting, in the context of parliamentary democracy, means taking votes outside of a meeting by one means or another. It was adopted by many chapters and other bodies at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic because there was no immediately practical way to vote during an online meeting.
Some proponents argue that meetings are inaccessible, leading to the euphemism “accessible voting.” They claim that members who do not or cannot attend meetings are “disenfranchised.” Leadership bodies also treat it as a measure to expedite decision-making, taking votes using anything from Loomio to thumbs-up in Signal chats for items they are unwilling (or sometimes unable) to wait for a meeting, or call for a special meeting, to dispose of.
Robert’s Rules typically prohibits absentee voting unless specifically allowed in the bylaws, which it usually isn't (RONR (12th ed.) 45:56). RONR argues that it is “a fundamental principle of parliamentary law”—that is, of the practice of deliberative assemblies—“that the right to vote is limited to the members of an organization who are actually present.” Organizing bodies have various workarounds at their disposal; a chapter steering committee may call an advisory vote by email to take an action on behalf of the chapter if they can’t meet quorum, or a body may move to ratify votes taken outside of the meeting (which is not *really* what a motion to ratify is for (ibid 10:55), but that’s fine).
This is the negative, legalistic argument. But I think RONR 45:56 also supports the positive argument I laid out in the previous section: when proposals are voted on in meetings, the question can be modified through amendments, minds can be changed through debate, and members can make procedural motions (to table, to refer to committee, etc.) which affect the question being voted on. In other words, members play a much more active and decisive role in the process of making decisions.
Voting by online referenda obscures a very important question: *who decides what the question being voted on even is?* One possible answer is that any proposal with enough signatures is put to the membership, similar to ballot initiatives in states which allow them. It could be that the chapter steering committee or another leadership body makes the decision. Both of these options risk boiling decision-making down to binary choices made by atomized voters. It is possible that questions could be amended in a membership meeting, then the amended version put to a referendum, but this workaround undermines the argument that referenda are important because they make decision-making more accessible than meetings.
My core argument is this: voting only by mail (or email, etc) ceases to be parliamentary procedure. It ceases to enable participation in the democratic process. It gets rid of participatory democracy’s ability to develop members, to execute on the philosophy that every cook can govern. And that is reason enough to avoid it.
Another form of absentee voting is proxy voting. Proxy voting is a practice where one member can assign their voting power to another. This is discussed in RONR (12th ed.) 45:70-71 as a regulated practice, though 45:56 describes proxies as a form of absentee voting, which is generally discouraged.
I view proxy voting as often, but not always, harmless. The membership of Seattle DSA adopted it as a negotiated alternative to a proposal for absentee voting, but RONR makes an interesting argument against it. That is, in stock corporations proxies make some sense because *shares* are voting, not individuals, but it should be avoided in “nonstock” corporations where the voter is an individual. The reality is that this form of voting doesn’t provide representation for absent members; it instead provides the illusion of representation while over-weighting the votes of one or more present members.
At the 2025 Seattle DSA Convention, two opposing sides on a particularly contentious topic engaged in what one member called an “arms race” to get proxies for their side of the debate. It’s impossible to say whether this changed the outcome, but it over-weighted proxy holders’ votes on not only this question but the others we considered as well.
There is one exception where I think proxy voting is positive in DSA: National Convention. At Convention, delegates are elected to represent their chapter. They do so with qualifications: they represent both their own views and those of their faction in general. But each chapter is entitled to a certain number of votes. When some delegates are unable to attend (and alternatives are exhausted) it makes sense to allow delegates to assign a proxy so that the chapter still receives its proportional representation at Convention.
In the next and final section, I will briefly touch on electoral methods and make the case for Single Transferable Vote (STV), and proportionality.
### **Representative Bodies Should Represent**
I have until now focused on the case for parliamentary democracy in DSA, and critiqued other methods of voting and democratic practice common in the organization.
In the first section I discussed participatory democracy. Often this term is synonymous with *direct* democracy, which DSA members practice in chapters, committees, and caucuses where every member often votes on every question. But direct democracy runs into a problem of scale, not just in society but in our organization. It can be difficult to arrange a meeting of even a couple dozen people. While larger chapters frequently manage meetings of 100 or more members, it would be impractical to manage a meeting of DSA’s tens of thousands, never mind the logistics of getting them to one place at one time! It's also sometimes necessary to act or make decisions between meetings of the full body.
Representative democracy is (on paper, at least) the sort we are most familiar with in the US, and in most nations with parliamentary or congressional systems. Because every person cannot be present for every decision, they elect people to represent them. The US is particularly ineffective at this because between the Senate and the near-universality of first past the post voting, its institutions are particularly unrepresentative. But many other nations do better, and so does DSA.
DSA’s highest body—our equivalent of a party congress—is the biennial National Convention. This is a representative body: delegates are elected to represent their chapters and vote on direction and leadership for DSA as a whole. This is not too different from most parliamentary systems. Likewise, the NPC, chapter steering committees, and often committee or working group steering committees are representative bodies that make decisions and steer the organization in between meetings of the membership.
The most important role of representatives is to represent their electorate. This may sound tautological, but it’s important to keep in mind. That’s why recall is a crucial right for electors to a standing body, and why I’ll argue for proportional representation in nearly every situation. But before talking about proportionality, I need to talk about voting methods.
There are a variety of methods to elect representatives. Broadly they can be categorized into *single-winner* and *multi-winner*. Multi-winner methods can then be further divided into *proportional* vs *majoritarian*, while single-winner methods are (more or less) majoritarian.
We have almost exclusively single-winner elections in the US, and DSA has a lot too. Single-winner methods are intended to select a winner that best represents the preferences of a majority of the electorate as a whole, which inherently means that minority preferences are not represented. This discrepancy is widely abused in the US through gerrymandering, which is impossible in DSA where the electorate is a whole body.
DSA also has elections which are inherently multi-winner, such as the NPC, at-large chapter steering seats, and Convention delegates. Which leads us to the distinction of majoritarian vs proportional.
Proportionality is key to making sure every DSA member gets represented. Let’s imagine an election for 10 open seats, where three slates are running. Slate A attracts 60% of the vote, and B and C each attract 20%. Each slate runs 10 candidates, that is, enough candidates to fill all the seats. For the sake of argument we’ll say each individual member fills their ballot with only one slate, although this is rarely true.
Majoritarian voting methods like Approval and Score approximate a result where every elected seat represents the majority preference of the electorate. These methods usually make the election very simple to process. In Approval and Score, all you have to do is tally the “score,” and the highest scores win. But they also strip minorities of representation as long as the majority runs enough candidates.
In this example, a majoritarian voting method fills all 10 seats with candidates from slate A. The seats represent the majority of the electorate, but supporters of slates B and C have no representation. If slate A ran less candidates there would be room for others, but majoritarian representation offers no guarantee.
Voting methods designed for proportional representation like Single Transferable Vote (STV), on the other hand, are designed to represent the diversity of the electorate. Rather than minority perspectives being squeezed out, they get representation according to their level of support. Proportional voting methods tend to be more complicated to process. I don’t know of any that *don’t* require multiple rounds of calculation, except party list methods which don’t work in DSA. But we generally use voting software like Opavote, which, while complicated, uses simple math.
Under STV, slate A wins 6 out of 10 seats, while B and C each get 2\. Slates generally do not benefit from running more candidates. The elected body represents the electorate as a whole.
The result from majoritarian voting methods is not really representative at all, and defeats the purpose of multi-winner elections. If the goal is only to represent a majority, why not elect a single leader and allow them to appoint a cabinet?
Some proponents of majoritarian methods seem to embrace this. They argue variously that the majority should rule, that leadership bodies are primarily executive and not political, or that representing the diversity of the electorate just leads to strife and deadlock. While there is a kernel of truth to these arguments—leadership bodies in DSA have a significant executive function and diverse bodies sometimes have no clear majority on a course of action—the more important point is that every decision in DSA is political, and leadership bodies necessarily make political decisions.
DSA members deserve proportional representation for their leadership bodies and Convention delegations. Minority perspectives deserve to be heard and have the opportunity to change minds on representative bodies just as they do in the general body.
All of these structures—meetings for deliberative decision-making, synchronous voting systems, and representative bodies elected by proportional representation—may at first seem superfluous, or hard to understand. Each can all too easily be discarded in the heat of the organizing moment. But this is to our detriment. They all fulfill the same principle that underpins the socialist project: the working class must first govern its organizations before it can govern society. Every member must have equal right to engage in the decision-making process in all its complexity, either directly or through elected representatives. For this there are no shortcuts.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### MUG Resolutions and Amendments
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mug-resolutions-and-amendments/
Last updated: 2026-06-07T22:22:35.000Z
The delegate survey is out! Convention delegates, check your email for “Delegate Bulletin #3: Proposal Compendium & Delegate Survey”
Help us get MUG proposals to the debate floor at convention by selecting “support” on the delegate survey for our resolutions and amendments:
**Constitution and Bylaws Changes**
[CB09: Special Convention Overhaul](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/cb09-special-convention-overhaul/43876?ref=marxistunity.com)
**Electoral**
[R07: Principles for Party-Building](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r07-principles-for-party-building/41437?ref=marxistunity.com)
[R08: Democratic Discipline](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r08-democratic-discipline-a-uniform-process-for-electoral-censure-across-dsa/41447?ref=marxistunity.com)
[R18-A01: A DSA Presidential Platform (1 of 2)](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r18-a01-a-dsa-presidential-platform-1/46105?ref=marxistunity.com)
[R20-A01: Democratic Socialists and the Labor Movement Need Each Other](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r20-a01-democratic-socialists-and-the-labor-movement-need-each-other/43496?ref=marxistunity.com)
[R21: Democracy For All: a NEC Subcomittee for Voting Rights](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r21-democracy-for-all-a-nec-subcommittee-for-voting-rights/41423?ref=marxistunity.com)
[R33-A01: A DSA Presidential Platform (2 of 2)](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r33-a01-a-dsa-presidential-platform-2-of-2/46108?ref=marxistunity.com)
**Labor**
[R05-A02: Defend Political Freedom and Bring Members Together](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r05-a02-defend-political-freedom-and-bring-members-together/47487?ref=marxistunity.com)
[CR10-A01: A Partyist Labor Strategy](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/cr10-a01-amendment-a-partyist-labor-strategy/45996?ref=marxistunity.com)
**Organizational Reform**
[R32: Towards a Multilingual DSA / Hacia un DSA Multilingüe](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r32-towards-a-multilingual-dsa-hacia-un-dsa-multilingue/43530?ref=marxistunity.com)
**Program & Platform**
[R34-A01: A Fighting Socialist Program for DSA](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/a-fighting-socialist-program)
**Democracy Commission**
[CB01: Democracy Commission Comprehensive Structural Reform Proposal](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/cb01-cr01-democracy-commission-structural-reform-proposal/42727?ref=marxistunity.com#p-187452-introduction-5)
[CR01: Democracy Commission DSA National & Chapter Affiliation Agreement Proposal](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/cb01-cr01-democracy-commission-structural-reform-proposal/42727?ref=marxistunity.com#p-187452-cr1-democracy-commission-national-dsa-chapter-affiliation-agreementhttpsdocsgooglecomdocumentd1x4wnmh6i4uytdmkayl5j7elafjp4ztqmd%5Fybei3uetmviewtabt0bookmarkiduve7pnamznf3-18)
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### A Fighting Socialist Program for DSA
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/a-fighting-socialist-program/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:49:38.000Z
After months of negotiation between Marxist Unity Group and Reform & Revolution members, we have come to this reconciled program, which takes parts of both programs and makes them into a cohesive whole. We are excited for your feedback, amendments, and votes in August at DSA’s 2025 National Convention!
---
**Whereas** in order to build a new society, our organization must have unity around our goals and beliefs and an ability to explain our politics to people in our lives and communities.
**Whereas** historical socialist parties have developed unity by adopting a program which explains capitalist society, includes demands which connect to present consciousness, and clearly states that the working class will need to conquer political power.
**Whereas** although DSA passed a platform in 2021 and a program for the 2024 elections, DSA has not adopted a clear and precise general program yet.
**Whereas** while DSA remains a broad-tent embracing a diversity of socialist tendencies, a DSA program must clearly explain how we will end the capitalist state and place the working class in control of society;
**Therefore be it resolved,** that DSA will adopt a political program to replace both the 2021 Platform and Workers Deserve More to be the basis of political unity with the organization and to provide an explanation of our political aims to the working class; and
**Resolved,** that DSA's program will be posted prominently on our website and on other materials, included in new member materials, and will be distributed widely among both our membership and the wider working class; and
**Resolved,** that the program so adopted may only be changed at a DSA National Convention; and
**Resolved,** that Workers Deserve More Coordinating Committee will be renamed Program Coordinating Committee and will be tasked with promoting chapter use of the program; and
**Resolved,** that Program Coordinating Committee will be further tasked with assisting chapters in adapting an immediate program to local and tactical conditions, providing a practical bridge between the struggles chapters engage in and the long-term political struggle waged by DSA; and
**Resolved,** that DSA adopts the following as its program:
## **Political Program of the Democratic Socialists of America**
We live in a country run by a class of bosses and billionaires called capitalists. They have bought and run the Democratic and Republican parties, most news outlets, colleges and universities, and every branch of government from city halls to the Senate. They use their power to exploit the vast majority who work to live—the hundreds of millions of us who make up the working class. **This system can only be ended by the working class taking political power from the rich and building a new society.** We in the Democratic Socialists of America fight for that society: a democratic socialist society.
Our wages are stagnant, our hours are long, and prices are only growing higher. We increasingly live paycheck to paycheck, one bad day away from financial ruin. And yet it is *our* labor that powers this unjust system. The capitalists who own the businesses we work at take all the profits for themselves and use them to control *our* society. This is the exploitation that defines the capitalist system.
The capitalist system exploits Black, immigrant, and Indigenous people by dividing them from the rest of the working class. Millions of people of color face discrimination, unemployment, and police violence, locking them out of political power and an equal quality of life. Oppressive laws restricting abortion, marriage, and self-expression force women and queer people to choose between being controlled by their family or living in poverty outside of it.
Different people face different kinds of oppression, but as members of the working class we all want to control the direction of our lives. Every law, policy, or practice that oppresses us for who we are stems from the capitalists’ control over our society and reinforces it. We all have a common interest against the capitalist bosses: their rule threatens our freedom and safety. To be able to defeat the ruling class and end their exploitation of our labor, we need to fight the oppression every working person faces in this country. No matter their race, gender, or sexual orientation, we stand side by side.
Capitalism is a global system that exploits workers around the world. The most powerful capitalists use their wealth to influence governments into waging wars, toppling other governments, and starving entire peoples with sanctions and embargoes. They use this power to coerce other countries into selling their natural resources, labor, and goods for cheap prices. This imperialist exploitation forces workers of wealthy and poor countries to compete in a race to the bottom.
The United States has become a superpower through exploiting and oppressing countries throughout the Middle East, Latin America, Asia, and Africa while crushing and bribing workers at home. As workers in the most powerful country on the planet, we must build a global movement against the exploitation of the working class by opposing our government's imperialist goals and toppling its capitalist backers.
Both political parties work for the capitalist class in a political system rigged to keep the ruling class in charge. The working class needs a party of its own to change this. We need an organization by and for our class, where our politicians reflect our values and where we make our decisions democratically. Democratic Socialists of America is that party. We are united by a program of putting workers in control. In our fight against oppression and exploitation, we sit with our neighbors on rent strikes, stand with unions in strikes to win better pay and benefits, protest oppression, and feed our communities. We elect our own members to legislatures around the country to speak out against injustices while fighting for healthcare and cheap groceries.
Winning reforms or building a mass workers’ party alone is not enough. The Constitution is written to protect the rich few from the working majority. Anything we win from the rich can be taken away with the stroke of a pen. The historic victories of the labor movement, the New Deal, and the Civil Rights movement are already being stripped away. In order to protect our victories and implement the wider changes we need, the working class must take political power from the rich and create a new republic based on a democratic constitution.
But winning the battle for democracy is just the start of the fight. The capitalist class will fight back tooth and nail with their control of industries and money. If we want a government by and for workers to stand a chance, we must immediately use political power to seize control of key industries and finance. We will replace the secret deliberations of a few shareholder boards with public, democratic control at every level of the economy. We will have a socialist society where economic prosperity will serve our needs instead of profit.
The future of our country and the future of humanity will be decided by which class rules: capitalists or workers. Democratic Socialists of America is dedicated to overthrowing the capitalists’ dictatorship and establishing a democratic socialist government.
## **What We Fight for Today**
DSA fights all over the country for policies that will improve the lives of working people today. These policies alone will not end the unjust system we live under, but we believe that by fighting the bosses for things working people need now, we can build a movement that can eventually take power and build a government of working people.
1. **End the Deportations:** ICE’s deportations are a weapon used to oppress the working class and must end immediately. Abolish ICE and end the exploitation of migrant workers.
2. **Stop the Genocide:** Free Palestine. We call for an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza. End support for the state of Israel, including military support, weapons sales, the targeting of pro-Palestinian activists, and tax incentives for Israeli bonds.
3. **Lower the Prices:** People are struggling to make ends meet. The cost of living must go down. Essential goods like food, water, and energy must be made affordable by controlling the prices directly.
4. **Jobs for All:** A good job is a human right. We demand the minimum wage be increased to $20 an hour, a 32 hour workweek, and a jobs program guaranteeing everyone in this country a living wage.
5. **Medicare for All:** Nobody should be afraid of going bankrupt due to a medical emergency. We demand the cancellation of all medical debt and a universal health care system that includes abortion and gender-affirming care.
6. **Housing is a Human Right:** Nobody should sleep on the streets. Freeze rents and evictions, and allow tenants to collectively bargain. Create universally accessible social housing by redistributing housing hoarded by landlords.
7. **Democratic Elections:** Our elections are undemocratic, with an unrepresentative Senate, gerrymandered House districts, restrictions on voting rights, and unaccountable money spent by SuperPACs. We fight for voting rights for all, ending the Electoral College, public campaign finance, and proportional representation.
8. **Fight Oppressive Laws:** We fight for sanctuary cities and oppose every oppressive or discriminatory law. We are fighting to end all legal and political oppression against people for their race, gender, sexual orientation, immigration status, disability, and more. DSA stands for new rights and laws protecting the oppressed.
9. **Protect the Environment:** Corporations must not destroy the environment for their profits. Environmental regulations must be enforced to protect our communities. We fight for a Green New Deal to begin investing in green energy, infrastructure, and build free public transportation with a just transition for every worker.
10. **A Union For Every Worker:** Dignity at work is a fundamental right. We call for a mass new organizing campaign by the largest trade unions, and demand a government which protects the right for workers to organize and gives federal workers the right to strike. We are fighting and building unions to organize every worker in a powerful, democratic union.
## **Winning a Socialist Republic**
Democratic Socialists of America fights today for things like universal health care, jobs for all, and ending oppression. But we do not limit ourselves to individual reforms— we fight to create a new society. Doing that will require a mass movement of the working class, ready to decisively defeat the capitalists and end their rule over society. Democratic Socialists of America puts forward the following program to end capitalist dictatorship and begin building a socialist society:
1. **A Democratic Socialist Republic:** We are fighting for the working class to conquer power from the capitalists, smash their oppressive state, and create a government controlled by the working class. We are fighting to build a working class democracy, a socialist society without the racist prison and police system where we will finally be able to live as equals.
2. Abolish the Presidency and the Senate, and place supreme political power in a working class democracy consisting of a unicameral legislature, workers’ councils, and popular assemblies.
3. Guarantee freedom of speech, protest, organizing, and the right to strike.
4. Require all elections to be conducted proportionally.
5. Provide universal citizenship for residents and guarantee freedom of movement through our borders.
6. Replace existing law enforcement agencies with a public safety force run by local communities for de-escalation and protecting democratic and social rights. Ban former officers from joining and eliminate qualified immunity.
7. Guarantee full rights for people under trial and rehabilitation, and transform prisons into public facilities for rehabilitation and re-entering society. End all forms of prison slavery.
8. Enshrine the right to abortion, receive reproductive care, and form families regardless of marriage or blood relation.
9. **A Workers’ Economy:** A mass workers’ movement for political power must immediately place the economy under the control of the working class. With democracy in our workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods, we can leverage prosperity to build a good life for everyone.
10. Nationalize large corporations, transportation, and essential industries, replacing the shareholder boards with public workers councils drawn from unions and accountable to working class democracy.
11. Provide quality housing, food, education, water, family care, and other fundamental necessities of life to all residents. Support the creation of public spaces and art.
12. Guarantee universal healthcare for all, free at point of service. Coverage will include disability care, gender-affirming care, and reproductive healthcare.
13. End the segregation and exploitation of Black people and other people of color. Use the wealth of the rich to pay reparations and build their communities.
14. Nationalize all utilities and build a national power grid using solar, wind, and other clean energy technologies in place of fossil fuels. Secure a just transition to a sustainable economy and respect planetary boundaries.
15. Centralize infrastructure and provide free public transit across the country, including expanded regional and high-speed electric rail.
16. **An End to Empire:** A socialist government will end foreign wars and the war against oppressed people at home, end the United States’ part in the exploitation of the international working class, and pursue a just transition for the majority of defense workers towards work which serves all of humanity.
17. Limit the military to self-defense, public infrastructure, and disaster relief, with its leadership accountable to working class democracy. Guarantee civilian rights and residence during military service.
18. Grant all nations and colonies within the United States the right to determine their destiny, including separation or joining the republic.
19. Guarantee right of return to Indigenous nations based on historic treaties or adaptations by their democratic representatives.
20. Close all overseas military bases, end our occupations of other countries and bring our military home, end trade in weapons, dismantle all secret agencies, and grant immunity and protection for whistleblowers.
21. End sanctions and economic strong-arming of other countries.
22. End all economic and military support for states engaged in apartheid or genocide.
23. Share research, resources, and technology needed to build an interconnected, global energy infrastructure powered completely by clean, renewable energy sources.
**Resolved,** the section of the program entitled "What We Fight For Today" is adopted until the 2027 National Convention, when the Program Coordinating Committee will provide an update for the National Convention within its consensus proposal. If significant political changes make a demand redundant or require significant rewording to reflect changed conditions before the 2027 convention, the NPC may amend the "What We Fight For Today" section by ⅔ vote of the entire membership of the NPC. Amendments to the program may not contradict the full program and should be drawn from the principles of the full program.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### DSA’s Electoral Program Belongs to its Membership
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/dsas-electoral-program-belongs-to-its-membership/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:50:35.000Z
**This is an article in favor of** [**Convention Resolution 08: Democratic Discipline: A Uniform Process for Electoral Censure Across DSA**](https://www.marxistunity.com/mugdsa-convention-2025/democratic-discipline)**.**
DSA is growing. I can see it each week at our canvasses for Zohran Mamdani, and around the country as chapters experience a surge in membership after the 2024 elections. Our growth will not be limited to our membership numbers. As you read this, a new wave of socialist candidates for office is forming in cities and towns across the United States. Perhaps you have heard of some of the big names, like Mamdani in New York, but there are plenty of others, and many, many more who are gearing up for new challenges in 2026.
This is an exciting moment for an electoral program that has served as an important public face of our political work for the past seven years. But it also means that as a national organization we need to understand *why* we run candidates for office, and how they relate to the democratic organizational structures of DSA. More specifically, how our organization responds when an elected makes a decision that the membership disagrees with. Our elected officials are only as powerful as their ability to present socialism (that is, DSA as an organization with a concrete program, not merely a bloc of legislators) as the alternative to our capitalist and undemocratic society.
This question is part of the broader debate around “electoral discipline,” or the science of getting the party’s representatives to abide by its democratically decided positions. Marxists and other socialist formations have been debating how to do this for over a century, and DSA is no exception. I argue that in order to create an institutional culture of accountability in DSA, we need a uniform process by which members can bring concerns about an elected’s actions to a general meeting to be discussed openly and democratically. This also allows electeds to respond in an official and coherent fashion, not behind closed doors.
I will begin by articulating Marxist Unity Group’s vision for electoral discipline, and then discuss why R08 is the most effective path to building a culture of accountability in our chapters. In doing so, I hope to articulate a vision for how chapters across the country should think about building their electoral programs in a period of political upheaval and uncertainty.
### **A. Discipline**
Debates around electoral discipline aren't new—Marxists across history, including touchpoints for DSA like the German Social Democrats and the Russian Bolsheviks, grappled with similar issues. The problem flows from the inherent nature of electoral politics: If having socialists in bourgeois legislatures is worthwhile, we must believe that these legislators’ positions in office offer our movement some amount of power that would be otherwise inaccessible. This is the case regardless of what form you believe this power takes. Lenin, for example, writing in 1907, believed that the Bolsheviks should use the bourgeois legislature for a “simple and modest purpose:” propaganda, criticism, and revealing the contradictions of society to the masses. Legislators, he believed, had a specific power vested in their individual authority as officeholders to agitate and inspire.
If a speech in a legislature is a source of power for a socialist party, it stands to reason that the individual legislator might end up with the lion’s share of that political authority, over the people who sent them there. This is especially the case within the American political system, which tends to value individual politicians over parties and movements. As a result, electeds have access to media and communications resources generally not afforded to the party as a whole, in addition to a loose grasp on the actual levers of political power.
It will inevitably be the case that by virtue of electing someone to a public office, that person will be elevated to a position of power relative to the membership of the chapter that ran their campaign. Because of our individualistic, candidate-rather-than-party political system, DSA electeds often serve as a public face and voice of the chapter at the same time that their actions in a legislative body do not align with the will of the chapter’s democracy. In an ideal socialist party with a rigorous political program, our elected representatives should rarely be out of step with the will of the party’s majority. But what happens when that is not the case?
Because of incumbency advantages, electeds are difficult to dislodge from their seats, even if DSA chooses not to offer its support in their re-election campaigns. Threatening candidates with a vote to revoke their endorsement after every bad decision is unlikely to be a sizable enough threat to move them on any particular issue. Issuing an empty ultimatum also signals that we don’t believe we have the ability to move them in the first place. Nor is DSA powerful enough to invest organizing energy into primary challenges to electeds who break with the party line.
Typically, DSA has responded to this power imbalance in two ways. The first is surrender. Because we cannot hope to unseat a disagreeable elected, some suggest, the hope of disciplining them to the positions of the party is entirely illusory. Since we have nothing to offer them once they are elected, we are, in this view, essentially stuck with them until we choose to unendorse. That is, if an unendorsement is even desired—if one believes that our elected representatives are inherently uncontrollable, why not continue the relationship in hopes that the next time an unpalatable budget comes up for a vote, they might have a change of heart and vote with us instead of with the establishment Dems?
The second response is bartering. Because electoral challenges are so difficult, some have argued that DSA should attempt to “earn” the discipline of our legislators by supporting them outside of the campaign season. This can take many forms, but it often revolves around finding ways to support individual legislators’ policy priorities or constituent services efforts. By being a core piece of our electeds’ political work, they argue, these leaders will be encouraged to respect us as a political force or source of intellectual authority.
There are two problems with this approach: The first is that it is wholly unpredictable. There is no reason to believe that any particular quid pro quo will result in a more disciplined legislative group, in no small part because it is not something the electeds themselves have vocalized or demanded. Greater collaboration with our electeds’ day-to-day work (appearances at community events, keeping membership informed of the things they are doing, etc) is certainly warranted, but it strikes me as unclear how greater engagement with our legislators’ priorities would bring about this type of change.
Secondly, this type of collaboration is not always possible. On the Organizing Committee of Central Brooklyn DSA, we have often met with legislators’ staff, who will outline a specific area of work in detail. Sometimes, after listening carefully to their plans, we had to respond with an admission that membership does not have organizational capacity for that area of work. That’s fine! Legislators can have immediate priorities that, while important, don’t necessarily fit into the work of our mass organization. But we cannot exist in a party where the legislators are able to use their authority to orient the work of a chapter or branch—the tail cannot wag the dog, nor should we want it to.
### **B. Censure**
Discipline does not flow from the threat of a primary challenge, nor can we enforce or encourage discipline merely through “good works.” Instead, discipline comes from a *willingness on the part of electeds to be disciplined,* which implies a degree of fundamental alignment with our political project, and a democratic structure for members to voice disagreement with their choices.
As DSA matures into a functional party, we must continue to build electoral programs that require that potential endorsees recognize that they will be expected to take our program and goals seriously as legislators and executives. In some cases, this has happened already: earlier this year, three Brooklyn DSA branches were asked to consider the endorsement of a city council candidate. Though members [voiced many concerns](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/letter-an-argument-against-endorsing) with her campaign plan and the lateness of her request for endorsement, members across NYC-DSA’s ideological spectrum were not impressed by her unwillingness to vote as a bloc when requested by the chapter—one of our state-level electeds went as far as to tweet “Bloc voting is not a choice!” during the endorsement forum.
Needless to say, the request for the endorsement was rejected—and I believe our chapter is stronger for it. It should be remembered that many of those who rejected the city council candidate’s endorsement were some of the same members who previously opposed the “1-2-3-4” plan at the 2023 citywide convention, which would have required that our candidates more clearly identify themselves as socialists and with DSA. This signals a maturation of our organization towards partyism in our largest chapter.
But DSA’s electoral program isn’t merely about campaigns and endorsements. It’s also about actually holding office as legislators. Legislators, especially those in a minority faction like DSA, are constantly subject to a wide range of pressures from forces to our right to take certain votes, support certain campaign strategies, or endorse certain coalitions. The sway held by these power players should be taken seriously—but it is by no means insurmountable.
Our legislators were elected to their bodies having expressed varying levels of support for DSA’s project. Many of them were elected by a DSA that was far less interested in the idea of discipline than the one we have now. All of them take direction and advice from a wide range of sources. As such, we need a process for responding to situations when electeds are out of step with chapter positions, as well as a way for our rank-and-file to voice their concerns when these expectations are not met.
R08 aims to accomplish the second goal. Imagine, for example, a state legislator refuses to vote against a state budget that vastly expands police funding and cuts critical programs fought for by DSA. Or if a high-profile elected fails to cross-endorse other socialist candidates in key races. This resolution will allow members to articulate dismay or disapproval to electeds in a formal and collective manner, and allow for the formation of chapter spaces to discuss how DSA should proceed with our relationship.
Providing these structures will solve an important problem related to communication and accountability. Right now, if I as a member want to inquire about the conduct of a DSA elected, I can do one of two things: First, I could scream into the void on Twitter in hopes that *somehow* something productive will come out of it; Or I could take my concern to the forums, where there is no guarantee that the people who need to hear it will engage.
The second option is to tap personal connections in chapter leadership and hope that concerns are eventually grapevined to the appropriate place. Take, for example, members’ collective disappointment with Assemblymember Zohran Mamdani’s insistence on employing the phrase “Israel has a right to exist” in response to unrelated questions about antisemitism. The only way for me to find out whether this issue was being raised with the campaign was to first ask an Electoral Working Group member I have closely collaborated with, who pointed me to a Steering Committee member who was able to inform me that the co-chairs of the chapter *may or may not* ask about the issue in their upcoming standing meeting. There are no formal channels for disseminating the business of that meeting with membership, which means the only way that I could discover the results of this conversation is essentially the same way I found out about it in the first place!
Theoretically, there is a third option. I could use New York’s bizarre petition process to bring an issue to the Socialists in Office committee, but there is no mechanism in place to guarantee the committee will hear the petition or that petitioners will be made aware of deliberations surrounding it. To do so, however, I would have to act on behalf of a chapter formation (branch, working group, or campaign), all while being careful that my efforts to *even circulate the petition itself* do not run afoul of the “public reproach” subclause of the [local bylaw barring public criticism of electeds.](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1GxxHXFAf-gzvVWtHbS1vYkP7EpW7tVBo1ZRx4%5F9c9UY/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com) Finally, I would have to hope that the committee considers the petition germane, circulated through legal means, and actionable—though no process for doing so is outlined in the bylaw. And remember, this is all to ensure a conversation that I would hope is happening in the appropriate bodies in the first place. As a member there’s just no way to find out.
Undemocratic backchanneling is no basis on which to run a socialist organization. While committees and standing meetings with leadership may be perfectly acceptable for the regular, day-to-day business of being a legislator in a socialist legislative group (or campaigning to become part of one), membership needs a process through which major concerns can be discussed. In the current set-up, issues will be handled through byzantine whisper networks as petitions are circulated without a proper forum to discuss them. Frustrations are aired on Twitter, political fights are transformed into matters of character, and most devastatingly, most importantly, members *leave.*
By offering a forum for concerns about electeds’ actions, members will no longer have to rely on the time, energy, and goodwill of SIO committee members or leadership bodies in ensuring issues are addressed. At the same time, electeds themselves will better be able to understand which of members’ (varied, occasionally inconsequential) areas of disagreement should be taken seriously, and which ones do not merit as complete a response.
By passing R08, members of DSA will affirm that we expect our representatives in office, the most powerful members of our organization, to take on the responsibility of responding to members’ concerns if a vote on censure is held. This is a *huge ask,* and I do not believe that members should underestimate its gravity. But it is an important step that we must take if we want to be able to define ourselves programmatically in the coming years and decades. It’s not enough to be an electoral movement; it’s not enough to be a hub for interconnected struggles. The working class needs a party, and we need to begin to build the deliberative and democratic structures required for maintaining this party’s independence and power.
### **C. But what if—**
In discussing this resolution with members across DSA’s broad ideological spectrum, one specific concern has emerged: “If we are too open or democratic about our ability to critique electeds,” some might ask, “will they not leave the organization?”
This concern should be taken seriously. Members have invested thousands of hours (and plenty of money) into building our legislative blocs across the country. The possibility that a legislator who is censured—or even threatened with a censure—might choose to unaffiliate with DSA is a real one. Even so, we should not let this concern get in the way of open discussion around what chapters expect from our elected officials as we advance into a new era of DSA’s politics.
There are a few reasons for this. The first is that DSA is inherently an organization in flux. It is a robust and constantly-shifting democracy that has a broad formal platform but with (for now) few tools for enforcing adherence. All members of DSA, including our electeds, will have shifting degrees of unity with the organization’s political zeitgeist. Many will leave on their own, and many others will join up. This is a natural and inevitable consequence of both organizational growth and the vicissitudes of American politics, which will make new and unexpected demands of politicians and organizers as we continue to fight for socialism.
While collaboration with our electeds will always be important, we cannot expect that our relationship with each and every one will be permanent. R08 will provide members a space to clarify disagreements in a public forum, and come to an agreement about whether or not an elected has significantly broken with the principles of DSA. After doing so, the official can reflect, respond, or, recognizing serious disagreement with the democratic will of the organization, simply leave. The resolution, in this case, merely takes the complicated and messy process of disagreement and moves it out of committees (or, in more egregious cases, out of the shadows of groupchats) and to membership as a whole.
Others might argue that the very threat of censure might cause electeds to distance themselves from DSA. This, too, I find strange. Why should DSA choose to trust politicians who are not willing to be criticized in the first place? Many members of our organization believe in protecting electeds from criticism at all costs, which is why NYC-DSA’s 2022 Convention passed a resolution to prohibit it. This is a tremendously infantilizing way to handle our legislative group. If an elected is unable to handle critique from their own movement, can we trust them to stand up to the forces of capital which will take up much firmer opposition against our project? I am skeptical.
If one opposes a censure, or even debate over a censure, they should have to work to organize the members of their chapter to vote no on the resolution or proposal rather than appealing to the authority (or the capriciousness) of the electeds. After all, they are members too, and should have an equal stake in our democratic process.
Neither carrots (allowing electeds to dictate our organizational work or smoothing over conflicts) nor sticks (threatening to unendorse or primary them) will successfully enforce discipline. No amount of defending every boneheaded or disorganizing decision made by Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez will bring her in line with the programmatic goals of DSA. That is her decision alone. What we can do, however, is to clarify to the world what we stand for, and the importance of democracy in making our decisions. The resolution on democratic censure is a step in this direction, helping us steer DSA into new and uncharted waters—together.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The Rise and Fall of Sewer Socialism
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-rise-and-fall-of-sewer-socialism/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:51:39.000Z
Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York has become an important front of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA)’s work, both in the city and nationally. In [interviews](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9cO25KDgD6U&ref=marxistunity.com) Mamdani commonly cites the legacy of the “Sewer Socialists” of Milwaukee as a political inspiration for his vision of socialism. The importance and visibility of his campaign requires that we understand and evaluate this history. For all the positive lessons Milwaukee’s socialists can teach us, they also had their shortcomings which should make us wary of reviving the Sewer Socialist banner.
### **Five Words or Less**
In the general elections of 1904, the voting public of Wisconsin approved a ballot measure to conduct party nominations by direct vote. This was a victory for Wisconsin's Progressive (and Republican) Governor, Robert M. La Follette, over his conservative intra-party rivals. It instituted a system of open party primaries in the state, and voters could now decide a party's nominees in future general elections, cracking open the elite-driven primary process of the major parties.
At the same time, the election delivered another notable result in Wisconsin—it sent six Socialists to the state legislature. Earlier that year nine socialist aldermen were elected to Milwaukee's Common Council, capturing nearly thirty percent of its seats. Though these were not the first socialists elected to municipal and state government in the United States, their victory was held as a triumph for the Social-Democratic Party (SDP) of Wisconsin, a branch of the then recently-formed Socialist Party of America (SPA).
The introduction of direct primaries and socialist legislators was of course troubling to the traditional parties. In large part due to the Socialist threat, the state instituted nonpartisan elections in 1912, disallowing party designations from appearing on the ballot. Instead, candidates were allowed a statement of principle, not to exceed five words. Not unlike today’s ecosocialists in NYC, the Social Democrats chose ["Public ](https://archive.org/details/the-sewer-socialists-volume-one)[Ownership of Public Utilities" as their ballot statement](https://archive.org/details/the-sewer-socialists-volume-one). However, compared to today’s call to “Build Public Renewables,” the SPA’s slogan was a much broader statement of principle rather than a single policy. When viewed in the context of the SPA’s [platform](https://teachingamericanhistory.org/document/the-socialist-party-platform-socialist-party-national-convention-indianapolis-indiana/?ref=marxistunity.com), it becomes clear that they were arguing not just for building new public utilities, but expropriating existing ones as well.
The principle of public ownership anchored the party's municipal platform as early as 1898\. As the Socialists’ flagship demand, it helped build the SDP’s popular support and won them enormous electoral victories in the early decades of the 20th century. The promise, however, remained largely unfulfilled. To understand why we must look deeper into Milwaukee’s socialist project—its rise, its brief municipal majority in 1910-12, and the Socialist mayors that held executive power into the 1930s.
### **Dovetail**
A crucial pillar for socialist electoral wins in Milwaukee was its relationship with organized labor. Victor Berger, a founder of the SPA in 1901 and top political leader in the Wisconsin branch, was largely responsible for its trade-union policy. The crux of the policy was, in Berger’s words:
> *"that we must have a* [*two-armed labor movement*](https://www.marxists.org/archive/berger-victor/1929/voice-pen.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) *– a labor movement with a political arm and with an economic arm. Each arm has its own work to do, and one arm ought not to interfere with the other, although they are parts of the same body."*
This insistence on politically neutral trade-union unity was in tension with those in the socialist movement's left wing, who preferred strategies of dual-unionism and open confrontation with the established American Federation of Labor (AFL).
The SDP’s natural ally in Milwaukee was the Federated Trades Council (FTC), an affiliate of the AFL. Prior to the Social-Democratic Party's formation in 1898, Berger formed close ties with the council through participation in local union struggles. He was able to secure FTC endorsements of the party and its daily publication the *Wisconsin Vorwärts* and later secured publishing status as the council's official organ via the weekly [*Social Democratic Herald*](https://www.jstor.org/stable/4633592?ref=marxistunity.com). In December of 1899 the FTC held a general meeting to elect its executive committee. The committee elected was composed exclusively of socialists, including [Berger](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910).
The SDP was admittedly careful around its agitation of union members, recognizing they may belong to different parties. And there was some anti-socialist sentiment from unions in the council, notably the Printing Pressmen's Union. But between 1900 and 1910, the FTC continually provided financing to both the party and the *Herald*, and the party saw its [share of votes grow](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910). By 1902 the SDP received 8,453 votes for mayoral candidate Howard Tuttle, more than a [three-fold increase from 1898](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910). With SDP members in FTC leadership and on the shop floor as trade-union members themselves, the party was better able to appeal to union members and grow its electoral voting strength. The relationship worked both ways in that it also provided an on-ramp for union members who wanted to seek public office.
A second pillar of Socialist electoral strength came from the legacy of the Populist party and the contemporary Progressive movement. Prior to the SDP's founding, the Populist party agitated around many of the same local issues, including municipal ownership of public utilities. In the SDP's meager 1898 showing, Democratic candidate David Rose swept the race on a [largely Populist platform](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910). While Rose proved popular with Democrats, he was more pragmatic than principled, and granting concessions to the local street railway company lost him Populist support during his first term.
For their part the Progressives made their political home in the Republican party, with the aforementioned governor La Follette winning election in 1900\. They too promoted municipal ownership of utilities, but after losing their 1902 municipal nomination to a conservative, they made a deal to support Rose, paving the way for another victory in the [1902 election](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910). At the state level Progressives held sway with Milwaukee SDP voters, and La Follette ran nearly twelve hundred votes ahead of SDP nominee [Emil Seidel on their own ticket](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910).
While the Progressive movement can be said to have brought support to the Socialists, Berger and the early SDP sought no association with Progressives during the height of their success, and criticized them for their commitment to the principle of private property rights. This would later change. In 1924, after the party’s support had already collapsed nationally, they supported La Follette’s presidential run on a reformist platform (Miller, Sally M, *Milwaukee: Of Ethnicity and Labor*, Socialism and the Cities, Kennikat Press, 1975, 60).
### **Labor and Coalitions**
The early SDP deeply embedded itself in Milwaukee’s trade-union movement, steering union workers into support for the Socialist party and their ballot line. Their effort was eased by two factors. Both constituencies were composed mainly of German immigrants already accustomed with socialism, and the national AFL was still young and willing to look the other way on socialist intervention for the sake of loyal support. Today's socialists enjoy no such luxuries. In the course of the 20th century, the ruling class systematically purged the labor movement of radical influence, cutting off the most active and dynamic organizers from the mass of the union movement and setting the stage for today's disorganization.
There are no longer large socialist parties with deep roots in working class communities driving the labor movement in the direction of systemic change. The Rank and File Strategy pursued by DSA is a step in the right direction, but as outlined in Marxist Unity Group’s [tasks and perspectives](https://www.marxistunity.com/content/files/2026/05/tasks.html), in its current practice it risks making the same error as Berger’s neutralism, which lost opportunities to create well-rounded socialists out of union militants. In some cases, especially visible in Berger’s example, neutralism even meant tailing the xenophobia and racism of the contemporary labor movement, emanating from structural divisions within the working class.
The party’s reformist orientation also dictated how it approached the other main actor in their coalition: Progressive voters. Although the early party was quick to criticize and distance itself from Progressive politics, there was crossover in their immediate demands. And as the SDP began winning elections based on these demands, the reform-minded middle-class became an essential component to growing their ranks in public office. Because the “sewer socialist” strategy dictated they could achieve their long-term goal of a cooperative commonwealth via the ballot, without transforming the existing political system, they were not necessarily turning voters into socialists. Instead, the party chose to reach them by dulling their program's horizon, and by seeking short-term common-sense wins to the detriment of their long-term vision.
NYC-DSA today is in a similar position. In pursuit of our electoral program we prioritize consolidating reform-minded Democratic Party voters around targeted campaigns for legislation, without effectively tying these efforts into any long-term vision for our socialist project. While participating in the electoral arena is a critical plank of any socialist party, it should be in service of reaching the widest possible part of the population with our message. Our messaging should center the need for large scale transformation of the political system, exposing its undemocratic nature and offering an alternative. Even inside of DSA, much more can be done to educate members in socialism, and expose them to varied work beyond the “community organizing” and mobilization tactics of the progressive non-profit complex.
Milwaukee City workers inspect a sewer line in the 1900s, from the University of Wisconsin Milwaukee archives.
### **The Breakthrough**
In the summer of 1903, Milwaukee’s press began to expose the systematic graft and corruption throughout municipal government, whipping up a massive public scandal. Democratic and Republican officials alike were accused of bribe-taking, misusing funds, even outright theft of public money. Berger put the *Herald* to work in tying the stories of graft to the capitalist system, and insisting on [socialism as its solution.](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910)
When Progressive reformers arranged a mass meeting to address the situation, the SDP used it as an opportunity to agitate against what they saw as the useless spectacle of convening the Progressive circle, which included the very businessmen and attorneys who the SDP charged were responsible for the graft in the first place. The SDP’s lone speaker at the event, Winfield Gaylord, called out the vice-presidents (sponsors) of the meeting for their role in the current state of affairs. The meeting appointed a Citizens' Committee of Ten, a civic reform group. The SDP refused to associate or work in coalition with the committee, asserting that it would be useless and at best would uncover those who took bribes, rather than those in the capitalist class [who gave them.](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910)
After the scandal, many in Milwaukee anticipated further SDP victories in the 1904 elections. The party's city convention was covered widely by the press. In an attempt to capture lightning in a bottle, the party nominated Victor Berger for mayor. A remark made in his nomination acceptance speech reveals the party’s early attitude toward electoral victories:
> *"It makes no difference to us whether we win or lose in Milwaukee. We are fighting a bigger fight than for a political victory in this city. If we are defeated, we will be here again next year, and the year after, and every year until we succeed."*
Progressives also took advantage of the moment and successfully nominated one of their own, Guy D. Goff, to the head of the Republican ticket. The Democrats again nominated Mayor Rose. The Friday before the election, the SDP held a large rally with Eugene Debs as speaker.
Though the SDP nearly doubled their mayoral vote from the previous election, the Democrat Rose walked away with the victory. He was able to peel off conservative Republicans through associating the Progressive Goff with the Socialists, and by heavily campaigning in the city's Catholic Polish community on an [anti-socialist platform](https://archive.org/details/milwaukeehistory0000bayr). Despite the mayoral loss, the election was a success for the party. For the first time they had elected nine aldermen to the Common Council. In November came further victories, with five members elected to the Wisconsin State Assembly and one to the State Senate.
The SDP were able to get their foot in the door at a moment when the traditional parties were weak with voters due to scandal. The Zohran Mamdani campaign is currently benefiting from similar circumstances. Until recently, incumbent Democratic Mayor Eric Adams was facing federal corruption charges, and current frontrunner Andrew Cuomo holds a blemished past of his own. Combined with the anxieties introduced by the second Trump administration, it is not a stretch to imagine the city’s Democratic voters will seek an alternative in a young, self-described socialist with a plan.
While the Mamdani campaign has so far done an excellent job messaging around his platform, it's hard not to wonder how a programmatically-united DSA could utilize such a large stage to associate the municipal reform platform with a national movement for revolutionary democracy. Our lack of programmatic unity sits downstream of organizational tensions around theories of change, structural democracy, and party discipline.
### **First Blush**
When the nine aldermen joined the Common Council, they immediately operated under impressive party discipline. They voted as a bloc against all appointments, and each signed an undated resignation card that was left with the party to be used in [case of emergency](https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/mkesocialism/id/3943/?ref=marxistunity.com). By alderman Emil Seidel's count they introduced 318 measures, with 71 of them having ["a wider bearing on social welfare and social trends."](https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/mkesocialism/id/3943/?ref=marxistunity.com) These included plans for a municipal ice plant, using union labels on city printing, fixing the sale of gas at forty cents, and empowering the council to [fix salaries](https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/mkesocialism/id/3943/?ref=marxistunity.com). It is unclear how many of these measures passed, and we can assume the more contentious of them did not. But the socialist members were seen to be fighting for a clean and efficient government on behalf of the working class. They crafted an image and reputation that they felt would carry them to further victories.
Toward the end of their first term, in the ramp-up to the 1906 elections, the party faced its first dilemma in government. The SDP's platform included the demand that no new franchises be awarded for public utilities, which would contradict the fight for public ownership. During their term the alderman followed this plank to the letter and voted against all franchise requests submitted to the council. But the growing city put an increasing demand on railroad and street railway service. And as socialists were committed to approving no franchises, they were unable to take credit for franchises that could be more favorable to the city than the existing monopolies.
In an effort to make the party more palatable to reform-minded professionals, the SDP struck the franchise plank from their platform and replaced it with a set of conditions by which a franchise could be approved. The story of this pivot is a glimpse into Victor Berger’s hold on the party. On the day of the SDP convention to approve a platform, Berger printed an editorial in the *Social Democratic Herald* arguing for the platform change. The party adopted it that same day, and the conditions therein were lifted verbatim from Berger's editorial. This change was also included in the state party platform [later that year.](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910)
A parallel is obvious between the franchise question and NYC-DSA’s actions and commitments regarding housing. While sometimes advocating for new social housing, a truly socialist policy, the pressures of coalitions and immediate feasibility have forced an adaptation to “market-oriented” solutions relying on capitalist developers. In both cases these adaptations erode the very purpose of socialist organizing as separate from progressive activism.
The 1906 election saw the SDP gain an additional three seats on the Common Council and again grow their vote share for mayor, though by a lower rate than the previous race. Mayor Rose was finally unseated by Republican Sherburn Becker, the son of a local financier. This term saw the Social Democrats begin to solidify their reputation. They bloc voted on every measure, and put forward proposals that generated increasing public attention. They seemed to bring a much desired respectability to the council after the municipal graft scandal.
### **Discipline and the Party**
The SPA was by no means a happy family. Its origins lie in a merger between Berger’s Social-Democratic Party and an expelled faction of Daniel De Leon’s Socialist Labor Party. The tactics of the Wisconsin organization were a continual source of debate and tension in the Party, not unlike the relationship between the NYC chapter of DSA and its national body today. Berger was on its reformist, self-described “constructive” wing, and Wisconsin often flouted party decision-making at the national level.
Despite their divergence from the SPA nationally, the Wisconsin organization still benefited from operating under the discipline of a party formation. Compared to the electoral experiences of some other SPA branches, notably that of George Lunn and the Schenectady, New York branch, Victor Berger ran a fairly tight ship. Electeds were expected to vote as a bloc in alignment with the party platform. In contrast, DSA’s electoral project has yet to achieve consistent bloc voting from our Socialists in Office. Endorsed electeds cast controversial votes without consequence, and the committees formed to liaise between electeds and membership are woefully opaque. Combined with a practical necessity to run on Democratic Party ballot lines, our ability to use these races to build an organizational presence in the minds of voters beyond the bubble of political media is hampered.
DSA is at best a proto-party, and while there is no such thing as a silver bullet, it is clear that we should take a cue from the socialist parties of the early 20th century to move beyond our perennial controversies. Democratic centralism in this context would simply mean having an organization-wide set of standards on conduct and voting for members within legislatures, standards mapped to a democratically determined program, and that breaking from these standards would have organizational consequences for these members.
The aim of centralist discipline isn’t to police members for the sake of moral purity, but to help create a culture where members, especially those in public view, see themselves as representatives of a movement and a party. That kind of culture begins with unity around a common program and common work. In a healthy organization, coercion of any kind would not be necessary outside of rare exceptions, and the actions of leadership would be checked by the regular practice of democracy, through free and open debate.
### **A Municipality of One's Own**
Prior to 1924, the city of Milwaukee did not operate under “home rule,” or municipal self-governance. The state of Wisconsin set Milwaukee's tax rate and held substantial power over the city's affairs. Since the creation of Milwaukee's first charter in 1846, the city was in a battle with the state to obtain its own autonomy. It was curtailed in the first place after city ward aldermen abused their debt-issuing authority to nearly drive the [city to insolvency. ](https://archive.org/details/milwaukeehistory0000bayr)Rural conservatives controlled the state legislature, and as capital interests found them easier to work with than the city legislatures, they typically supported efforts to retain the state’s power [over the city](https://archive.org/details/milwaukeehistory0000bayr). Given the issue was fairly non-partisan from the city's perspective, however, home rule was supported (at least rhetorically) by most municipal candidates seeking office.
In 1907 Milwaukee was authorized to hold a convention to prepare a home rule charter. That same year the state also remade the makeup of Milwaukee's Common Council. Now each ward elected one alderman instead of two, with twelve aldermen elected at-large by the whole city. This was an effort by the Democrats and Republicans to forestall the Social Democrats'[ accrual of power](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910/page/n27/mode/2up). In the 1908 municipal elections, David Rose was reelected mayor with SDP candidate Emil Seidel beating out the Republican for second place. But while the SDP elected nine aldermen, under the new council configuration they wound up with fewer seats.
Preparations for the home rule charter convention later that year proved controversial. When it appeared that Republicans and Social Democrats would make up the majority of delegates, Mayor Rose declared the whole thing unconstitutional. He denied the convention use of city hall and had the finance committee of the council block funding of the event. Despite this the convention went ahead with plenty of civic support. Unfortunately, while the charter for home rule passed in the state senate, it was [defeated in the assembly.](https://archive.org/details/milwaukeehistory0000bayr)
### **Structural Barriers**
Sewer Socialism’s theory of change implies that we live in a democracy. While citizens are nominally free to vote for anything they want, and we are nominally free to run any candidate or form any party, there are massive systemic barriers to democratic political transformation. At every level of government, judicial review and arcane constitutional systems block popular will. The SDP were consistently routed in their efforts by an antagonistic state legislature, and a Mamdani administration will no doubt confront similar antagonism when seeking to touch the MTA budget or raise the corporate tax rate.
These realities functionally preclude socialist power within the capitalist state. Agencies beyond popular control have their own agendas which span across administrations. Those who are tasked to implement progressive change are often most invested in the reactionary status-quo. Gerry-mandering, fundraising challenges, regulations, and capitalist control of the press further limit democracy.
If we are to win a truly democratic society, we as socialists must persistently identify and communicate to the public the roots of our domination in the US constitution and the capitalist empire which upholds it. It is our ability to organize a popular opposition to our undemocratic institutions that will determine our success. To the extent we are able to elect public officials through this process, we can be confident that we are building a base capable of withstanding the winds of reaction, acting as a democratic counterbalance to undemocratic institutions until we have a majority mandate to replace them.
Farmer-Labor Progressive Federation propaganda endorsing the Socialist ticket.
### **Our Year**
For the ten years after 1898, the Social-Democratic party steadily increased their share of the mayoral vote and gained a positive reputation on the Common Council. Now it was time for their efforts to bear fruit. The party's image had so decisively changed in the city, even the typically anti-socialist editorial of the *Daily News* had this to say:
> *"… It is an insult to the intelligence of the people of Milwaukee constantly to hold up the thousands of hard-working, industrious men that compose the bulk of the Socialists as a menace to the community. Instead of being a menace, they are one of the chief sources of its prosperity. In this connection we need not consider Socialism whatsoever. For it is not within the power of the Socialists of Milwaukee to enact Socialism–the most that they could do, even if given a free hand in municipal affairs, would be to work a program of moderate reforms …"* (Daily News, May 3rd 1909)
On April 5th, 1910, voters in Milwaukee elected their first socialist Mayor—former alderman Emil Seidel. They also won fourteen of twenty-three available ward-alderman seats, seven of the twelve available at-large seats, two civil judges, the positions of Comptroller, Treasurer, and City Attorney, and a [majority on the county board](https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/mkesocialism/id/3943/?ref=marxistunity.com). Crowds filled the streets the night of the election, and when the race was called the Milwaukee *Sentinel* lit a searchlight in the sky with the results, sending the crowd to deafening cheers (*Milwaukee* *Herald*, April 9 1910). Triumph carried into the general election later that year, and the party sent thirteen members to the state legislature. Victor Berger won the fifth congressional district, becoming the first Socialist Party member elected to US congress.
A key factor in Seidel's success was carrying the Polish-Catholic dominated fourteenth ward. This had been a Democratic stronghold, where the Catholic church proved successful in hampering the socialist vote. The SDP put a strong effort into reaching these voters, distributing translated literature and sending native speakers to the ward. Five months before the election the party established an entire newspaper in Polish, the *Naprzod*, while also distributing a translated campaign paper titled [*Voice of the People*.](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910)
It should be mentioned that the Wisconsin SDP, and its electoral success, was primarily a product of the German immigrant community. Milwaukee’s German wards were its strongholds, and the party’s efforts to reach out to the Polish community and others via its foreign language sections give us a view of the path not taken for expanding its proletarian base.
The party’s orientation seems especially jarring at a time when women and Native people could not vote and had little civic protection, and Jim Crow reigned over the Black population. Were it not for Berger’s notorious racism, we could imagine the party doing similar outreach to Milwaukee’s Black community. Instead, the party chased the votes of the relatively privileged section of the proletariat and the petit-bourgeoisie, with strict limits on what kind of socialism they would tolerate. This was another example of the narrow vision inherent to Sewer Socialism which missed an opportunity to advance the struggle for democracy. These kinds of errors would limit their tenure in power.
### **In Power**
The party's 1910 platform included much more specific demands than those previous, heavily influenced by their six years of legislative experience. Home rule became the first plank, with municipal ownership moving to second. Further planks included raising corporate taxes, building public slaughterhouses and municipal hospitals, operating a municipal stone quarry, annexing territory for the city, ward redistricting, and providing all city workers with a fair wage, among [other reforms.](https://archive.org/details/HistoryOfTheSocial-democraticPartyOfMilwaukee1897-1910)
In their two years in power Seidel's administration did much work to improve the efficiency of the city government. Shortly after the election Berger offered economist and labor historian John R. Commons a job in Milwaukee to help reorganize government processes. Over eighteen months Commons and his team, as the Milwaukee Bureau of Economy and Efficiency (BEE), produced reports and made recommendations concerning cost-systems and the organization of departments. Similar bureaus existed in Chicago and New York and Commons visited them [to recruit and study](https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=uc1.b4354836&seq=7&ref=marxistunity.com).
Following the bureau's guidance, the city made successful interventions in first responder telegraph systems, plumbing inspections, the reorganization of garbage, and [new unit cost systems for materials, labor, and management](https://archive.org/details/the-sewer-socialists-volume-one). Meanwhile, the comptroller's office inventoried all tax-delinquent and city-owned property and created an [indexed payroll system from scratch](https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/mkesocialism/id/3943/?ref=marxistunity.com). Using scientific management methodologies, the administration was able to accomplish more without having to raise taxes.
The BEE recommended delegating certain municipal problems to commissions composed of interested citizens. One of these became the Child Welfare Commission, which in its pilot was able to reduce child mortality in an allocated district by sixty-six percent through one-on-one nursing [assistance with new mothers.](https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/000271621204100127?icid=int.sj-abstract.similar-articles.5&ref=marxistunity.com)
The administration also made interventions in labor, raising the wage of day laborers employed by the city from $1.75 to $2.00 a day. They further implemented the eight-hour day for all city and contracted employees. Union labor was employed whenever possible, and the SDP helped in organizing unions where city employees were without one. Similarly to [the Child Welfare Commission](https://archive.org/details/the-sewer-socialists-volume-one), a citizens committee on unemployment was created to help job seekers.
The election of the Socialists in 1910 was a wake-up call to the old parties, and it fundamentally altered the political calculus of Milwaukee. In response, the old parties were forced to join together and endorse a nonpartisan candidate, Gerhard A. Bading. The coalition proved too much for the SDP to overcome, and Seidel was defeated in the 1912 election. Socialists also lost ten seats on the Common Council, costing them their majority. This was despite the fact that the party actually grew its vote totals, and for the first time elected an alderman in the Polish fourteenth ward, Leo Kryzcki (*Milwaulkee Herald*, April 13 1912\. Following the success of this strategy, state lawmakers pushed a bill through the legislature to officially adopt nonpartisan elections [mentioned in the introduction.](https://v/?ref=marxistunity.com)
### **On Good Government**
The Seidel administration no doubt left Milwaukee in better shape than they found it. Their interventions in accounting, labor and management helped bring Milwaukee’s government into the 20th century. But similar changes were occurring at the same time under non-socialist administrations. The ultimate lesson of the Sewer Socialists is that “Good Government” is not enough. They won a supermajority, conquered the red-baiting of local press, governed without a blemish, and two years later lost their mandate. Why? Because they relegated their function in office to managing an undemocratic system, barely distinguishing themselves from liberal progressives. Eugene Debs understood as much, writing shortly after the SDP’s 1910 victory in a January 1911 article titled “Danger Ahead:”
> “The truth is that we have not a few members who regard vote-getting as of supreme importance, no matter by what method the votes may be secured, and this leads them to hold out inducements and make representations which are not at all compatible with the stern and uncompromising principles of a revolutionary party. They seek to make the socialist propaganda so attractive—eliminating whatever may give offense to bourgeois sensibilities—that it serves as a bait for votes rather than as a means of education, and votes thus secured do not properly belong to us and do injustice to our party as well as to those who cast them.
>
> These votes do not express socialism and in the next ensuing election are quite as apt to be turned against us, and it is better that they be not cast for the Socialist Party, registering a degree of progress the party is not entitled to and indicating a political position the party is unable to sustain.”
Democrats and Republicans have no trouble manipulating the legislative system at junctures beyond socialist control, or even adopting progressive messaging, should it become necessary. When it became necessary in Milwaukee, the capitalist parties united using every tool at their disposal, and the voter coalition the SPD had built couldn’t withstand the onslaught.
### **The Torchbearer**
Though the SDP had lost its hard-won majority, they held onto a presence in City Hall through Daniel W. Hoan and a minority on the Common Council. Hoan was elected as City Attorney along with the Seidel administration in 1910, at the age of twenty-nine. He alone would stay on through the losses of 1912, and in 1916 he went on to win the mayoralty and govern the city for twenty-four years.
After the nonpartisan bill of 1912 the political lines in Milwaukee sharpened. With all non-socialists in coalition against them, the SDP had trouble holding on to the middle-class reformers who swung their way in 1910\. In Hoan’s 1916 run against Gerhard Bading, the slogan was once again “Public Ownership of Public Utilities.” The Seidel administration had been unable to meet this demand, due to a dependency on state legislation which allowed opposition to stall their bills. Existing franchises for street railway and gas companies were also not up for renewal [during the 1910-1912 term.](https://archive.org/details/milwaukeehistory0000bayr)
The 1916 race held an opportunity for the Socialists, as it coincided with a referendum to take the city’s street lighting under municipal ownership. As Bading and the old parties could never support municipalization, Hoan was able to take the opportunity of differentiation and press the SDP’s line. He held a good reputation with voters from his accomplishments as City Attorney, which included concessions from public utility companies. Bading resorted to red-baiting, but Milwaukee voters by this point [were numb to such attacks](https://archive.org/details/milwaukeehistory0000bayr). Hoan won the election and the street lighting referendum passed, putting the SDP once again back in the executive. This time however they lacked a council majority, taking eleven seats of the thirty-seven member chamber.
Though Hoan held the mayor’s office for twenty-four years, the SPD never again gained a majority on the Common Council, nor was Hoan able to fulfill the party’s demand for public utility ownership. Despite this his administrations held some notable accomplishments, and it was during Hoan’s tenure that Morris Hillquit, leader in the New York SPA, coined the term “Sewer Socialism” to describe Milwaukee’s Socialists. A 1920 city zoning ordinance introduced some measure of urban planning, and in 1921 Milwaukee became the first city in the United States to publicly finance cooperative housing under the “Garden Homes” project. The law was later changed, however, to allow individual owners to obtain a personal deed to their property when paid in full, and the cooperative dissolved over time. In 1935 the council passed the Boncel Ordinance, which allowed the Mayor or Chief of Police to close strikebound industries. And in the spirit of the Social Democrats’ fiscal responsibility, Hoan was able to bring the city budget to operating nearly on a cash-basis, [with little debt to speak of.](https://archive.org/details/milwaukeehistory0000bayr)
Daniel Hoan finally lost the mayor’s office in 1940 to young nonpartisan upstart Carl Zeidler. He barely won reelection in 1936 after the Socialist Party once again sought coalition with the Progressives, abandoning their independent electoral column (Miller, 64). His longevity in office was due primarily to his prioritization of working relationships with the nonpartisan coalition, rather than any mandate for municipal socialism. The New Deal of the 1930s siphoned off the reform-minded electorate from the Socialists, and the unions [moved on with them](https://archive.org/details/milwaukeehistory0000bayr). With the Second World War and the Cold War still to come, the Social-Democratic Party left the stage.
### **Conclusion**
The essence of “Sewer Socialism” as opposed to other trends in socialism, is a de-emphasis on systemic thinking about capitalism, and large scale social transformation. It aims to find an existing majority support in common-sense policy which represents good governance and increased quality of life.
There is an obviously positive side to this vision, which is responsible for its legislative victories. This is the idea that socialism serves the interests of the working class majority and uses the resources of society to improve quality of life. While effective sewers, transportation, health and education are arguably in the interests of the whole society, the problem of taxation, varying economic interests between sectors, the undemocratic nature of the regime, and ideological factors make it impossible for the capitalist parties to deliver. This is particularly the case in the era of falling profitability and neoliberalism.
The same dynamics faced by the SDP face us today, where NYC-DSA’s landmark legislative victory, the Build Public Renewables Act, is hollowed out and opposed at every turn by the state government mandated to implement it. It’s only a genuinely majoritarian (working class) party, supporting a revolutionary program for social transformation, which can actually deliver on the public good and represent all of society.
The idea that there is pre-existing majority support for progressive policies which does not require a vision of social transformation, leads us to a dead end. While ordinary people might recoil from the significant disruption and the uncertainty implicit in the idea of revolution, and obviously most people are not ideologically socialists, a program which represents popular policies that would improve people’s lives *can* win majority support. For every proposal we make, people ask “how do you pay for that?” and we need to have an answer. That answer in itself requires reckoning with the question of power in society, enforcing progressive taxation, expropriation or cuts to the budget of repressive forces of the state.
If the party behind the reform platform is *also* carrying out systematic education and propaganda, we can leverage support for policies to create more socialists and win support for more radical measures necessary to enforce and protect reforms from the ruling class. This grounding also helps people to understand the barriers we face in making progressive democratic change, and protects against demoralization following temporary setbacks and losses. As it turns out, winning bold reform planks like Medicare For All and fast and free public transportation are often impossible without a vision for revolutionary social transformation.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The General Strike?
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-general-strike/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T19:55:38.000Z
The prospects of a general strike in 2028 have been a topic of conversation since UAW's Shawn Fain announced a contract alignment in late 2023\. It is good to see widespread excitement and forward thinking in a Left that frequently thinks in a duration of months, if not weeks. Unfortunately, this newfound farsightedness is combined with a sense of heroic volunteerism. We should examine the tasks we need to meaningfully affect a 2028 general strike to predict what our influence can be ahead of time.
If we intend to seize the moment to put forward our politics, we will need to navigate a series of organizational and political tasks to even make it to prime time:
1. DSA members could only meaningfully impact a general strike by being the backbone of the organizing force.
2. DSA has no programmatic unity to conduct systematic political agitation during a strike, so this is a key political task in order to use the platform of strike action
3. DSA members who are *both* unified around a common program *and* are engaged in organizing a general strike need to do the same political cohering of the rank-and-file in order to carry out a political strike.
Doing all 3 major tasks in 3 years is impossible. We may find targeted interventions in 2028, but we need to prioritize organizational and political tasks over simply supporting a strike. In order to meaningfully affect the workers' movement, **we must transform our atrophied labor wing into industrial fractions** to carry out coordinated work within our unions. While doing so, we must **oppose labor neutralism from DSA's labor wing**, moving from a reserve force of administration-loyalists and promoters of "bread and butter" economic reforms into a fraction of trade unionists able to move our fellow workers against the liberal-constitutional order that unions are sadly entangled with.
Most importantly, **we must win DSA membership to MUG's democratic demands in our draft program,** **with the key political demand for a democratic republic**, rather than chasing the spectre of a general strike in the hopes of widespread and spontaneous politicization.
### **Organizing the Strike**
First, let's consider our role as the drivers of this strike. How would DSA members begin to meaningfully influence a 2028 general strike?
In order to transform our local organizations into a machine capable of carrying out a nationwide coordinated strike, DSA members must begin to organize themselves on a national scale. Currently, our National Labor Commission is not organized into meaningful industrial organization, stewards networks, etc. and is instead a plethora of disconnected campaigns. Unless the NLC makes a sudden recovery, any member-to-member organization will likely happen through the remains of strike solidarity organization (like 2023's "Strike Ready"), caucus organization, chapter labor groups, and informal networks. Fairly autonomous organization isn't bad on its own merits, but it makes the difficult task of nationwide strike organization – and political orientation to it – much more difficult.
Then, members must evaluate their unions readiness to strike based on their contract status.
Chances are high that if a contract is expired, a \[two-to-three\] year contract \[from the time this project starts in earnest to May 1, 2028\] will be difficult to win in larger companies already on the lookout for contract alignment. If the union decides to work without a contract until 2028, that carries its own challenges and organizing tasks. If contract alignment does not happen, then the only options are wildcat strikes, which carry their own risks. All three of these scenarios require a strong shop floor organization, a friendly local leadership assisting in strike preparation, and a firm commitment to May 1, 2028 by the vast majority of members.
Stewards, union reps, and any committees need to be fully functioning. On top of that, strike committees should be formed and strike captains elected and very supportive of the general strike. If these organizational bodies don't exist, they need to be built and tested as soon as possible.
Local leadership should be bought into this project, willing to use union resources and begin the hard work of strike preparation. If they are not, add "oust local leadership" to the list of tasks. If we need to organize around an entrenched leadership, don't expect a strike fund and anticipate sanctions from the local and international leadership on top of the pressures of a strike.
Finally, after those hurdles are cleared, the vast majority of the membership needs to generally support a *political* strike in May 2028\. Pretending that we are organizing a *solely economic* strike until the moment we walk off is a recipe for disaster; we'll lose our credibility with the rank-and-file and be lumped in with other union bureaucrats and deceivers.
### **Orienting to the Strike**
To drive a general strike, DSA members must be organized themselves – as socialists, union activists and leaders – and must ensure their union organization is organized and politicized enough to carry the strike out. This is an enormous task. Regardless of our ability to lead this strike from the grassroots, we must have an idea of how to orient towards it. Here we move from a speculative approach into our practical orientation.
Preparation for any concerted strike action is very much a *short-term* project; however, it's still unclear what exactly our goals in a 2028 General Strike are:
- Maximum density to include the most possible workers in strike action?
- Maximum disruption to attempt to win political and economic demands?
- Maximum coordination to organize cross-industry and nationwide?
- Maximum visibility of the strikes to push political demands into the public consciousness?
- Maximum visibility of our organization to recruit strikers and supporters alike into a political party?
Pick one. Each requires its own set of priorities, goals, and tactics. Then, how do we evaluate the results if strikes do break out? Do we celebrate uncritically, denounce if they do not meet our standard, or find some more nuanced position? More importantly, how does our evaluation fall into a larger medium- and long-term strategy within the workers' movement?
A comrade organizing within Amazon recently described how the Teamster-decreed December "strikes" played out. It's pretty well documented – even in Labor Notes! – that this was a very small minority action. In my view, the most significant and promising developments were: the consolidation of scattered independent organizing groups, the coordinated action of Teamsters locals (through picketing on a national extension of the picket line), and mainstream attention on Amazon organizing and concerted activity. These are all part of the obvious long-term strategy of organizing a critical mass of Amazon through generating leads for new organizing and bringing newly-consolidated groups and generally autonomous locals under a common banner. The risks of such a visible and low turnout action, however, means that there need to be visible *gains* by next year in order to maintain the tempo at the national scale. If no gains are made, the Teamsters-consolidated effort will appear to be a militant, but impotent, minority. The loss of (unaffiliated) CAUSE Amazon election in North Carolina does not help this appearance.
For a general strike in 2028, these concerns are multiplied. If we are too eager to jump into the fold blind and unprepared, we will lose our standing with the broader workers movement. If we do not have a compelling but realistic analysis, just tailing whatever exciting strike happens, we will lose the advanced segments of the workers movement. Like the Teamsters in Amazon, and others before them, we must have a real medium- and long-term plan for what to do after 2028.
These are the *organizational* tasks.
### **Our Political Tasks**
The *political* tasks are altogether different.
Our most important task is winning the majority DSA to a min-max program *leading with democratic demands*. A corollary task is the development of propaganda around our democratic demands, especially regarding the democratic republic. This will enable DSA to act with programmatic unity, instead of paper unity around yet another ignored program. Especially relevant for 2028 is developing propaganda ("convey\[ing\] many ideas to a single person or to a few people") that can be transformed into agitation ("only one or a few ideas, but convey\[ed\] to a whole mass of people") by DSA cadre in their trade unions and strike support networks.
Trade unions are economic organizations of the working class and generally seek to benefit their members with economic gains such as wages and benefits and dignified working conditions. They do not fight for the class as a whole; unions seek victory for their members and, indirectly, their families with rare solidaristic coordination for aggregate membership. When workers go on strike, it raises their trade union consciousness – successfully fighting against the employer directly affecting the economic gains is proof. The strike against the employer leads workers to trade union consciousness for the economic struggles of the proletariat; the general strike *generalizes* this to a strike against the capitalist *class* by organized workers acting as a class.
In order to promote the political general strike, it is necessary to promote the general interests of the class as a class. Above we described the general strike as a generalization of economic action against the capitalist class. Naturally, this all-around stoppage of production in a nation, region, or city develops the self-awareness of the proletariat fighting a common enemy who has a commanding stake in the economy.**.** But how can the proletariat promote its economic interests absent a general strike in perpetuity? We do this through moving from the economic sphere to the political. The current state, dominated by monied interests, is unwilling to enact essential reforms that precipitate such strike action. This is because the class in control of the state is the bourgeoisie, a class more than willing to disenfranchise and repress the working class to preserve their minoritarian rule. Therefore, the only way to liberate the international proletariat is to uproot the existing economic order through a truly democratic state form.Recognizing the general political condition of the working class is directly related to their economic condition means exposing the bourgeois class domination of society, as expressed in the current liberal-constitutional state form, is essential to developing political consciousness.
To bring forward political demands in a general strike, we need general political demands from DSA. First, we must explicitly say that the state is undemocratic and insufficient to satisfy the real needs of the working class. Second, we must have a program that sets out the minimum conditions to change that and politically transform society – the minimum section of the Marxist minimum-maximum program.
Of course, having this program isn't an end in itself. Once we clarify our political demands, we must tie them to the pressing issues of the day. These issues can be anything from international crises to local police terror, or the mass movements in opposition to actions of the ruling order. A general strike in 2028 would fit neatly into this category of mass movements and, like all mass movements, would have an unwritten program of its own. It is our task to transform the unwritten program of reformist economism into the revolutionary minimum-maximum program step by step. We do this through political agitation.
We need to develop our own ability to make good political agitation that is comprehensible, compelling and timely. DSA is historically bad at intervening in high politics and historically bad at general agitation. Even during the 2025 State of the Union, our messaging was, at best, weak, unclear, and tailing Democrats and their allies. Instead of challenging the legitimacy of the state in an unprecedented address, DSA thought a “broligarchy” jab was better messaging. This was during a relatively low tide organizing moment – what will happen when our mass strike machinery is also turning?
As 2028 is also a significant presidential election year, we should be cognizant of the twists and turns of high politics and direct our agitation towards that as well. Based on the last five years, we can predict that DSA will be split on tactics around the presidential election. When Trump or his successor runs again, we will need a clear position on how we frame our opposition. How will our agitation change if the Democrats favor a "moderate" (like Slotkin or Shapiro) or an opportunist (like AOC)? If DSA runs a candidate, how will this affect our agitation? The unions will likely back any Democrat, and there will be genuine popular anti-autocratic sentiment to boost a progressive or even "left establishment" Democrat. There likely won't be energy around socialists, independents or "third parties" unless a strong platform is immediately built.
It's likely that some union locals will act on the 2028 general strike themselves, which puts us in the hardest position to meaningfully promote our politics. Instead, locals will likely be hostile to political demands against the liberal-constitutional order, instead preferring to promote the Democratic opposition uncritically. We must either organize separately or win over leadership to political demands, along with pushing them against the international union pressure. These situations require even more political unity within DSA's industrial fractions, since a split in approach for the 2028 general election will cripple any potential concerted intervention.
### **Politicizing the Strike**
If we intend to make this a political strike to some extent, we must win over a majority of union members, DSA members, and the broad left to the key points of agitation. Without a politicized rank-and-file, even the most militant trade unionists will find it difficult to balance real economic gains with the political tasks of coordinated strike action.
An instructive example happened in Philadelphia, November 2024\. Three major unions—AFSCME DC33, Transit Workers Union 234, and SMART 1594—were in the process of contract negotiations and had authorized strikes. The unions publicly announced a threat of coordinated strike action which would effectively shut down city services and public transit in the region. This strike did not happen; AFSCME DC33 accepted a one year extension and TWU accepted wage increases and increased security. This happened during a particularly politicized time (the immediate aftermath of the general election) and location (a "blue" city in a "purple-to-red" state, and target of 2020 and 2024 election interference operations) but there was no political content to this potential strike. Instead, fairly small economic gains were offered and accepted. Our hard work could face the same results if contract alignment as economic pressure is the focal point in 2028, and without a national political direction this seems like a possibility to expect.
We should have a sober analysis here: we will not be presenting the dominant narrative in a 2028 general strike. We do not currently have national leadership in the unions or prominent labor figures. Elected officials, even ones we endorse, will likely not openly agitate against the liberal-constutional order. Chances are we will not have a critical mass of striking rank-and-file or local leadership to promote our political message nationally. Most likely, we'll be putting agitation forward "from the sidelines" in a supporting role and this will be unevenly spread across chapters, with possibly a few chapters finding themselves at the center of a small coordinated strike. There is nothing wrong with this, but this reality *must* inform our strategy.
Regardless of the outcome, we will be left with the labor movement in decline for over half a century. A decade of more energized campaigns have forced a breath of life back into labor. On the verge of a new upsurge, a general strike may give the boost that labor desperately needs; however, a resuscitation does not cure labor of its sickness. As we elaborate in [our Tasks and Perspectives (65-80)](https://www.marxistunity.com/tasks), we must contend with mega-merged general unions run by bloated bureaucracies, building trades who've capitulated to high-finance project managers under dictatorship of business agents, and public sector unions gutted by disinvestment and state rollbacks on union protections. The core organizational functions like stewards networks and robust organizing programs are completely hollowed out. A fighting spirit, if it exists at the grassroots, is often overshadowed by a legislative campaigning model run by staffers. It is our job to thread the needle, to be capable and organized trade unionists *and* political partisans for the class as a whole.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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[Read the printable version here](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1K4GyezDBT%5FnPxjVA8R73rxGB1uo0xfsJ4KnnhXsjSG8/edit?tab=t.0&ref=marxistunity.com#heading=h.vi466lkwhuwm).
### Unite the Class!
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/unite-the-class/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:03:20.000Z
### **Introduction**
> *No class in capitalist society is internally uniform and even. That is true even for the capitalist class, it's more true for the working class. The working class is always uneven in correspondence to the unevenness of capitalist development.*
*–*Gabe Winant, Fragile Juggernaut
On the banks of the Genesee river, the University of Rochester is on strike. Workers at the [University of Rochester](https://urgradunion.com/?ref=marxistunity.com) earn only $15k/year as a stipend. After years of organizing, the University of Rochester met with them at the bargaining table and seemed to support their effort. Since Trump’s election, the administration has withdrawn from the process and “intends to block students from organizing”. For that reason, U of R graduate workers, who have patiently and capably organized for years, have been pushed to a strike. This is the largest labor struggle the city has seen for decades and, if the graduate workers win, it would have been the largest increase in unionized labor in the city in a generation. Their picket lines are immaculately organized, buzzing with the disciplined and earnest energy that can only come from those newly brought into a movement. But they are also buttressed by a decade of radical organizing in this city. On the picket line you can talk with city council people, members of various local subcultures from urban farmers to clowns to radicals from any number of organizations, all while you eat grilled chicken and veggie dogs. Radical labor organizers help the grad workers coordinate their pickets such that deliveries can’t get in, food is brought in by labor locals and Food Not Bombs alike, the music is a zany mix between pop and 19th century labor folk. This picket is contemporary US radicalism at its finest, with one exception: throughout the picket, there is not a keffiyeh, no Palestine pin, not a single flag. This is at the request of the union.
Why is that? It is not because the Graduate Labor Union (GLU) is Zionist or even apolitical. The University of Rochester was the main site of Rochester’s encampments last year, and the labor unionists are as radical as any new wave of laborists would be. It was not at the insistence of the broader labor or activist community, who have been out there picketing with them. It was not because of some sense of weakness in Palestinian solidarity organizing, which has moved from victory to victory in Rochester and again is supportive of the strike. It’s because the University of Rochester is helping the state deport any problematic foreign students involved with Palestinian solidarity. Half of the Graduate Labor Union are foreign students and eleven organizers have already had their student visas revoked (of which six had their visas restored, and five are ultimately leaving). Put in other words: it is too dangerous for GLU to allow any visible connection between themselves and the Palestinian solidarity movement.
That is, in miniature, the thesis of this essay. There is no trick which sidesteps this repression, and here the division of workers has nothing to do with people’s subjective opinions. We can hope for wildcat actions, illicit moments of solidarity, illegalist developments. But so long as the University and state hold the threat of immediate deportation over the heads of foreign students, there is a division in the workers movement which you need to publicly accept to act. The state has imposed a division on the workers and until we remove that division we must act around it, accepting a wall, however temporary, between one of the most important labor struggles the city has had in a generation and the Palestinian solidarity movement.
How are we, as socialists, to organize the workers movement? Not just the constellations of remaining unions, the whole thing? There are many theories, from [base building ](https://theleftwind.org/2018/03/16/its-all-about-that-base-a-dossier-on-the-base-building-trend/?ref=marxistunity.com)to the [rank and file strategy ](https://rfs.dsausa.org/files/sites/28/2022/02/rfs-pamphlet-online.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)to [policy feedback](https://www.cambridge.org/core/elements/policy-feedback/3231877106C458D0CF766173080B0409?ref=marxistunity.com). Here I will pose a new thesis. Socialists often think of the working class as *subjectively* divided–by our lack of organization, by political alignment, by *narratives* around race. While that is certainly true, there is a mistaken belief that there is some *objectively* unified working class out there waiting to be chiseled from our current conditions. This argument tends to view the divisions workers face as merely cosmetic ideological impositions from above. But the frustrating reality is that the working class is both subjectively *and* objectively divided. There are processes, rules, regulations that the state uses to wedge the working class. The result of this is we find less a unified class that just needs to be organized, and more a series of class fragments created by state policy.
To discuss this question, I’ll discuss one of the best theories of how socialists are to relate to the working class currently available on the US left: Communist Caucus’ *Proletarian Disorganization*. I will lay out their argument and what I view as the faults in it, before discussing a theory of class division--the everpresent ways the state prevents the working class from organizing. I will then look at the real workers movement in the US today and its faults, before concluding with an argument for Marxist Unity Group’s prioritization of democratic struggle.
### **Disorganization**
[*Our Moment: Proletarian Disorganization as the Problem of Our Time*](https://communistcaucus.com/our-moment/?ref=marxistunity.com)*,* also called *Proletarian Disorganization*,is one of the main theoretical texts of Communist Caucus. Its authors argue that the current moment is defined by the slow destruction of working class organizations, and their replacement with alienation and individuation. This is absolutely a real dynamic: labor density in the United States has cracked [single digits](https://www.bls.gov/news.release/pdf/union2.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) overall recently, with an increasingly large portion of the labor movement bound up in the public sector which Trump is currently in the process of destroying. Without broad unionization, most workers do not experience anything approaching democracy and instead turn to ever deeper alienation. This dynamic has become the defining trait of the moment, leading to political movements which try to find a way forward through shortcuts, like spontaneous street energy or celebrity worship. None of that has worked so far, since socialism requires organized workers institutions and we currently have none.
The authors then argue that socialists must break this impasse by directly organizing workers and indeed that this is the main task of the current moment. Disorganization constrains any attempt at radical politics, from social democracy to insurrectionary anarchism, because it means *any* political vision is necessarily unmoored from the broader class. This can only be resolved, our comrades say, through the persistent development of [“mass proletarian institutions that can be used by their rank and file as vehicles for the class struggle.”](https://communistcaucus.com/our-moment/?ref=marxistunity.com)
Connected to this is a criticism of the focus socialists put on issues other than how we organize a mass base. Against the tendency to view the main problems of the socialist movement as involving the Democratic ballot line or declarations of the party, they argue that we should focus all our energy on the resolution of this disorganization. Doing so would require reversing the fate of our labor movement, and would require the promises of the tenant movement [to pay off](https://www.marxistunity.com/for-a-rank-and-file-tenant-unionism/). That will require, Communist Caucus argues, a tremendous amount of innovation on our part alongside a massive increase in our efforts to these projects, to the degree that their comrades’ focus on issues *other than* how to solve the organizing problem of our time seems dilatory. A direct quote:
> *Successful proletarian reorganization will reconstruct the foundations of class struggle and bring about new strategic possibilities. In other words, desirable opportunities that currently appear impossible can become unlocked, and they can even combine to drive each other forward. Consider, for example, how the age-old question of reform and revolution appears today. Ironically, proletarian disorganization currently blocks both transformative reforms and revolutionary change. No amount of sectarianism between the two can overcome this barrier, as the option for either is simply not on the table in our present. As with the electoral-first push, even when reform politics gain momentum, they immediately become vulnerable to systemic pressures that force significant compromise regardless of conviction. Revolutionary politics are likewise pigeonholed, as calls for revolutionary action become quickly consigned to micro-sect marginality or islanded prefiguration.*
This is a grounded argument which speaks to a real problem with our moment. It’s unquestionable that a central part of the task of the contemporary socialist is answering the question of how to organize the vast majority of workers who now work in retail and logistics, operating under intentionally fragmented labor markets, into unions. We need a vast worker’s counterculture, mass participation in democratic neighborhood organizations, a collective experience of democracy, if we want a working class fit to rule society.
There are two criticisms I have of Communist Caucus’ argument, stemming from two elements which I believe they under-emphasize. On a political level there is a suspicion of high political questions marked by several carve outs. On the one hand revolutionary politics are often referred to in a way similar to this:
> *“As with the electoral-first push, even when reform politics gain momentum, they immediately become vulnerable to systemic pressures that force significant compromise regardless of conviction. Revolutionary politics are likewise pigeonholed, as calls for revolutionary action become quickly consigned to micro-sect marginality or islanded prefiguration. This is a difficult reality to confront. But we will face the truth now, or we never will.”*
It is objectively true that contemporary US society is not suitable for worker rule. That said, this framing presents revolutionary politics as simply the other side of a spectrum of socialists who are uninterested in the actual problem of disorganization. Despite this framing, abolitionism is framed as a potential way forward for the worker’s movement in *Proletarian Disorganization*. In practice Communist Caucus members are tremendously supportive of abolitionist politics and have played an outsized role in DSA’s Palestinian Solidarity organizing, all while suggesting we keep our heads to the grindstone. This is a contradiction which I will try to resolve.
Structurally, Communist Caucus also has shown a disinterest in party-building, either treating the issue as synonymous with the ballot line question (which I cannot hold against them, it is a common conflation) or as a model under a particular challenge. Their conclusion seems to be that a system of mass organizations will need to culminate before we reach a ‘fundamentally different social structure’ which will provide unique opportunities for the socialist left:
> *“If our primary task today is to build proletarian organization, what should that look like practically? We need mass proletarian institutions that can be used by their rank and file as vehicles for the class struggle. Still, we cannot simply reconstruct organizations as they existed earlier in history. Mass proletarian organization always coalesces around contradictions (like that between worker and boss) as they influence the everyday experience of the working class and as they relate to the larger historical situation of their time. It will not be possible to build proletarian organizations just as they existed before because both working-class experiences and the historical situation have changed.”*
This accumulation of workers organizations seems to be their view of how we will get to the party. Against this I will argue that a party structure is needed *before* we can make the transformative interventions the worker’s movement needs.
### **Division**
> *Who has the right to have rights?*
*–* Mahmoud Khalil, [Letter from a Palestinian Political Prisoner in Louisiana](https://ccrjustice.org/sites/default/files/attach/2025/03/Letter%5Ffrom%5Fa%5FPalestinian%5FPolitical%5FPrisoner%5Fin%5FLouisiana%5FMarch%5F18%2C%5F2025.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)
There is an objective working class: everyone whose survival depends on the sale of their labor has, at a high enough level, the same interests. But when we wake up we do not wake up as an “objective worker.” Instead we eat our breakfast and go to work as a plumber, an office administrator, a barista, a working artist, a teacher, a meat packer, etc. We have a subjective set of experiences defined by the fraction of the class we end up working within.
In our jobs, we rarely experience the other workers we interact with *as fellow workers*. As an office worker, one might not ever experience the call center employee, or the janitor, as anything other than an abstraction, or an annoyance when they do something “wrong.” And when we leave work, we confront other workers not as fellow workers but as customers.
Imagine if you will, the main street of a small town. There are offices, stores, apartment complexes, restaurants and cafes, and at a corner of the town there is a warehouse, where much of the town’s goods pass through. We could spend all day arguing which part of the economy we as socialists should focus on. But we could spend a great deal of energy organizing their workplaces, and even succeed in organizing parts of it, and we still might not have a “working class” present in this town but a collection of militant and disconnected unionization campaigns. Prices rising due to one worksite increasing labor costs or causing layoffs in one sector of the economy demoralize workers elsewhere, one part of an office may become organized while the other isn’t, teachers getting raises lead to higher taxes, etc.
Now, some of our comrades may look at this picture and see the problem in the choice of site: that we should have just focused on the warehouse in order to take power over the chokepoint of the town. Regardless of whether you could succeed there or not, this position accepts as a given that the class is fragmented and we can only organize individual fragments, neglecting the possibility of unification. Whatever fragment you choose to start with, you will run up against the ruling classes’ ability to turn worker against worker, and the ways those divisions are etched into the mundanity of our daily lives.
So, organizing specific workplaces might not create a unified working class just because of the divisions within the economy. Let’s make these divisions less abstract. Imagine a prison, where prisoners labor for a dollar a day, or a food packing plant that primarily hires migrant labor. In both of these instances, the objective working class of the region is divided between a citizen/free working class and a migrant/incarcerated working class. This division is not just one of bigoted and patronizing attitudes, it is a legally defined “color line” protected by the force of the state.
These divisions can push white workers to align with their landlords and bosses, a cross-class alliance of whiteness aligned against the “outsiders” ruining the community. Further, these white workers will do all that they can to move from being subjugated alongside imprisoned/migrant laborers to the one doing the subjugating, by jumping into small ownership. A contractor can simply own a car and be willing to use precarious labor and suddenly he is no longer a worker but an employer, whose employees are kept in line by the internal wall within the labor market, an internal wall staffed by very well paid police/immigration officers. We can decry that fascist bargain, but it is a response to a real condition: they are divided from their fellow workers by a real barricade of armed men. Increased carceralization, and increased pressure on migrants, can then be seen not as attempts to lower crime or migration, but rather as a form of labor regulation, fortifying the wall that divides the working class from itself.
This is not an incidental problem that we can hope to solve somewhere down the line. It is not a separate problem which we can carve out from our theory of class. Segregation, oppression, and violent bigotry are not sad exceptions. They are the history of the vast majority of the US labor movement. We cannot extricate politics from our work, organizing the class until we’re at the point where we can confront these outside divisions, because the outside is already in: ‘high politics’ is inscribed into every interaction the working class has with itself.
The real United States of America has been defined by a colonial regime of states of exception to our generalized [‘civil libertarianism](https://jacobin.com/2016/11/donald-trump-democratic-party-welfare-state?ref=marxistunity.com).’ In the midst of the writing of the Constitution, as Madison fretted about the “[the superior force of an interested and overbearing majority](https://guides.loc.gov/federalist-papers/text-1-10?ref=marxistunity.com#s-lg-box-wrapper-25493264)”, here meaning the possibility of a united group of farmers and freedmen, no such unity existed. [21% of the population ](https://constitutioncenter.org/blog/how-things-have-changed-since-1787?ref=marxistunity.com#:~:text=Back%20in%201787%2C%20the%20delegates,at%20least%20150%2C000%20Native%20Americans.)of the United States was either indigenous or a slave at the time, and white people born outside the US were characterized by yet another set of carve outs until the Naturalization Acts of 1790\. This system of groups of people run under separate laws is a characteristic of all [colonial societies](https://www.jstor.org/stable/20002624?ref=marxistunity.com) for a reason. From the British codification of the caste system to Israel today, division is a useful way to make sure your ‘overbearing majorities’ can never culminate into one force.
In the US today, while white and propertied Americans have had the full protection of the law since the country’s founding, Indigenous people, black people, migrants, and Arab Americans have existed as police state categories, open to the full force of an increasingly powerful security regime. This system of divisions has now been deployed against the whole US working class, as we saw on the U of R picket line. This must be faced head on: accepting division anywhere accepts division everywhere. To fight this system, we need a formation based around a program which is able to confront these divisions and *unite the class*.
> *“Considering that against this collective power of the propertied classes the working class cannot act, as a class, except by constituting itself into a political party, distinct from, and opposed to, all old parties formed by the propertied classes;”*
*–* Karl Marx, in a resolution to the 1871 London Conference of the International Workingmen’s Association
When we organize workers or comrades we are not organizing them into idealized theories. They join real organizations with real histories and real sets of policies. So when we organize workers, they are joining the contemporary US labor movement. So what is the state of the real movement?
The labor movement in the US is both heavily regulated and in a 50 year long state of decline. Tremendously brave and tactically ingenious organizing has occurred alongside the continued hollowing out of traditionally organized industry. Strikes are on a slight rise but within a heavily regulated broader movement. So much of the remaining 9.9% of unionized labor is in public sector unions are usually disallowed from striking by anti-strike laws like the [Taylor Law](https://jacobin.com/2018/09/nixon-cuomo-public-sector-strikes-taylor-law?ref=marxistunity.com). But further, even when we talk about the reality of the organized working class in the United States, we are talking about unions which represent at most a sector of workers. This is the legacy of the [Taft-Hartley Act](https://jacobin.com/2017/12/taft-hartley-unions-right-to-work?ref=marxistunity.com) which exists to ensure that even when workers are organized, workers remain divided.
These unions *should* primarily represent their workers, they are after all the representative body of a particular kind of worker, but this system has produced many comorbidities. It doesn’t take much effort to list moments when labor unions have acted against the interests of workers as a whole. You can see it in the Teamsters’ support for the [XL Pipeline](https://teamster.org/2021/01/teamsters-statement-on-cancelation-of-the-keystone-xl-pipeline/?ref=marxistunity.com), which would pollute and destroy native lands in the name of 8000 jobs (of which a negligible number were permanent positions). You can see it in labor’s gestures at support for Trump’s tariffs, which will shortly destroy our economy. When different sectors have reactionary interests, that is, interests which place them against other workers, the unions of those sectors must represent those sectoral interests.
You can see this at its clearest in one of the most well organized forces on any DSA chapter’s enemies list, the police and prison workers unions. This organized body of workers is organized around the production and safeguarding of profit earned through oppression. Migrants form the backbone of the US food production and distribution system, from agribusiness to food packing to food service. The existence of a large population with fewer legal rights allows for an artificial inflation of the white petty bourgeoisie, who have little but petty capital and a will to exploit. Police officer, contractor, landlord—all benefit from the way our legal system creates subjects outside of the law, and combine to form the backbone of reactionary politics in the United States today. They act militantly for these rights, against any attempts at [police reform or accountability](https://rochesterbeacon.com/2025/05/06/ruling-against-police-accountability-board-appealed/?ref=marxistunity.com) while they develop intentional [media strategies](https://www.teenvogue.com/story/how-copaganda-works?ref=marxistunity.com) to continue to raise their budgets. Even amidst the restrictions on public sector labor actions, New York State even faced a rare wildcat action when prison guards illegally [went on strike](https://inquest.org/the-hidden-war-fueling-the-new-york-prison-guard-strike/?ref=marxistunity.com) for the right to be more violent towards inmates.
But this is not the only story. As labor has declined, out of both desire and necessity, the labor movement has begun to move beyond strictly sectoral organizing through ‘amalgamation from above.’ This dynamic, where labor unions have begun merging into each other to pool resources, saw it’s clearest example in the 2004 [unification](https://www.marxistunity.com/tasks) of the textile workers in UNITE and hotel workers in HERE, in order to use UNITE’s treasury towards organizing in the growing service sector. These mergers have led not to the unification of workers, but rather the bureaucratic management of larger and larger numbers of workers and ever more focus on staffing and policy change to resolve the problems of labor. While the labor movement’s amalgamated and focused on successive attempts at bills now called the PRO act, labor density has dropped by half to moving below ten percent. These union staffers are really tremendously capable people, but as Communist Caucus says, “We need mass proletarian institutions that can be used by their rank and file as vehicles for the class struggle ,” and we know that the amount of organizing required to get even the \~18% labor union density we had before the PATCO strike would require so much more than genius staff.
If we want labor organizers to innovate in ways that will challenge the undemocratic structures of the current labor movement, we need something that can support them outside that movement.That support needs to be consistent, and it needs to consistently act for the whole of the working class, for democracy within the labor movement, and against the dividers of the working class in the state.
All of this said, there are a number of positive developments. [Letter carriers](https://www.nalc.org/news/fight-like-hell?ref=marxistunity.com) and [federal workers ](https://labornotes.org/2025/04/federal-unionists-say-its-not-game-over-its-game?ref=marxistunity.com)are both organizing against the Trump administration’s unhinged destruction of the administrative state, in ways that are opening up previously disallowed forms of organizing. Social unionism, conscious efforts by rank & file unionists to work for the benefit of the whole working class, [has won the ideological battle among labor militants even as far back as the 1990s](http://www.justlabour.yorku.ca/volume11/pdfs/02%5FRoss%5FPress.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com). But these are still just trends in a largely divided and depoliticized labor movement, and for us to succeed efforts will need to be consciously brought together.
This is all in agreement with Communist Caucus, but I will move further. The question being asked here, which we have only given unsatisfactory answers to, is the question of the party. The greatest shift in union strategy in this country occurred in the 30s, as the Congress of Industrial Organizations began organizing mass employment factories. Left wing unions adopted anti-racist and anti-sexist policies during this period, starting a slow process that would culminate 30 years later in the civil rights and feminist movements. Many of these changes were led by the Communist Party of the USA (the CP), who was doctrinally opposed to the national oppression of African Americans and women. That change outpaced the CP (and non-official Communists), and the Taft-Hartley Act was passed in the hopes of closing the pandora’s box on party intervention into labor. In my lifetime, the left has proceeded with a desire to innovate past the problems of the current moment, to iterate through practice until we find a satisfactory answer. But we have had a satisfactory answer for at least 175 years, an answer so effective that the state still asks whether it’s employees are Communists.
We cannot keep asking labor questions that only a party can answer. Only a party, that is an organization which acts for the whole of the working class, can make these consistent interventions. DSA is currently organizing the Emergency Worker Organizing Committee alongside the United Electrical Workers. That is one of the bright lights of this current moment, but it needs to be expanded, generalized, and politicized under a shared program. Becoming a party is not about changing a word or making a declaration, it’s not about a state agreement or a line on a ballot. [It is about acting together, as a unified force.](https://www.marxistunity.com/principles-party-building/) We need to unite, towards a clear set of shared goals, if we’re to solve the problem of disorganization.
###
**Break Down The Walls, Unite the Class**
###
> Oh the FBI is worried, the bosses they are scared, they can’t deport six million men they know. And we’re not! gonna! let them! send Harry over the sea. We’ll fight for Harry Bridges, and build the CIO!
*–* The Almanac Singers, [The Ballad of Harry Bridges](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IgEVJ97BcVM&ref=marxistunity.com)
So we need a party that intervenes in and connects different issues, with a program standing against the political divisions the state imposes on the working class. What priorities does such a strategy entail?
Over the 2010s an [argument emerged ](https://jacobin.com/2016/11/donald-trump-democratic-party-welfare-state?ref=marxistunity.com)that the socialists should prioritize a fight for universal, economic reforms as a way of connecting workers and turning workers into a class for itself. The argument emerged in a very different ideological atmosphere where socialists needed to differentiate themselves from a liberalism brought together by a striver identitarianism, but it was always wrong. It implicitly accepts the United States’ colonial policy, where Indigenous people, Migrants, Prisoners, and since 2001 anyone associated with ‘terrorism’ (in practice Muslim and Arab Americans) are regulated under separate rules. This policy of divide and conquer has always been used to divide the workers movement, and to win we need to turn this logic on it’s head. These “particular” struggles are in fact fragments of the one *real* universal struggle Marxists have always stood for: the struggle for a genuine democracy.
Democracy is how the worker’s movement discovers its progressive element, how it becomes something larger than itself, something that can speak for more than a handful of labor councils and socialist organizations. Internally democracy allows the working class to truly work together, breaking down our subjective divisions (prejudice, alienation, lack of experience). Externally, the struggle for democracy, for the equal rights and personhood of empire’s victims, is the way we concretize the solidarity between fragments of the class and build a universal movement. It is how we break through the objective--and often physically real--walls the state has built through the workers movement.
The links built in the progress of the struggle for democracy can only strengthen and empower the workers movement, allowing for people from utterly different lives to work together as equals fighting our shared oppressions, both within and without the workplace. It will allow workers to spill out of the sectoral walls the state has built into the labor movement. And make no mistake--I am not suggesting that socialists in general or DSA in particular sideline or cease our interaction with the labor movement, or that we section ourselves off into a pure segment of the labor movement. Far the opposite--we need to enter the labor movement in greater numbers than ever, we need to all work with or within EWOC, but we also need to recognize that we are intervening into the labor movement to *change* the labor movement. That could be so much more powerful if we did it with a common purpose.
It is for this reason that Marxist Unity Group is proposing a [program ](https://www.marxistunity.com/workers-demand-the-world/)which puts the fight for political freedoms first. We view the revolutionary struggle to bring democracy to this country to be *the* most important thing for us to work for, because it is under democracy, true democracy free of legal delineations and second class citizens, that will allow workers to rule. We need to fight against, as Communist Caucus [argues,](https://communistcaucus.com/our-moment/?ref=marxistunity.com)
> *the objective structural constraints of the US constitutional order—a federalized republic with anti-democratic minoritarian features and legally-encoded respect for private property relations...Fighting on this stilted terrain makes the impetus to abandon socialist principles and adopt “pragmatic” positions overwhelming.*
We can decide to fight this, rather than accepting it as a permanent ceiling to our organizing. We *need* to do that, in fact, if we’re to be serious about changing our social relations. This is a power we have, not a stage we need the Angel of History’s permission to surpass. A program which acknowledges and aims itself against *the* thing preventing a generation’s worth of political energy from manifesting into anything would be able to unite so much more than DSA. It could be used to unite with a tremendous number of social forces *towards clear and universal goals*.
These goals need to be targeted, directly, at the end of America’s colonial rule-by-division. Establishing equal rights across residency and criminal status, the abolition of prison slavery, the ending of the US security state and the special policing of Palestinian and Arab Americans, these are not abstract questions which do not come up at all in the process of organizing. Each of these divisions affects even the most economistic of organizing, and they need to be pointed to. By treating them as carve outs--by treating Palestinian solidarity, migrant justice or prison abolition as something we should be good on separately of a need for ‘class based’ organizing, we are accepting the colonial logic of our so-called nation that these are separate questions at all.
Accepting division anywhere accepts division everywhere. We workers are purposefully fragmented by the capitalist class and imperial state. We are born free and yet we live everywhere in chains, kept from our siblings by a series of high walls guarded by well paid fascists. Organizing workers in this or that cell is important but alone it will never bring us together. We must use the battle for democracy to break the chains which bind us and destroy the walls between us. We must use that fight to further organization in every shop and building. Only that will get us to liberation.
[*Please give to the University of Rochester Graduate Labor Union strike fund.*](https://www.gofundme.com/f/ur-grad-labor-union-strike-and-hardship-fund?ref=marxistunity.com)
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The Politics of Executive Power
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-politics-of-executive-power/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:04:41.000Z
A century ago, participation in municipal government was an important pillar of the socialist movement. The Socialist Party of America in its heyday elected dozens of mayors. These victories were usually in small towns, and often short-term. But in Milwaukee Socialists elected mayor Daniel Hoan who held the office from 1916 to 1940\. And in 1917, the SPA ran Morris Hillquit for mayor of New York City and won nearly 25% of the vote.
Socialist municipal platforms championed city-owned utilities, reforms to the democratic process, and expansion of the welfare state while making clear the need to transform the whole of society to overcome the limitations of taking the reins of municipal government. Nowhere more than at the city-level does the difference between ‘winning elected office’ and *taking power* take concrete form, as the municipality is subject to constraints from capital’s domination at all levels of the state.
Today, democratic socialists are running for mayor in Democratic party primaries instead of on an independent Socialist ballot-line. Zohran Mamdani’s campaign for mayor of New York is taking off, and he’s emerged as the clear opposition frontrunner against establishment candidate Andrew Cuomo. The race has put a sober analysis of the opportunities and limitations of taking executive power back on the order of the day.
And as our budding party movement grows and matures, the question is appearing everywhere, not just New York. In Minnesota, Twin Cities DSA just this Spring endorsed Omar Fateh for Mayor of Minneanapolis, and in upstate New York, Rochester DSA is poised to run a slate for an outright majority in their City Council alongside supporting Mary Lupiens’s bid for Mayor. And all these efforts lay in the shadow of the cratering political project of Brandon Johnson as Mayor of Chicago, whose 2023 election was once hailed as an insurgent ‘progressive’ victory.
Below are three member essays from DSA chapters in the Twin Cities, Rochester, and New York, all addressing a question posed by live political experience: what does it mean for the socialist movement to take executive municipal power?
---
### **Who’s Afraid of Power?**
By: Austin B, Twin Cities DSA
*Written in March 2025 in response to TCDSA’s prospective* [*endorsement*](https://twincitiesdsa.org/2025-endorsements/?ref=marxistunity.com) *of Omar Fateh for Mayor of Minneapolis.*
On May 15th, 2023 Brandon Johnson, former Chicago Teachers Union staff organizer endorsed by Our Revolution, Senator Warren (MA), and Senator Sanders (VT), ascended to the Chicago mayorship and quickly became a progressive darling the nation over. In his campaign, Mayor Johnson hammered home the need for alternatives to the police in crime prevention and reversing decades of austerity in Chicago’s schools. He also proposed a slew of new taxes to raise $1 billion in revenue for social programs. During his runoff election against Paul Vellas, Johnson’s campaign was outraised at a ratio of 2:1\. Nevertheless he won with 57% of the vote.
As of the writing of this article, Johnson’s approval rating has dropped to *6.6%*. In less than two years, Johnson has tarnished the legitimacy of his own progressive agenda.
When he forced a measure onto the municipal ballot to increase transfer taxes on real estate sales over $1 million and use the proceeds for homeless services,it was voted down by 58%. Last year Johnson ousted the charter school-favoring head of Chicago Public Schools Pedro Martinez, but caused an unnecessary scandal by first asking Martinez privately to resign, telling the public he had done no such thing, and then backtracking after Martinez provided evidence to the contrary. In response 41 of the 50 Chicago aldermen signed an open letter criticizing the mayor; notably including many of Johnson’s key allies on the council.
After sacking Martinez, Johnson appointed progressive Reverend Mitchell Johnson as interim head of CPS. Immediately after the Reverend’s appointment, it came to light that the good minister had defended the Palestinian resistance after October 7th and was a staunch critic of Zionist aggressions. This prompted immediate criticism from the Illinois Governor and elected officials at every level of Chicago politics. Mayor Johnson left the Reverend Johnson out to dry and asked for his resignation within days.
Time after time, Mayor Johnson tried and failed to pass a meaningfully progressive agenda in the city of Chicago. Despite taking the mayorship in a “strong” mayor town, and having the backing of many Chicago councillors, the strongest unions in the city, and the progressive movement as a whole, Johnson was unable to confront capital and win. In this failure he threatens to undo years of base and movement building in Chicago, dragging others down with him.
I don’t bring up Johnson to paint him as a singularly inept figure. Rather, his inability to overcome the entrenched status quo—despite having power in the form of city mayorship—is downstream of both the failure of the broader Left to build enough muscle in Chicago and the mundane budgetary and political constraints faced by any mayor. At the end of the day, Johnson is not a radical socialist, willing to break the rules to enact permanent and lasting change, nor does he have the movement behind him to force capital to accede to those same demands.
My worry is that our TCDSA chapter is on this same path with Senator Omar Fateh’s bid for mayorship of Minneapolis. I have no bones to pick with Senator Fateh, his policies, his person, or his historical relationship with the chapter. In this article I am not criticizing Senator Fateh, but rather the idea that now is the time to grasp executive power.
Even if Fateh is elected with a sympathetic city council, a single city cannot challenge capitalism and withstand the reaction of capital and the Democratic Party. Fateh—and socialism—will be blamed for every flaw of the status quo and the disorder caused by capital flight, capital strikes, and sabotage from both parties at every level of government. As a chapter and mayor, we will not have room to maneuver and act unconstrained, but will be bound in many of the same ways as Johnson in Chicago.
In the best case scenario we are able to be the decisive force in electing Fateh to the mayorship while at the same time keeping on all of our endorsed city councillors, and adding Stevenson into the mix. In this scenario, there is a council coalition of DSA socialists and progressive liberals which is able to reach a majority vote. In the best case scenario, Fateh, Wonsley, and Stevenson all run agitational campaigns that condemn the present order of state and private power, and in doing so are able to effectively recruit more members to our chapter, giving us some extra muscle going into 2026.
What comes next in this scenario? My analysis relies on two assumptions; the first a hypothesis, the second almost a foregone conclusion:
1. We have the power to prove the decisive factor in electing a candidate.
2. We do not have the power to back them up once in office in any meaningful way.
I trust my comrades in the electoral committee to accurately assess the first assumption.
On the second, I want to take a lay of the land of the current level of chapter organization and a brief vision of the future.
Let’s start with politics. On the federal level, we have a redux of the Trump regime, this time with a more entrenched coterie of “civic” nationalists and right-wing blood-sucking tech sector moguls making up the two wings of the inner circle. Already on the chopping block is federal aid for ailing cities, money for bootstrapping new social programs, and Justice Department investigations into corrupt police departments. There will not be increased federal funding for social programs, homeless outreach, or construction of public housing. Much more likely will be petty retaliation against the city which sparked a wave of riots that destabilized the 1st Trump administration and threw the state off balance.
The Democrats will also actively work against Mayor Fateh. Representatives Cori Bush (MO) and Jamaal Bowman (NY) were both ousted in bitter primary fights by a Democrat establishment loath to allow the left any foothold. Colorado lost both of their DSA state house representatives to establishment-backed Democrat candidates, Michigan’s Rashida Tlaib had to fight off a deep-pocketed primary opponent, and Assemblyman Zohran Mamdani in New York City is currently clawing against a Zionist-backed lobby and former Governor Cuomo in his bid for mayor.
The DFL will not be coming to help either. We’ve seen DFL candidates physically attack our own candidate, Chughtai, at the uptown caucus, and Walz already has clashed directly with Senator Fateh, vetoing his legislation targeting Uber/Lyft, and going one step further to preempt Minneapolis’ attempt to reign in the ride share companies. In the wake of a self-inflicted electoral loss on the national scale the Democratic Party is attempting to shed and shred its left wing.
On the economic front, Minneapolis will, like every other city in the country, face budget challenges due to the collapse of downtown real estate and federal funding cuts. City revenue projections are dour for the coming years—commercial property taxes are projected to fall significantly and precipitously, hurried along by the pivot towards ‘work from home,’ corporate layoffs and downsizings, and the attendant rise in commercial rental vacancies / drop in commercial property assessments. The looming commercial rent crisis is bad enough the city of Minneapolis is currently exploring significant tax breaks for building conversions from commercial to residential in an attempt to staunch the bleeding of tax revenue.
Adding to the pile the mayor’s forking over a sweetheart contract to the police union, the next mayor will be forced to contend with a tight budget and decide which taxes to raise or which services to cut to avoid municipal bankruptcy. In Fateh’s endorsement questionnaire, he answered that he would not seek to cut the police budget. Instead he would shunt other, less violent modes of emergency response under the cop budget. Ultimately he will be working within the bounds of the municipal budget and what the legal order says is possible to do with tax dollars, not radically break with the status quo.
Raising taxes on the wealthy and big corporations provides an easy but illusory answer. In the age of the fiber optic cable, interstate highway system, and exurban tract house, it has never been easier for capital flight to take wing. In Seattle several years ago DSA and SAlt attempted to pass a tax to target Amazon and Microsoft HQs. Who would we target in Minneapolis? General Mills and 3M headquarters in the suburbs, or Target which has offices downtown and a secondary HQ in Coon Rapids with an already scheduled expansion. Commercial vacancies are growing regionally; what’s to stop a targeted corporation from moving their office a matter of miles into Edina or St Louis Park? What about a progressive property tax or income tax to make up the shortfall? What’s to stop enough, not all, but enough of the local Minneapolis gentry from packing their bags, selling their Lake of the Isles adjacent house and moving to far flung…Minnetonka? Edina? Wayzata? The borders of the city are porous and quite small; it's very easy to imagine capital flight in response to mild reform and taxation.
In Johnson’s case, he at least has the backing of CTU, Chicago’s most powerful union. Do we have something similar in Minneapolis? MFT is admirable, but Fateh isn’t one of them in the way Johnson was one of CTU. The building trade unions are a key component of physically building a better Minneapolis, but they are already falling in line behind Frey. Unions in this town couldn’t pull their heads out of their asses enough to organize a compression strike in 2024 and don’t have the socialist inoculation to stand steadfast behind calls for a ceasefire in Gaza. The Union Working Group project of the labor branch is still in the process of tilling the soil and planting seeds, we don’t have the organization and cohesion in any union to bring it out in the streets in support of a socialist mayor facing backlash. In five years I hope this project bear’s fruit, but in the upcoming year we have no leverage there.
Imagine these factors coming to a head in 2026, under a Fateh mayorship. With tight fiscal budgets and a sluggish economy, where are we going to find money for funding a radical platform in the city without causing capital flight? Where are we going to find the resolve to withstand constant and repeated criticism? Imagine the furor caused by our statements in the wake of October 7th but every week for 4 years—directed at our chapter, mayor, and councilor over every single issue.
When MPS is unable to, once again, adequately upgrade its HVAC systems to handle heating summers, who are parents going to blame? When city workers demand justly deserved raises to deal with spikes in inflation, but the police contract has erased any gains made in revenue raising, who is going to take the fall? Do we have the power to restrain Target if they threaten to move their HQ to outside the city in response to a targeted tax? Do we have the power to restrain enough of the city council in response to Target’s threats? Moreover, when (not if) Minneapolis police kill another black person, who will people remember as the Mayor who was unable, seemingly unwilling, to restrain the police under his nominal control? Who will be held accountable for the everyday miseries of the status quo and capitalism more broadly?
What happens when we get a socialist elected to executive office, where the ability to be oppositional becomes balancing on a knife’s-edge, where everything wrong in the city is our fault and people’s lives don’t get better? I am skeptical that we as a chapter have the power or willingness to break through the status quo and create a positive legacy for a socialist mayorship.
Shawn Dunwoody, *Mural in Martin Luther King Park*
---
### **Are We Ready?**
By: Jean Allen, Rochester DSA
*Written during the deliberative period before Rochester DSA voted to endorse a bid for a majority on the City Council and endorse Mary Lupien’s campaign for mayor.*
We stand at the start of a very scary moment. Because the democrats are fragmenting in their response to Trump, because we’ve stuck by a strategy that’s put us at the center of the Left in Rochester, we have a very real chance to win both our City Council races and the Mayorship this year. I can picture it already. We have the energy. We have good candidates. We have the support of the mass of people who would go out to canvas. We have experience and good politics by our side. We have a platform which I am proud of and stand by. But something that’s been troubling me is this question: Is the working class of Rochester ready to govern? Are *we* ready to govern?
The old socialist parties of the 19th century had programs too, but the list of demands were not just things they were planning on accomplishing in the short term. They didn’t intend these demands to be aspirations, or things it would be nice to have. Their demands were answers to a simple question: What prevents the working class from ruling?
That seems like an abstract question, but it, like so many other things, is about to become very real for us. The petty bourgeoisie—shop owners and professionals—skilled as they are and possessing more free time, remain the main group involved in Rochester politics. The capitalists are able to turn out their money to buy labor or media exposure, and use that to further dominate Rochester politics. The working class neither has much free time nor the money to delegate its tasks to others. Workers can only rely on themselves. So the working class, to govern, needs organization. Furthermore, state policy divides our class—into migrants and residents, prisoners and ‘law-abiding’ citizens—while its policies help cohere the capitalist class into a united political agent. These are real problems, and will continue to be problems in Rochester under the leadership of our comrades if we win.
Then there are the organizational issues, which raise the question—can *we* rule? The working class, to govern, needs an organization which speaks to the unity of working class interests, just as the state and state institutions help build the unity of the capitalist class. We are not there yet. We *are* currently the center of a broad coalition of abolitionists, Palestinian liberationists, environmentalists, students, labor organizers. We have a newsletter which rocks and is amazing but which, charitably, 100 people read. We have aspirations to build a new labor movement and we are organizing towards that goal. At the same time, our connections are mainly with labor staffers and not with the rank-and-file of the labor movement as a whole.
We have, through various advocacy campaigns, become a known force to a large portion of the few thousand people involved in activism in Rochester. For a decade, we have argued about whether we should be a party, or a network, or a movement. The idea that we could replace the Democrats as the governing body of this city only becomes a live question because of a decade of collective organizing experience. Partyism—the idea that we could be at the center of the organized political expression of the working class—is still just one tendency in DSA, because the question felt abstract. It’s about to get a whole lot less abstract.
That we could govern Rochester *might* make a kind of sense if we talk about it in other activist spaces. But the experience of shared struggle, of the necessity for democratic organization, of the need for deeper solidarity, just isn’t there yet in either the labor movement or in people’s day to day lives. If we went to a picket line saying we are ROCDSA, the group that wants to replace the Democratic party in Rochester, many union members would still not know who we are, and would find the idea preposterous. What’s more, on a visceral level most people don’t understand why such an institution might be necessary.
Understanding the need to connect all of our struggles requires quite a bit of time doing political work and seeing the faults in parochial strategies. Many comrades within the movement would be hostile to us saying we want to take government in Rochester, and for good reason! They’ve seen the ways that groups who claim to be the tribunes of the working class compromise on their beliefs, or turn into sectarian cults. We need to show the masses that we are correct, not by lecturing at them, but through practical political leadership. That also hasn’t happened yet.
It’s good for us to have aspirations, it’s even good for us to be bold and move decisively in a moment where the Democratic Party seems to be in disarray. But if the Democrats disappeared tomorrow, that would not change any of these facts, and it would not make ROCDSA, or the working class of Rochester ready to govern without seriously depending on the middle or upper class. Are we ready to deal with a police strike? With real capital flight? Are we ready to almost immediately be at war with the state and federal government because we are pushing something controversial? And are we ready to do that, knowing that if we elect a socialist majority in city council and in the mayorship—and are immediately beset by crisis or worse—and govern in the same way as we did in the past, that we will have caused a generational disillusionment in this city?
My intention is not to be negative. If we vote for this campaign I’ll be there on the doors alongside everyone else. But if we vote for this we need to be dead serious about the question of our readiness. Because we’re simply not, and we will have to very quickly resolve that if we want to solidify our victory. So if we are going to do this, we need to get tremendously serious about what we need to do to allow the working class to govern in this city.
We need to unite the activist layer on increasingly formal grounds. We need a press which actually reports on the goings on of the city. We need a large and militant workers movement with a rank-and-file that understands the need for unity. We need a working class which understands the divisions imposed on it by the state and works to undo them.
We are stepping into uncharted territory. I salute that boldness. But we must step carefully.
Jose Clemente Orozco, **The Table of Universal Brotherhood* (1931)
---
### **He Can Actually Win**
By: Joseph P, New York City DSA
*Written in April 2025, in response to NYC-DSA candidate for Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s rise to second place in the polls.*
Our biggest dreams are near—but could they actually be a nightmare?
The election prospects of DSA’s Zohran Mamdani, running for Mayor of NYC in the upcoming Democratic primary, look better than ever. Zohran has recently been polling in 2nd place behind disgraced former Gov. of NY state, Andrew Cuomo, breaking campaign fundraising records from small donations. By all accounts, his campaign has gone from being considered a long shot to ‘quite possible’ territory, and he has been given the dubious honor of becoming the fixation of the right-wing tabloid press in the city.
So what’s the issue?
The issue is precisely that *he can win*, and as the winner of the Democratic primary has an excellent chance of becoming the next mayor of NYC. Zohran’s campaign has emerged at a time when the political class in NYC is experiencing a particularly acute crisis of legitimacy. Eric Adams, the current Mayor, has been scandalized by federal corruption charges and a quid pro quo deal with the Trump Administration. The only other contender, Andrew Cuomo, resigned from the Governorship in 2021 following several scandals and accusations of sexual violence, making his lead much more precarious than it seems. It’s far from a done deal, but this context warrants a discussion of the practical problems of governance.
The position of NYC Mayor is an incredible opportunity for DSA to build consciousness and organization around DSA and its platform on one of the largest political stages in the country. Just think of Claudia Sheinbaum, the left-wing Morena politician who catapulted from head of government of Mexico City to the presidency of Mexico. However, with great opportunity comes great risk. Think of Brandon Johnson in Chicago, a progressive darling who took the mayorship as the next great hope of the left, only to end up politically crushed when his agenda met the resistance of various sectional interests. There is a very real danger that taking executive office in a strategically important city to US capitalism could provoke a wave of reaction and resistance from “the establishment” that could expose the weakness of our movement, like Johnson’s mayoralty exposed weaknesses of the left in Chicago.
Taking power without ensuring a majority for the sort of policies we aim to implement risks setting us back when political and social resistance creates dislocation (e.g., a capital strike from real estate, or an NYPD strike) that then puts blame on the administrative ineptitude of the “socialists”. We can see that the widely read tabloid press, like the New York Post, is already lining up this angle of attack. Just look at the [recent editorial](https://nypost.com/2025/05/04/opinion/nyc-subway-is-no-homeless-shelter-zohran-mamdani-cant-you-pretend-to-care-about-the-city/?utm%5Fcampaign=nypost&utm%5Fmedium=referral&ref=marxistunity.com) accusing Zohran’s proposal to convert empty retail spaces in the MTA system into service-provision facilities of hypothetically increasing the presence of homeless people in New York’s subways. This is alongside traditional attacks on the left’s approach to “law and order” politics that always loom large in NYC politics.
With Zohran’s campaign standing on the precipice of success, we must seriously analyze the risks, challenges and opportunities associated with the possibility of a socialist Mayor of New York.
*The Dangers of Executive Office*
Dangers abound when taking office as a ‘radical’, and very often they have little to do with co-optation or betrayal. They stem, rather, from the vacillations inherent in juggling a number of competing constituencies and their contradictory interests. Without a legislative majority and/or the social base necessary to coerce the intransigent opponents of reform, most attempts to pass policy will invite active sabotage and passive resistance. Whether it’s finance capital crashing bond markets and bankrupting the city government in the 1970s, or the NYPD conducting low-intensity warfare against the mass movement during the 2021 George Floyd uprisings, these are the kind of dangers that we can expect to see if Zohran becomes mayor.
An instructive lesson could be the administration of David Dinkins, elected mayor in 1990\. The press made an extraordinary amount of hay out of the “crime wave” gripping the city, which became the central issue of the election. Dinkins, a member of DSA, ran a progressive campaign—an incarnation of the Rainbow Coalition—that promised to tackle racial conflict and police brutality.
Dinkins took power with the intention of reeling in the NYPD after several high profile cases of violence. He moved to make the Civilian Complaint Review Board (CCRB), an NYPD oversight agency, an independent all-civilian body. What followed was a revolt from the NYPD against the mayor’s office and the entire city. The cops mobilized to defeat any kind of reform, no matter how tepid. In September 1992, a Police Benevolent Association (PBA) rally at City Hall transformed into a police riot. Thousands of city cops rampaged through the streets drunk, hurling racial slurs and physically attacking bystanders. They even managed to block traffic on the Brooklyn Bridge. The violent defiance of the police against the people of the city caused a wave of support for the CCRB reform, which went on to pass.
Even so, “law and order” politics remained dominant, and Dinkins was pushed to the right on crime by the onslaught of the NYPD and a resurgent right wing. Despite that rightward turn, he was still defeated in the next election cycle by a stronger right-wing candidate: Republican darling Rudy Giuliani.
The tensions between the mayor’s office and the police department persist through every administration and periodically boil over into flashpoints. Since Dinkins, every mayor has had to deal with the cops and their attack dogs in the PBA. De Blasio, for example, was publicly embarrassed when city cops turned their backs to him at a press conference concerning two NYPD cops who were killed in 2014\. Bloomberg faced the ire of the PBA in 2004 over contract negotiations. Even Giuliani, who came to power in part due to his public support of the 1992 police riots, drew the wrath of the police union when he attempted to stiff them on wage increases and benefits.
Upon taking office Zohran would be facing a permanent fifth column: a semi-autonomous rogue criminal organization that would wage a protracted low-intensity war against the administration’s reform agenda. The right-wing tabloid press is already priming their readers to associate a Mamdani administration with a catastrophic increase in crime by producing a steady stream of scurrilous headlines attacking him for being ‘soft on crime.’ More than capital flight or even disinvestment, the real danger comes from the collapse in confidence in the administration which will be facilitated by NYPD’s presence in the streets and their allies in the right wing media.
The potential consequences are clear: polarization of the electorate, low approval ratings, and backlash against “socialism” and any political force associated with it. To effectively combat this resistance, a Mamdani administration will need support from a popular mass movement that supports the socialist program and is willing to fight back in the streets, the press, the workplace, and the halls of electoral power.
*Socialism in One City?*
What can we expect from a Zohran administration? Given the overall weakness of the Left in the US and NYC, a Zohran win for mayor would be more suggestive of the weakness of the liberal political class in the City than any overwhelming strength of the socialists. We would not expect the inauguration of the Commune-on-the-Hudson, but a liberal-progressive administration dependent on a coalition of “progressive” forces inside City Council and out. DSA has very little presence on the Council to leverage, so Zohran would essentially be leaning on liberal politicians substantially to his Right.
This puts the DSA in an awkward position: we’re objectively not in a dominant position within Zohran’s governing coalition. This reality leads to an overwhelming pressure to liquidate into the broad progressive ecosystem.
We can already see the reluctance and politicking taking place over endorsements of the ranked choice list, with ostensible DSA electeds like Emily Gallagher and Julia Salazar making no particular case for Zohran and endorsing up to 4 progressives for mayor. The fact that even our “closest” elected officials can still miss the forest for the trees, and attempt to hedge their bets on the race, suggests that despite how well Zohran is doing, it is still politically safer for them to take their cues from their fellow North Brooklyn Democrats than to stand ten toes down for their org-mate and comrade.
What would be the degree of freedom available to a Mamdani administration? Could he freeze rents in NYC, for example? The office of Mayor is nominally afforded this responsibility. But since we can expect DSA to be a relatively isolated player in a Mamdani administration, any influence our organization may have on his policies would be mediated through our connection to his broader coalition. In a showdown over rent freezes, Mamdani and DSA will have to contend with his allies who are heavily funded by real estate lobby money. Under these circumstances, the pressure from Democrats to squash confrontation and preserve the fragile progressive coalition would be heavy. The result is a watering down of NYC-DSA’s political message, demands, and brand. The organization is absorbed into the liberal-progressive “blob,” meaning New Yorkers have no clear way to understand who NYC-DSA is, and how we’re different from the city’s Democratic Party establishment.
This coalitional dynamic is already present among NYC-DSA’s current Socialists in Office (SIOs). The trend there has been to preserve the progressive coalition and the structure that facilitates it, even if that means compromising on socialist political program and messaging. Of course, there are critics who advocate for a politically independent course, which pursues a coalition but maintains its distinct politics and attempts to carry them out. However, this stance is much harder to adopt in an *executive* role like Mayor compared to a *legislative* role like Assemblymember. This is because executive politicians are by definition responsible for administering the existing state, a role which structurally requires compromise and coalition to a greater extent than the legislative. These critics will be able to make their case, but I \\doubt we will see a course correction to our SIO’s coalitional strategy in time to face the challenges of a Mamdani administration.
*How DSA Can Lead*
With great challenges come great opportunities. The stakes of executive office in New York City are the highest NYC-DSA has ever faced. How can the Mamdani administration and NYC-DSA avoid right-wing reaction and liquidation into the liberal-progressive blob? How can we maximize our time in executive office—growing DSA and associated mass movements as much as possible, winning as many of our political demands as possible, and spreading the word far and wide about DSA and our political platform?
The role of DSA in a Mamdani administration would come down to two broad missions: 1) cohere a mass community-based movement of the working class in support of the administration, and 2) use the administration as a foothold to establish a permanent base of power within the city government and its institutions. A Mamdani administration will likely find it difficult to enact radical changes under the current balance of forces in the city. The role of DSA, then, must be to actively construct a movement that can serve as a vital link between everyday people and the administration.
On the first count, we will need a political sphere to combat and counter the right-wing media onslaught. This requires political coherence around a new citywide program for a democratic socialist NYC. The pervasive “common sense” notions of law and order are hard to kill, but they can be checked by an organized force capable of building a counter-narrative around NYC-DSA’s program. In response to a hostile media constantly churning out negative stories about Zohran and his “socialistic” policies, DSA needs to go directly to the communities and talk to the people there about what it means to implement pro-worker policies. We should take a page out of the books of other mass party movements, like The Workers’ Party in Brazil or MORENA in Mexico, which serve as institutional linkages to rank-and-file mass movements organized outside of the electoral arena.
In the NYC case, a concrete example could be using the Mamdani administration as a vehicle for organizing the mass tenants’ movement. Zohran has promised to use the Rent Guideline Board to freeze rents, but he could go much further than that. The current NY City Council composition is possibly the most politically progressive in living memory, with very few Republicans present and many (at least rhetorically) pro-tenant Democratic Councilpeople. A Mamdani administration could back up an organized city-wide tenants’ movement by putting out the call for neighborhood-level tenants’ committees, teaming up with left City Council members to provide a direct link between an organized tenant movement in a building or city block and the administration. This would not require new legislation or clearing other insurmountable hurdles, and would be both organizing and coalition-building.
I envision something close to what Bernie Sanders referred to as the ‘organizer in chief:’ how can we take atomised individuals and facilitate their coming together into larger, more powerful groups backed by institutional power to fight for NYC-DSA’s transformative citywide program?
The secret of the support for bourgeois politics in NYC lies in the marginalization of the majority of working people from the political process, where the progressive Democratic blob is presented as the only viable choice because *There Is No Alternative*. But the Democratic blob is not appealing to working New Yorkers, and the worst aspects are actively repellent. The power of DSA lies precisely in its ability to present a political alternative, a process which could broadly revitalize DSA as a political force capable of directing genuine challenges to capitalist power.
Building an alternative means not only taking the idea of governing seriously, but naming our enemies, and building the movement through organizing campaigns that target these enemies using the podium of the political offices we manage to win. The dominant mode of electoral organizing within DSA today continues to encourage the passivity of working people by conceding the fight to build a democratic socialist alternative in favor of marching behind the dominant factions of progressive Democrats, in the hopes that the crumbs of power that fall to us will accumulate into a loaf of bread.
DSA can build our own hegemony by daring to differentiate itself from the blob, naming our enemies and the undemocratic capitalist system that stands in the way, presenting our own vision for a working class NYC—in short, putting forward a political program. Only a clear program can gather together the disparate elements of working class militancy, and form a unified movement capable of directing genuine challenges to capitalist power. Daring to separate ourselves does not mean spurning potential allies or counterproductive sectarianism; it means clarifying the basis of any alliance or coalition with forces that may not share all of our goals. If there is one thing that politicians are bound to do, it's to go whichever way the wind blows. The socialists need to act as the weathervane that mass politics will follow.
Mamdani’s mayoral campaign is already demonstrating that this is possible. As the leading non-Cuomo candidate, he has already pushed what's left of the progressive field to conform to his messaging and tempo. Even Cuomo has adopted Zohran’s call for fare-free buses! Time will tell how this plays out, but even if Zohran loses, he has managed to demonstrate that there is an opening available for socialism in NYC. Whether we absorb the lessons about the challenges of executive governance is unclear. What remains certain is the necessity of a mass movement unified around a program for revolutionary democratic socialism, determined by our organization’s internal democratic process and our willingness to act.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Marxist Unity Group’s NPC slate
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/announcing-our-npc-candidates/
Last updated: 2026-06-07T23:15:33.000Z
**Amy is a member of Seattle DSA and an incumbent on the NPC**. They have used their term to fight for greater transparency and member power in DSA, including serving on the Steering Committee, chairing the Personnel Committee and working with the National Tech Committee. Prior to being elected to the NPC they served as one of Seattle DSA’s co-chairs. Locally, they have worked on the successful Raise The Wage Renton and Shaun Scott campaigns, participated in strike solidarity, and have experience as a tenant organizer. They are committed to building DSA into a mass party of the working class under the democratic control of our membership, and will use their second term to continue throwing open the books and democratizing DSA.
**Sid is a member from the Central Brooklyn branch of New York City DSA**. He has worked to shape New York’s robust electoral machine into a party formation capable of standing up for the working class. As an experienced field and communications lead, Sid has fought for greater collaboration between their chapter’s electoral machine and NYC's tenants movement. Currently, he is an organizer in the campaign to elect Zohran Mamdani for mayor, and has written extensively about electoral strategy, his experiences in the field, and the need for candidates who will be tribunes of our democratic organization. He serves on the Organizing Committee of CBK DSA, helping administer the day-to-day activities of the largest branch of the country’s largest chapter.
**Cliff is a long-time DSA member with experience in five different chapters across the country.** He has led tenant and labor organizing efforts, participated in electoral campaigns, fought the construction of Cop City, served on his chapter’s Steering Committee, and most recently led Orlando DSA’s abortion rights ballot measure campaign. Based in Florida and hailing from Atlanta, Cliff is accustomed to organizing in the harsh political climate of the South. An EMT by trade, he is committed to building common-sense security infrastructure for DSA that will help local chapters weather intensifying government repression. Cliff has a long track record of fighting the right where they’re strongest, and his focus on the NPC will be making sure DSA’s national resources are deployed to help local chapters do just that.
## **Our NPC Platform:**
### **The Revolutionary Path to Democracy**
This country was built for the ruling class to hoard profit, not for the working class to flourish. In the current political moment, the Trump administration is dismantling even the limited rights working and oppressed people have won. To defeat fascism and build a better world, we need to defend political freedoms like the right to organize, assemble and speak, while putting forward a clear vision for revolutionary transformation of the current system: a new republic, with universal and equal suffrage which includes all residents regardless of national origin, proportional representation, and an end to mass incarceration and the imperial police state.
### **Build the Mass Party**
The power of the Democratic Socialists of America comes from our nationwide scope, multi-tendency mass membership, and commitment to radical democracy. On the NPC, we are committed to fighting for the maximum possible transparency and member control, treating Convention as sovereign over the NPC and building strong and open central bodies like the National Electoral Commission. We should treat all our work as part of building the party, including running for office with the aim of building oppositional socialist caucuses at every level of government, operating under the democratic discipline of membership.
### **Toward a New International**
Our struggle needs to spill beyond the United States through militant anti-imperialism and cross-border coordination. We see the long term horizon of DSA’s international work as the construction of a new socialist international that can pursue a shared revolutionary strategy, and towards that end support efforts by the International Committee to build links with parties across the world. While we embrace public criticism and debate about existing and historical socialist projects, we believe DSA’s primary domestic responsibility is to oppose military funding and US intervention.
### **Unite The Class**
To win political power, the working class needs to struggle on every possible terrain: tenant and labor unionism; social movements for abolition, migrant justice and reproductive freedom; alternative media and cultural institutions, all in the orbit of DSA. At the same time those struggles need to target the ways that the state disorganizes and disunites the working class. Toward that end, we are committed to supporting EWOC and ETOC, building Democratic Left, and supporting chapters engaged in mass work across the country, and support attempts to take those independent working class organizations and use them to fight for political freedom.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Against the Cult of the Robe
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/against-the-cult-of-the-robe/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:08:43.000Z
Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia has been trapped in El Salvadoran prison for thirty-seven days. The Maryland sheet metal worker and father of three was arrested by the Trump Administration on March 12, 2025, and deported alongside hundreds of others to El Salvador’s notorious CECOT mega-prison a few days later. Despite a 2019 order from an immigration judge that he cannot be deported to El Salvador and increasingly irate recent orders by US. District Judge Paula Xinis to facilitate his release, Mr. Abrego Garcia continues to languish in El Salvadoran prison.
When Mr. Abrego Garcia and the others deported with him were brought to CECOT, they were shackled and forced to bow their heads to their waists. Guards then commanded them to kneel and shaved each of their heads. From there, they were brought to their cells–large, crowded rooms of hard metal beds and bright lights that remain on at all times. Prisoners at CECOT are kept in these cells for all but a half hour every day. Mr. Abrego Garcia has since been transferred to a different El Salvadoran prison, but the hundreds deported with him remain in CECOT.
Trump and El Salvador’s dictator, Nayib Bukele, have remained defiant about freeing Mr. Abrego Garcia, and Trump indicated that he intended to send “home-grown” prisoners to El Salvador’s hellish prison system as well. So far, despite America’s oft-vaunted system of checks and balances, no other government bodies have been able to effectively intercede to free Mr. Abrego Garcia, despite the Administration admitting he was deported because of an “administrative error.”
\*\*\*
The first few months of the second Trump Administration have been defined by an autocratic seizure of power by the executive. To begin mass deportations, dismantle significant portions of the federal government, and drive transgender people toward eradication, Trump has worked to consolidate power in the Oval Office, at the expense of both legislative and judicial authority. To the extent the Democratic Party has fought back, it has been through largely ineffective appeals to the courts.
While there is a role for lawsuits in attempting to stymie the Trump Administration’s frenetic efforts to erode personal liberties, any approach that relies on these institutions is doomed to failure. The federal courts are wildly undemocratic institutions which have been wholly captured by the right; while these structures should still be used strategically as necessary, it should be recognized that no meaningful defense of democracy will come through such an anti-democratic institution.
The Democratic Party and the NGOs in its orbit have been relying almost solely upon the judiciary, and had little to offer but finger-wagging when the highest level of that branch has performed its historical role as a rubber-stamp for reactionary policies. DSA must fill this void in leadership with a clear call to replace our slavery-era Constitution with a democratic system of universal and equal suffrage, where the people’s elected assembly, not authoritarian executives or unelected judges, retains final political power.
\*\*\*
The Trump Administration’s seizure of congressional power has been widespread. Trump and DOGE have essentially asserted unilateral control over federal spending, fundamentally upending the Constitution’s designation of Congress as holding spending power. This extends even to the shuttering of entire congressionally-created agencies like the Department of Education.
Congressional responses to this executive overreach have generally ranged from subservient groveling by Republicans to ineffective bleating by Democratic Party leaders. When faced with their biggest spot of leverage—Republicans needed at least eight votes from the Senate’s Democratic Party caucus to keep Trump’s government open and cut money for housing—Chuck Schumer delivered ten, including his own.The funding advanced, 62-38, and the Democratic Party squandered its clearest opportunity to stand up to Trump legislatively. Democrats have routinely provided votes for Trump’s nominees, and Marco Rubio was confirmed with an incredible 99-0 vote.
Instead of fighting in the legislature, Democrats and their allied nonprofits have largely sought to fight back against Trump in the Courts. This is a curious choice—especially after Trump spent his first term stacking courts with Federalist Society ghouls and Biden and Schumer failed to act with the same urgency. So far, it has not paid dividends for liberals, based on a combination of rulings in Trump’s favor and his inclination to ignore any rulings *not* in his favor. His refusal to free Mr. Abrego Garcia is perhaps the most alarming example. The Trump administration has argued that once prisoners are in El Salvador, they are beyond the reach of the Judicial System—laying the groundwork for a set of extrajudicial concentration camps.
The Supreme Court, for their part, has delighted in repeatedly making decisions which nominally preserve rights while functionally allowing Trump to proceed with his agenda unchecked. When a case related to education cuts in violation of Congressional mandates, *Department of Education v. California*, reached the Supreme Court, the Court stayed a temporary restraining order previously issued by a federal district court, thereby allowing the Government to terminate various education-related grants. In a lawsuit to stop Trump’s use of the Alien Enemies Act to summarily deport Venezuelan nationals to CECOT, the Supreme Court initially made vague gestures at “due process” while allowing the deportations to continue, and insisted that any future challenges must be brought in the district where an individual is detained–allowing the Administration to kidnap people and send them to hyper-conservative judicial districts in Texas and Louisiana for show trials. The Court later temporarily blocked the deportation of some American residents from Venezuela, but made clear that this was only a pause to allow them to consider the case.
In Mr. Abrego Garcia’s case of admitted wrongful deportation, the Supreme Court ordered him returned (or at least ordered the government to “facilitate” his return), but also ordered the lower court to amend its order to reflect “the deference owed to the Executive Branch in the conduct of foreign affairs,” which has given the Administration leeway to refuse to take action. This has allowed Trump—for now—to continue alleging he is in compliance with the court orders.
This is the latest ruling in the long history of the judicial system creating the imperial presidency by caving to the President regarding issues of “foreign policy” or “national security.” The Constitution nominally prohibits deprivation of liberty without due process of law, grants Congress the power to declare war, and prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. Nevertheless, thanks to the Supreme Court’s deference, presidents have been able to force residents into concentration camps on the basis of their race, carry out secret bombings of foreign countries, and torture detainees who are held indefinitely without trials. It is all too likely that Trump will eventually openly ignore court orders—even from the Supreme Court if necessary—but a rhetorical and political strategy of deference to the authority of the courts until that point of rupture ensures that meaningful resistance is both untimely and unmoored from a coherent understanding of democracy.
This deference extends to executive branch violence at home, where courts allow police and prisons to get away with abuse and horrific conditions through clever legal loopholes like “qualified immunity.” The deadly nature of American prisons for transgender women has been known for decades and courts have done next to nothing to ameliorate it. If one looks to courts to defend them from the violence of the executive, they will almost certainly be left defenseless.
It is clear, then, that we cannot expect courts to save us—and, by extension, we cannot expect a governing system reliant on the unenforceable supremacy of an unelected judiciary to save us. We must stake out a clear position that we are opposed to both Trump’s authoritarianism and the undemocratic Constitutional order that created the conditions for it. Our Constitution entrenches rule by the privileged few by creating rigged, non-proportional actors with just an appearance of democracy, such as the wildly-disproportionate Senate, unelected judiciary, President elected through the byzantine electoral college, and gerrymandered House.
We must agitate sharply and openly for a new, democratic constitution with final political power resting in a people’s assembly, elected proportionally by universal and equal suffrage. Under this democratic constitution, members of the people’s assembly would be elected through nationwide proportional vote, in order to ensure the body is reflective of the political will of the people. This representative body’s democratic decisions would then have final authority over judges and executive employees. This is the natural political vehicle for the rule of the working-class majority, and achieving it must be at the center of our organizing.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### For a Rank-and-File Tenant Unionism
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/for-a-rank-and-file-tenant-unionism/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:12:10.000Z
As the organization of tenant unions continues apace across the country (and beyond), the comparison between tenant unionism and trade unionism, implied in their names, has become increasingly significant, if under considered. One comparison arose in a debate, first among scholars at the Law and Political Economy Project and percolating into the movement at-large, regarding the appropriate legal architecture to support tenant unionism. On one side was the call for a “[Wagner Act for tenant unions](https://lpeproject.org/blog/a-wagner-act-for-tenant-unions/?ref=marxistunity.com)”–the institution, through legislation, of collective bargaining rights for tenants in their buildings with their landlords. In [a response](https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-should-tenant-unions-look-to-labor-law/?ref=marxistunity.com) questioning the reasonableness of the labor-tenant analogy, Greg Baltz and Shakeer Rahman emphasize that unlike workers, “tenants are purchasers not producers, so their ability to leverage interventions… require different legislative agendas than what the labor movement has pursued.” Tenants don’t need collective bargaining rights, the authors of this position argue, but consumer protection laws such as housing code regulations and rent caps.
In contrast to the world of legal theory, tenant unionists themselves have also engaged in the trade-union-analogy, though with more practical ends in mind, and with less overt theoretical attention. The Madrid Tenant’s Union, for example, put together an [organizing handbook](https://www.inquilinato.org/manual-organizacion-inquilina/?ref=marxistunity.com) based on [Labor Notes’ *Secrets to a Successful Organizer*](https://labornotes.org/secrets?ref=marxistunity.com); dozens of tenant unionists in New York City, for another, are currently enrolled in the Jane McAlevey-started [*Organizing for Power* training](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3o7X-RIniqk&ab%5Fchannel=Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung&ref=marxistunity.com) program; [the Connecticut Tenants Union](https://thedigradio.com/podcast/building-the-union-w-hannah-srajer/?ref=marxistunity.com), in perhaps the most notable example, has [partnered with SEIU Local 1199 to build out its union along traditional trade union lines](https://jacobin.com/2024/06/labor-tenants-unions-organizing-solidarity?ref=marxistunity.com). This article subjects the analogy between the two union forms to more concerted theoretical and political pressure by transposing Kim Moody’s *rank-and-file strategy* to the site of tenant unionism, noting the continuities and problematics that arise in the process. To do so, we ask: What might a rank-and-file tenant union strategy look like?
Our motivation in doing so is twofold:
- For one, we want to highlight the practical-political, rather than legal, convergences and divergences between the two union forms;
- Secondly, a rank-and-file tenant unionist strategy has the potential to overcome cleavages within the tenant union movement: namely, the gap between “independent” tenant unions and larger non-profit organizations; the role of administration, bureaucracy, and staff in tenant unions, tenant associations, and nonprofits; the question of membership and leadership; the relation between hyper-local organization and wider unions; and, finally, the centrality of democracy.
### **Introduction**
Twenty-five years ago Kim Moody wrote “[The Rank-and-File Strategy](https://solidarity-us.org/rankandfilestrategy/?ref=marxistunity.com),” a pamphlet for the socialist organization *Solidarity* in which the author elaborated a practical-political orientation that had emerged among members of the International Socialists in the 1970s and that has, since Moody’s writing, retained purchase–if contested, reconsidered, and applied varingly–within the left ever since. The rank-and-file strategy was developed to ‘bridge’ the gap between the left (“with its highly theorized, often moralistic politics”) and the most active portions of the working class (with their generally “untheorized, pragmatic outlook”). In a much-quoted metaphor, Moody describes the context of this gap as “the lack of a sea of class-conscious workers for socialist ideas and organizations to swim in.” Such a sea is not produced through flood alone, though floods happen (Occupy, Bernie, COVID & the George Floyd Uprisings, Al Aqsa), but–to extend the metaphor–by the steady drip of daily, relational class struggle and the diligent intentional carving out of democratic, oceanic basins. The rank-and-file strategy places the point of production at the heart of its orientation because, as Moody writes in a 2020 revisit of the strategy, the workplace and union present a site of struggle that contains “elements of democratic procedures,” is in “direct confrontation with capital,” and is itself a “well-defined political arena.” It’s this character of trade unions–bounded site of contest, direct engagement in class antagonism, pretenses of democracy–that make trade unions the ‘natural organizations’ of the working class, the ideal vehicles in which socialists might best ‘draw out’ the class consciousness that makes the grand historical ideas of socialism politically potent.
At its core, the rank-and-file strategy is about democracy and political struggle; from the rank-and-file vantage, the two components give each other meaning and are practically inseparable. Moody is arguing *to* socialists that democratization is both the necessary means for and appropriate expression of working-class self-organization. Through robust, participatory democracy, the rank-and-file become protagonists in their local; in its absence, the rank-and-file is sequestered and suppressed, disorganized. The rank-and-file strategy is, in this sense, a direct response to bureaucratic top-down unionism, as well as socialists’ past attempts at ‘cozying up’ to bureaucratic union leadership. Simultaneously, though, the rank-and-file strategy calls for the development of cross-union, class-wide, transitional and socialist organizations and publications. Here the rank-and-file strategy recognizes the bounded sites of shopfloors as useful only insofar as they are transcended.
Perhaps most importantly, and made clear by its name, the rank-and-file strategy identifies the *rank-and-file*–that is ordinary members, not elected executive committees nor bureaucrats, not staff members nor social cliques–as its protagonist. This emphasis is particularly relevant in that this is a strategy written to and for those already radicalized. While certainly theoretical, Moody is also excoriating those socialists who imagine their correct theoretical or political lines to be sufficient for them to assume leadership, direct a union, etc.
In putting forth an argument for *rank-and-file tenant unionism,* we want to hold onto these four aspects of Moody’s argument:
1. The necessity of democracy and the trade union’s pretenses of democracy
2. Their explicit, direct engagement in class conflict with capital
3. The well-defined, finite nature of unions as a site of organization
4. The protagonism of the rank-and-file
### **Democracy:**
Moody does not give an explicit, positive definition of democracy. Rather, he generally counterposes a ‘democratic’ union to one compelled and controlled by *undemocratic* elements, such as unaccountable leadership, bureaucracy, and staff. It is in this conflict where the rank-and-file strategy begins its intervention into labor unionism as a democratizing force. This is also the entry point at which the authors of this article contend that the strategy could be adapted to tenant unionism, at least abstractly, in constructing a mass democratic tenant movement to whose collective will all supporting bureaucratic structure is subordinated.
For Moody, bureaucratization refers to those unions “in which the leadership and their hired staff are positioned between the pressures of capital and the needs of the members, and thus develop distinct interests from those members in holding their positions in the bureaucracy.” Here, leadership and staff, rather than acting as tribunes for their union’s general membership, increasingly act like their managers. In identifying the undemocratic potential in bureaucracy, the question of democracy is not confined to particular choices(elections, referenda, and contracts) but permeates through a union’s administrative functions and its general reproduction. Democracy is not one thing (the vote) but an assemblage of mechanisms and conditions by which the general populace of an organization assert their will over the functions and character of the organization, with regularity and transparency. These mechanisms and conditions include both the formal, or *constitutional* character of the union as well as its *social*, in-practice content. This means things like the enumerated rights of the rank-and-file to recall leadership and participate in open bargaining and union decision-making, as well as the social fabric–the *thick* organization, the filled-in McAlevey bullseyes, the diligent list-work, mutual aid, care-work, conviviality–that imbues these formal mechanisms with the actuality of democracy.
With this in mind, Moody addresses one of the paradoxes of the rank-and-file strategy, namely that
> *some rank-and-file movements or caucuses run for union office and win. When they do, those who take office cease to be rank-and-filers by definition. True enough. What the rank-and-file strategy says about this is that it is important the rank-and-file caucus that took power not disband but maintain its links to the membership, and advise, support, and if necessary keep the reformed union leadership on course.*
Democratization–of the union and beyond–is not a means (for power or leadership or the assertion of a particular politic) but in itself the perpetual ends of the rank-and-file strategy. The danger of bureaucratization suggests nothing of the general necessity of administrative work in organization. Rather it points to the political content of that work, the practical necessity of its democratization, and the inevitable alienation that results from its concentration in unaccountable hands. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy is a robust argument for the capacity of working people to rule themselves: administratively, politically, economically, locally and at scale. Moreover, it is an argument that trade unions are formed under democratic pretenses and lend themselves toward the actualization of substantive democracy.
It’s helpful to situate Moody’s concept of rank-and-file democracy with Marx’s writing on the Paris Commune, which is, among other things, a celebration of the working people of Paris’ world-historic reclamation of administrative governance from the bureaucratic “boa constrictor” of the bourgeois state. Gone, Marx wrote of the Commune, was “the delusion as if administration and political governing were mysteries, transcendent functions only to be trusted to the hands of a trained caste.” The Commune saw the replacement of “haughteous masters of the people by its always removable servants,” and the responsibility of civic administration carried out by regular working people “publicly, simply, under the most difficult and complicated circumstances, and doing it… for a few pounds, acting in bright daylight…” This, Marx wrote, constituted the “reabsorptionof the state power by society as its own living forces instead of as forces controlling and subduing it, by the popular masses themselves, forming their own force instead of the organized force of their suppression.” The rank-and-file strategy can be understood, in its democratic orientation, as a call for the reabsorption of *union power* by a union’s own living forces, publicly, acting in broad daylight: combating the delusion that the complexities of union administration, negotiations with management, and exigent political circumstances require unaccountable bureaucracy.
This emphasis and articulation of democracy, when transposed to tenant unionism, highlights a few principles that must remain abstract until we survey the tenant union scene and its parallels with and divergences from trade unionism. Those are as follows: that a rank-and-file tenant unionism calls for **a)** the continual democratization of administrative labor and responsibilities; **b)** the revocability of any leadership and administration by the general body; **c)** universal suffrage, in form and content, amongst membership; **d)** that such formal mechanisms require the content of thick organization, of intentional and maintained relationships between membership; **e)** that staff, leadership and bureaucracy are subordinated to the general populace’s will.
### **Direct Class Conflict**
As Baltz and Rahman assert, tenants and laborers assume distinct places in the broader cartography of the capitalist mode of production. Labor *produces* surplus value, whereas tenants, through their rental payments, are extorted of what surplus value they retain in the form of wages. Workers, moreover, are directly engaged in the process of production. Tenants operate in the sphere of reproduction and, in Baltz and Rahman’s legal framework, as mere consumers of the commodity that is housing. This distinction has clear bearings on the necessary legal reforms the movement should fight for. This framework’s initial relegation of the tenant, however, to just the singular position of consumer, misses the fact that the collective tenant generates the vast surplus value expropriated by the landlord class, first by consuming the commodity via rent, but by then themselves reproducing that *same* commodity–their homes–and often augmenting its value (before its next consumption by them or the next, higher-paying, tenant). As one scales up to buildings, neighborhoods, even entire cities, it becomes more clear that the housing commodity’s value is a product of tenants’ reproduction. This reproduction is a delineation of tenancy that distinguishes it from labor but does not reduce it to a form of class struggle subordinate to that of labor and labor unions. Rather, with real estate’s growing proportion of surplus value extraction in the global economy, tenant struggles can be seen as labor’s complement. Further, the relative absence of the tenant union form in capital’s legal framework, confirmed by efforts to construct a Wagner Act for tenants affords the tenant movement a relative blank slate upon which to construct transitional, liberatory forms. How, in the first place, do these structural differences persist or bear upon the political-practical strategy of these two means of class struggle?
In both union forms, the primary and anchoring means of leverage is the *strike.* The strike is the class struggle tool from which other tools–like petitions, direct actions, public rallies–derive their potency. But these types of strike are not the same. Both are means of developing leverage and gaining control by starving a class antagonist of expected accumulation. As the existence of the landlord and the capitalist hinge upon the regular extraction of surplus, this withholding can produce substantial leverage and result in the substantive transformation of workers’ and tenants’ material existence: wages can go up, rents can go down; conditions of work and life can improve dramatically. However, Baltz and Rahman argue that the potential shared interest between labor and capital in the growth of their firm–in that a bigger pie means bigger slices–makes for a fundamental contrast with the more zero-sum struggle between tenant and landlord, where the ‘pie’ in question only grows at the expense of tenants (their rents raise, or they are replaced with higher-paying tenants). [Because of this, they argue](https://lpeproject.org/blog/why-should-tenant-unions-look-to-labor-law/?ref=marxistunity.com), “tenant unions don’t have a power that is comparable to controlling production. Even when done collectively, withholding rent does not function the same as withholding production.” Yet the emergence of the ‘[real estate state](https://academicworks.cuny.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1649&context=gc%5Fpubs&ref=marxistunity.com)’ and the long process of domestic deindustrialization have made rent and rent-extraction increasingly central means of accumulation and sites of contradiction and class struggle. The power imbalance between a rent strike and a labor strike is perhaps more a question of scale and organization than an essentialized characteristic of the mode of production and the respective locations of tenancy and labor.
That tenant unionism finds kinship in both trade unionism *and* land struggles worldwide is yet another important consideration. Tenant unions seek working-class *control* over where and how working-class tenants live. Sovereignty, popular control, territorialization, communal infrastructures of governance, protagonism, neighborhood democracy, Marx’s notion of *reabsorption*–these are some expressions and horizons of tenant unionism that move beyond economistic struggle over surplus value. The assertion of working-class tenant control over home and reproduction expressed *through* a rent strike is both a direct class confrontation over value and a prefigurative–Moody uses the term *transitional*–construction of worlds and relations beyond capital.
For Moody, the direct class conflict of trade unionism is significant in at least two senses. First, a central reason Moody focuses on trade unions “is that unions bring people together at the heart of the social relations of production. This is where both class formation and class conflict begin.” The combination of class formation and class conflict produces in workers a ‘trade union consciousness,’ (e.g. a class in itself) which “involves an awareness of class conflict and the need for organization.” Such a consciousness, though it might rest upon the uncritical assumption “that ‘the system’ is here to stay,” is the raw material that can become socialist consciousness, or the subjectivity of a class for itself. The rank-and-file strategy hinges upon this movement *from* trade union consciousness to socialist, revolutionary consciousness. Such movement requires not only direct class conflict–which all tenants and workers by definition live–but *organized struggle* in direct class conflict. This distinction is important. Famously, [as Engels wrote](https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/principles-communism.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com), under the capitalist mode of production, the worker is not the property of a particular boss, but rather *property as it were of the entire bourgeois class*. The tenant, similarly, is not the property of a given landlord, but of the landlord class writ large. The movement from trade union consciousness to revolutionary class consciousness is the practical recognition of this very distinction: you struggle and organize against your boss and in doing so, in the practice of which, the absolute tangible possibility of working-class self-management and the similarly absolute limitation of particularized direct class conflict in the context of the totality of social relations are both made pressingly evident ([just look at what happened to the recently first unionized pizza place in New York City](https://ny.eater.com/2025/2/10/24362961/barboncino-pizza-closing-franklin-crown-heights?ref=marxistunity.com)). Does this map 1:1 between labor and tenancy? The geographic correlation of rent is an important consideration: rents are, far more so than wages, integrated by geographic proximity; landlords, with increasingly algorithmic efficacy, look to rents nearby as benchmarks, constantly one-upping one another in an ever-rising seascape of rent prices. But it is unclear whether or not this lends itself to something like neighborhood collective bargaining, through which the distinction between rent and wage is made more analogous in their expression of organized struggle. It is worth noting that neighborhood collective bargaining was [an early (though never achieved) goal of one of the first autonomous tenant unions of the current movement, the Crown Heights Tenant Union](https://inthesetimes.com/article/solidarity-works-brooklyn-tenant-union-organizes-for-rent-regulation?ref=marxistunity.com), and [the Swedish Union of Tenants collectively bargains for rents of the whole of Sweden](https://radicalhousingjournal.org/2021/a-union-for-tenants/?ref=marxistunity.com).
Second: for Moody, it is precisely the over-mediation by an undemocratic bureaucracy that blunts the direct character of class conflict in bureaucratized unions. The rank-and-file strategy is predicated on direct class conflict, and it prescribes the removal of obscuring mediations of that direct class conflict. Tenant associations, located in discrete buildings and in organizing against a single landlord, are engaged in direct and fairly unmediated class conflict. It is because of this that tenant associations are often home to more incipiently radical class consciousness than their labor counterparts. In the authors’ experience, a tenant in a tenant association dealing with the deprivations of a predatory landlord is quick to question the very fundamentals of private property. The rank-and-file strategy of tenant unionism, then, is predicated on this very fundamental radical consciousness *and* on the organizational cultivation of such consciousness beyond the scene of the apartment building. This means the culling and rebuffing of bureaucratic tendencies in organizations as they scale up. This also means the development of democratic organization at scales larger than the building and neighborhood, such that the incipient class consciousness of *Why should I pay rent?* can integrate more complex political analyses involving the state and the broader political landscape.
### **The Bounded Site of Organization**
The union form is founded on the fact that it is hard for individual workers or tenants to negotiate with their boss or landlord. Through collective organization, workers and tenants develop leverage, can negotiate from places of strength, and can win legal regulations that can soften the violence and bolster organization. And yet, the union-form is hamstrung insofar as it confines itself to a struggle between individual firms or buildings. Particular struggles are necessary in constructing a broader union-form, yet the particular struggle is only made relevant beyond its bounds precisely by the union-form–the union form is a container in which a rich litany of strategies, tactics, and their assessments can be stored, shared, and referenced. A rent strike in one building, disconnected from others, is never known beyond its walls; a rent strike in one building, in which a union supports it, in which the tenants present on their experience at a union meeting, in which the union provides the infrastructure for the tenants of this striking building to visit strike-curious buildings down the street, to share the gospel of not paying rent. Moreover, the struggle of any given shop floor or building is limited by the exigent legal/social/political circumstances in which the particular struggle occurs. The union is then meant to be a force multiplier, a widener of possibility but precisely through the particular.
The specific site of class conflict that labor and tenant unions attend to is fundamental to the rank-and-file strategy in both cases. Yet their sites of struggle and organizational forms are not analogous. Labor unions have a clearly defined bargaining unit: all the workers represented by a union. Such a dynamic emerges from the legal architecture created by historic labor movements (e.g. the Wagner Act, the NLRB, etc.). This legal status results in one of the primary distinctions in between the labor and tenant union forms: in closed shop states, where labor unions have a certain sovereignty of representation, workers are de facto represented in negotiations by the union. In other words, unions *mediate* the class conflict. Tenant associations, however, are voluntary and not compulsory. While a group of organized tenants can secure wins in their struggle against their landlords and transform the conditions for *all* tenants in a building, they are not by default mediating the rent-relation between tenants and landlord. This distinction in organizational form is precisely what occasioned the call for a tenant unionist Wagner Act.
The labor union is split into various locals, differentiated by industry, profession, and/or geography. Locals typically have elected officers that form the governing body of the bargaining unit. These unions are also often subordinated into federations and coalitions, like AFSMCE. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy is predicated upon the nested nature of labor union organization: you organize enough shops, from the bottom up, and you can transform the union as a whole and even the larger federations. This provides a clear (though not easy) pathway toward scalable political power. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy is a direct response to the *decayed* character of so many unions: while the formal positions, the chapter chairs and shop stewards, the delegates and executive committees, remain formally filled, many locals are husks, trench coats hiding largely unorganized workplaces. The formal existence of the union, the persistence of its structure, is predicated upon dues from working members. As a result, the formal architecture of unions guarantees their reproduction. That the human, organizational content is not guaranteed is precisely where the rank-and-file makes its intervention.
In contrast, tenant unions are more often loose federations and are less neatly nested. Though they do have bounded and particular class antagonisms at their foundation: these are organized apartment buildings, sometimes even called locals by certain tenant unions, particular tenants sharing the same address congealed into a tenant association, engaged in struggle for control over the conditions and circumstances of their homes. However, whereas many labor unions exist only in *form*, lacking human beings and organizing work, the tenant association is generally *emergent*, containing many people organizing around shared goals but lacking a formal structure. Tenant associations typically emerge *in response* to urgent conditions: the heat is turned off, rents have been jacked up, a tenant in the building is harassed by management. A motivated tenant in the building knocks on their neighbor’s door; maybe organizers with a neighborhood tenant union or tenant organization help doorknock even more neighbors. A meeting is held: a tenant association is declared; the tenant association exists primarily insofar as its *content* exists. While there do exist tenant associations with rigid structures, elected presidents and boards, the emergent character of tenant associations is more typical. Oftentimes, the informal form of tenant associations lies dormant for long stretches. Conditions improve, or a leader moves out, and the practice of assembly and collective action begins to fade. Then, a new crisis emerges, and a renewed content and form of collective assembly also emerges.
The more salient distinction, though, is how parts of the union relate to their whole. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy generally directs its attention at trade unions where locals conglomerate into a single bargaining unit. Tenant unions are, for the most part, loosely-linked federations of distinct bargaining-unit tenant associations and individual tenants. It’s helpful to pause and spell out the nomenclature that we are familiar with, but please note that this nomenclature is far from uniform across the movement. The smallest, basic unit of the tenant movement is the tenant association (TA), which is composed of tenants living in the same building (or interconnected buildings) owned by the same landlord. The TA is a natural and bounded site, both as a bargaining unit and geographically. Multiple TAs located in buildings owned by the same landlord can organize together to form a tenant council (TC). A TC is bounded in terms of bargaining but not in terms of geography–a TC can extend across different blocks and neighborhoods and across the city; the prospect of nationwide tenant councils often serves as inspiration for nationwide tenant organization, particularly given the increased concentration of real estate ownership. TCs are generally subordinate to tenant unions; the former are often organized by the latter. A tenant union (TU) is an organization of tenants, tenant associations, and tenant councils in a given neighborhood or city. A TU is bounded geographically but rarely in terms of bargaining. Another level of organization, whose place in this architecture is actively being negotiated, is that of the hyper-local yet beyond the building unit: these “circles” or “locals” or “block” organizations are bounded geographically and yet not by bargaining. They are sometimes codified into union structure and otherwise are sometimes informal places of gathering and social reproduction, or both.
All of this is to say that there is not a clean, cohesive articulation of agency, leverage or democratic integration of the site of fundamental class conflict into the tenant union *or* the nonprofit tenant organization. This results in a separation between the base-level class struggle and the reproduction of the tenant union as a whole; the people making the tenant union exist at any given time (holding meetings, coordinating, developing politics) often aren’t specifically accountable to organized tenants in their buildings, the latter of which we might term the movement’s “rank-and-file.” This separation is fertile ground for the development of bureaucracies. This is the case in both independent tenant unions, where the ideologically-invested assume positions of informal bureaucracy, and in nonprofit organizations where the formalized role is generally assumed by staff and directors. One is accountable to ideological presuppositions, the other is accountable to boards of directors and funders. Neither are particularly accountable to a general membership. Tenant organizations in this sense operate beside base-level class conflicts, offering support and resources for particular building fights and, in return, employing and utilizing the militancy of building-level leaders and organized tenants for fights beyond the building–such as legislative campaigns (like [the 2019 laws won by the New York tenant movement](https://ny.curbed.com/2019/6/14/18679507/rent-regulation-new-york-state-reform-legislation-passed?ref=marxistunity.com)) or mass mobilizations (like the 2020-22 [Cancel Rent Movement](https://jacobin.com/2021/08/nyc-cancel-rent-movement-campaign-covid-eviction-moratorium-erap-havp-housing-justice-for-all?ref=marxistunity.com)). The formal relationship between the union/organization and the tenant association is, by and large, tenuous, often ill-defined and informal, emergent at one point (like when a TA needs support), quietly receding at another (when a TA leader moves out or a campaign ends).
This split between the “rank-and-file” in their buildings and the agential actors of a union, does indeed mirror the ‘service-provision’ model of bureaucratic unions, but the lack of a formal connection between a particular tenant struggle and the union organization marks a point of departure between tenant and labor. Moody’s rank-and-file strategy conceives of the formal, material tether between local and union, as well as across unions in federations, like a ladder that insurgent rank-and-file movements can ascend. Tenant unions and nonprofit tenant organizations rarely have such ‘climbable’ architecture: either the structures don’t formally exist, in the case of autonomous unions, or they are formally undemocratic, in the case of staff-driven nonprofits. Either way, there are often no democratic mechanisms for the rank-and-file to take control of the larger-scale organization. On top of this, tenant unions find tenants who *aren’t* organized in their buildings or blocks coming to organize. The tenuous relationship between TU and TA is then replaced with an inexistent, irrelevant one. One question the movement must answer, then, is *can you be a rank-and-file tenant unionist if you are not organizing in your building or on your block?* This dynamic is intensified in nonprofit organizations where staff and directors operate as administrative leaders of their organizations, with no accountable relationship *either* to their own tenant association nor to that of their organization’s membership.
As such, one of the more urgent tasks of the rank-and-file tenant unionist strategy is to develop and demand, within tenant unions, tenant organizations, and in spaces of coalition, the formal architecture of democracy. This requires democracy at the base-level, actual democracy in our buildings and not just democratic vibes, that can then articulate up and out to every level. The actual particulars of the democracy that is practiced can and naturally does vary; what is consistent is that there is some degree of formality, reproducibility, generalization of skills, engagement in deliberation and collective decision-making; voting is absolutely necessary, but of course not sufficient. Parliamentary procedure, even casually and necessarily shaped for the context, is helpful in that it induces a rehearsal of governance that is necessary for the construction and maintenance of democratic organization.
We prefer to think of democratic structures in terms of centripetal and centrifugal forces of organization–the constant expulsing of bureaucratic control combined with the gravitational pull of rank-and-file into agency, into administrative and organizational reproduction, into leadership. In concrete terms, this means that all potentially-bureaucratic labor be subject to democratic control. Staff and leadership must be subject to the discipline of the democratic rank-and-file body; likewise, the rank-and-file body must be capacious enough to effectively and democratically discipline such leadership. Form and content–norms and practices, bylaws (or their equivalent), and actual activity. Any structural obstacles to this dynamic–on the one hand, unaccountable boards, undemocratic fiscal direction, lifelong career directors; on the other hand, amorphous, role-lessness in organization, that *tyranny of structurelessness*–must be overcome time and time again. Moody gestures toward precisely such democratization in perpetuity in his call for rank-and-file caucuses to *not* disband when and if they win union leadership.
A second, related task is that of building scalable organizational architecture: from the building, to the block, up to the city, the state, and the country. The tenant movement has a relatively blank slate to operate from: this means we have the opportunity (and responsibility) to construct truly democratic organization. So too, though, do we have the responsibility of infusing any such organization with the capacity to organize for that democracy to matter. To the extent that larger organization already exists (examples being New York’s[ Housing Justice for All coalition ](https://housingjusticeforall.org/?ref=marxistunity.com)and [the KC Tenants’ newly launched Tenant Union Federation](https://www.thenation.com/article/society/tenant-union-organizing-rent/?ref=marxistunity.com)) : the task is the explicit democratization of those structures and the grounding of them in building and block struggles; establishing formal and concrete tethers such that any organizations of higher abstractions cannot float off (as they so often do) is paramount.
### **The Protagonism of the Rank-and-file**
Protagonism is the shift from being a mere recipient of conditions to an active force in shaping them. To become a protagonist, to act protagonistically, is to recognize a narrative of history and to place yourself within its movements. The rank-and-file strategy expresses and sets for itself a *mass protagonism*, that is, a protagonism that exists in the form of collective organization. The key facets of the strategy’s program: democracy, class conflict, and the organizational terrain of the labor (and tenant) union aim to build this protagonism. It is also essential to note, however, that protagonism, or Moody’s “worker self-activity,” is also a prerequisite. It must be the fuel that develops these facets of the rank-and-file program and without which the political dangers of bureaucratic top-down forms inevitably arise. We must help its flourishing in the tenant movement, but only protagonism itself can plant its own seed. In constructing a rank-and-file transitional tenant union form then, we must resolve and propel through our work this dialectic.
When speaking of protagonism and protagonists, we’re necessarily speaking of particular subjects, so we must ask: Who is the rank-and-file of the tenant union movement? Surely, it’s the organized tenant who is not paid to be a tenant organizer. But, would this encompass any tenant who is organized with their neighbors in their building (in the form of a tenant association), in their neighborhood (through a tenant union or a block committee), or through a larger tenant organization, even if they are not actively engaged in struggle? Or is the rank-and-file tenant necessarily someone who is actively engaged, organizationally, in that ground-level class conflict, tenant vs. landlord, from the site of their home? The more strict application of Moody’s strategy leans toward the latter, though this overlooks some of the complications of the tenant/labor analogy teased out above. A tentative solution would be to confine the ranks of the rank-and-file to those non-professional tenants who are organized within their buildings and/or in their immediate neighborhoods. Such a distinction, for now, allows us to retain the social reproductive significance and conscious-building character of hyper-local organization and direct class conflict without over-prescribing an analogy that is admittedly imperfect. Tenants in small apartment buildings (who are, remembering Engels from above, tenants of *the landlord class*), where organizing is less immediately feasible, would not be systematically overlooked; and yet, untethered, unrooted activists would not be overly emphasized and allowed free reign. The tenant unionist affection for land struggle as an orientation reinforces this rooted, but not isolating definition of the rank-and-file tenant. The rank-and-file tenant, after all, seeks, along with their neighbors, to wrest control over where and how they live from the ever-squeezing grip of profiteering landlords.
For the rank-and-file tenant movement to become protagonists, their organizations, at all scales (of the building, neighborhood, city, country etc.) must be structured to facilitate the regular expression of their general membership’s democratic will. This is a prescription of form and content. Democratic mechanisms must be built out patiently; relationships of trust too. Leadership must always be subject to discipline; administration democratized; staff controlled by members. This is also a question of capacity. So-called ‘autonomous’ tenant unions–that eschew the prospects of hired staff or incorporation for the reasonable fear of becoming bureaucratized, undemocratic, accountable to boards and foundations–must grapple with the correlation between low-capacity organizations and a generally undemocratic and unrepresentative character. If the barriers to tenant self-management of their organization result in the concentration of leadership and administration in already-ideologically-inclined cadre activists, then those activists must plot out a path to transform these conditions. Clear in Moody’s rank-and-file strategy is the absolute necessity of a mass-character union. An organization of five people is, categorically, not a rank-and-file organization, though it certainly can be interpolated within one.
A rank-and-file strategy that centers mass protagonism and mass-democratic organization allows for a more genuine collaboration across tenant unions, across tenant organizations and might allow for a more militant tenant class *for itself*. The strengths of various formations–nonprofit, autonomous; neighborhood, citywide, statewide, across the country–might be, rather than contrasting, complementing and cohering.
### **Conclusion**
In sum, the tasks of socialists in the tenant movement include:
1. The development of expressly democratic tenant unions and tenant organizations, whose democratic character is explicitly rooted in the localized class struggles of tenants in their buildings and on their blocks. Such a democratic character includes the formal (or constitutional) makeup of the union, as well as the relational, cultural, and political educational content of the union;
2. In the context of these unions, organizers must clearly define administrative and leadership roles such that the discipline of these necessary organizational functions by the democratic rank-and-file is rendered possible and continually so;
3. The development in these unions of the capacity to be democratic bastions of working-class power. This requires de-essentializing any notion of ‘non-profit’ while not misplacing the salient critique from which an essentialized notion of the nonprofit tenant organization emerged. Undemocratic NGOs merit the criticism they receive, particularly when they tout “radical democratic” veneers. Yet capable staff are essential for the development of mass organizations. This task entails the experimentation by democratic tenant unions of hiring staff and electing leadership; moreover, this calls for developing effective language justice programs and, otherwise, wide-ranging practices of accessibility–a mass tenant union necessarily includes a vast and diverse array of working-class tenants and the unions must be well equipped to facilitate the development of protagonism across languages, cultures, accessibilities;
4. To develop organizational infrastructure at higher levels of abstraction that maintain and even bolster the mass-democratic tenant unions described above: citywide and statewide tenant unions, based in the democratic struggles of block and building organization where decisions are made by general body assemblies and, again, bureaucracy and professionalism are disciplined by the general body;
5. To struggle for the democratization of already-existing tenant coalitions and spaces; to caucus with organizations and organized tenants within these existing coalitions toward this project of rank-and-file tenant unionism; to, join with other working-class tenant organizations in expressly democratic federations and coalitions;
6. To explore the concrete possibility of engaging, as *rank-and-file* tenants, in already-existing large tenant organizations, to inquire into their democratic content and as far as necessary and possible to organize toward their democratization, which includes the subordinating of career directors and unaccountable staff to the democratic will of the rank-and-file.
*Individual articles* *are not a reflection of caucus policy.*
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The Legacy of the Civil Rights Movement
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-legacy-of-the-civil-rights-movement/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:15:03.000Z
The MUG editors asked if I would like to write an article on the legacy of the Civil Rights Movement. I said I would, but that it would have to be about the black freedom struggle in general because I do not think the conventional division between a moderate Civil Rights Movement and a radical Black Power Movement gives due recognition to the deeply radical character of Martin Luther King, Jr’s political thought, which transcended the boundaries of this division.
King gave a comprehensive account of his political beliefs and how he came to hold them in his 1958 book, [*Stride Toward Freedom: The Montgomery Story*](https://archive.org/details/stridetowardfree0000king/page/221/mode/1up?view=theater). Like the later Black Power Movement, King placed the black struggle for equality in the broader history of the worldwide struggle against colonialism and imperialism. He was also just as vehement in his condemnation of economic injustice and the violence of the Klan, police, court, and prison system. And he was not afraid to cite Marx against the evils of capitalism at a time when the FBI and the House Un-American Activities Committee were still on the hunt for communist sympathizers. But he would later differ with Black Power advocates on such issues as the role of violence vs. nonviolence; American vs. African or Third World identity; whether black Americans were a colony; and on democratic egalitarianism in a multiracial society vs. some form of independent black community/nation.
Although King was involved in debates with Robert Williams and Malcolm X between 1959 and 1965 over the role of violence and the ideologies of black nationalism and separatism, these debates were cut short when Williams went into exile in 1961 and Malcolm X was assassinated in 1965\. However, Williams and Malcolm X directly influenced both Stokely Carmichael (later known as Kwame Ture) and Huey Newton. Carmichael gave a name to this movement in his Black Power speech on the March Against Fear in Mississippi in June 1966, and Newton and Bobby Seale followed in October with the founding of the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense. From these beginnings, the Black Power Movement would explode in size and influence in 1967.
### **1967**
In May, armed Black Panthers made headlines when they entered the California State Capitol to protest a gun control bill aimed at them. In July, Newark and Detroit erupted in rebellion, triggered by police abuses. And Stokely Carmichael and Richard V. Hamilton’s [*Black Power*](https://archive.org/details/blackpower0000unse/page/4/mode/2up) was published that fall, warning of urban guerrilla warfare if blacks were prevented from exercising control over their own lives. Carmichael recognized blacks made up only ten percent of the US population, but he likened the situation in the US to a colonial people fighting for liberation.
King disagreed profoundly with Carmichael’s characterization of blacks as a colony within the US and answered Carmichael in his last book, [*Where Do We Go From Here?*](https://www.dirzon.com/file/telegram/Books%20and%20You/Martin%5FLuther%5FKing%5FJr%5FWhere%5FDo%5FWe.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com):
Who are we? We are the descendants of slaves. We are the offspring of noble men and women who were kidnapped from their native land and chained in ships like beasts. We are the heirs of a great and exploited continent known as Africa. We are the heirs of a past of rope, fire and murder. I for one am not ashamed of this past. My shame is for those who became so inhuman that they could inflict this torture upon us. (p. 53)
But we are also Americans. Abused and scorned though we may be, our destiny is tied up with the destiny of America. In spite of the psychological appeals of identification with Africa, the Negro must face the fact that America is now his home, a home he helped build through ‘blood, sweat and tears.’ Since we are Americans the solution to our problem will not come through seeking to build a separate black nation within a nation, but by finding that creative minority of the concerned from within the ofttimes apathetic majority, and together moving toward that colorless power that we all need for security and justice. (p. 54)
America must be a nation in which its multi-racial people are partners in power. This is the essence of democracy toward which all Negro struggles have been directed since the distant past when he was transplanted here in chains. (p. 54)
Beneath all the satisfaction of a gratifying slogan, Black Power is a nihilistic philosophy born out of the conviction that the Negro can’t win. It is, at bottom, the view that American society is so hopelessly corrupt and enmeshed in evil that there is no possibility of salvation from within. Although this thinking is understandable as a response to a white power structure that never completely committed itself to true equality for the Negro, and a die-hard mentality that sought to shut all windows and doors against the winds of change, it nonetheless carries the seeds of its own doom. (p. 44)
King was for integration, but not on the terms of other Civil Rights leaders attached to the Democratic Party, which he broke with in his [April condemnation](https://www2.hawaii.edu/~freeman/courses/phil100/17.%20MLK%20Beyond%20Vietnam.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) of the Vietnam War.
### **1968**
Everyone knows what happened in 1968: the Tet offensive; MLK’s assassination; cities burning; the Columbia University occupation and strike; RFK’s assassination; multiple gun battles between police and Black Panthers; the police riot at the Chicago Democratic National Convention.
I have one more event to add to this list. After the Democratic Convention, Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) issued a fifty thousand copy special edition of *New Left Notes* calling for a national student strike and demonstrations across the country on Election Day. Turnout was small and disappointing everywhere, but our demonstration in Newark with the Black Panthers was important for other reasons.
An SDS community organizing project led by Tom Hayden had been working in Newark since 1964\. It was part of a larger SDS effort to build an interracial movement of the poor in Northern cities, an idea suggested to Hayden by Stokely Carmichael in 1963\. However, by 1968 the original aim of the project to create a political movement of the poor had been overwhelmed by the escalation in Vietnam and the rebellion in 1967, in which twenty-six died; but a small group of SDS activists remained and maintained a working relationship with the Panthers. That is why the Election Day demonstration in Newark was a joint Panther/SDS project.
The demonstration at a downtown park drew only a few hundred people, half being students bused in from campuses and half Black Panthers from Newark. After a few speeches, the students and Panthers went their separate ways. I’ll quote from the next day’s Princeton student newspaper for an account of what happened next:
#### Newark policemen beat orderly SDS demonstrators
By Richard Balfour NEWARK — A peaceful demonstration by the Students for a Democratic Society against yesterday's election became a violent melee when police, apparently acting without provocation, attacked and beat several protesters. The police acted when members of the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom began shoving stragglers at the end of the column of protesters which was moving away from the scene of its rally in order to disband. The police, wading into the crowd of about 20 radicals, attempted to push them faster than their orderly pace and then began beating them with black-jacks and nightsticks. No Young Americans for Freedom were attacked. James J. Tarlau '70 was one of the two protesters injured in the clash. He was treated for several scalp lacerations and body blows at the Newark City Hospital and released.
The reality was worse. Tarlau was our SDS chapter president, and the leader of the Newark Police Red Squad identified him by name before clubbing him. And the right-wing Young Americans for Freedom were part of a larger vigilante movement led by Anthony Imperiale that began armed patrols of black neighborhoods during the 1967 uprising.
My takeaway from these events, and the general conclusion within SDS by the end of 1968, was that the Panthers were a tiny, vulnerable group that a handful of students had little power to protect, and that we would have to expand our activities beyond the campuses if we wanted to build a more powerful movement.
### **1969**
The establishment of the Fort Dix GI coffeehouse in April, which included a number of people from Newark SDS, and the Revolutionary Union’s publication of [*The Red Papers*](https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/red-papers-1/index.htm?ref=marxistunity.com) at the same time were the two most significant expressions of SDS’s move beyond the campuses. The coffeehouse group was soon involved in a campaign to Free the Fort Dix 38, which became a rallying point in the fall for a coalition including the Panthers, Young Lords, Young Patriots, American Servicemen's Union, and other antiwar groups. (The [Fort Dix 38](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fort%5FDix%5F38?ref=marxistunity.com) were GIs, including members of the antiwar American Servicemen's Union, who had been charged with crimes allegedly committed during a riot in the base prison in June.) *The Red Papers,* widely distributed at the last SDS convention, would sell 20,000 copies over the next year and set the terms of debate within the New Communist Movement for the next five years. Its immediate suggestion was that students should form collectives, move to working class communities, get industrial jobs, and study Marxism-Leninism.
There were changes going on within the black liberation movement at the same time. The League of Revolutionary Black Workers formed in Detroit and advocated a strategy based on factory workers rather than the Panthers’ strategy of organizing the lumpen. ([See John Watson's 1969 interview](https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/1960-1970/watson-point.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com).) Then the Panthers held their United Front Against Fascism Conference in July, which was a disappointment because their main strategic proposal for community control of police was too narrow and shared too much in common with the reformist politics of the Communist Party leaders who had prominent roles at the conference. Finally and sadly, Fred Hampton was assassinated and his leadership in pulling together a multi-racial Rainbow Coalition was lost.
### **1970**
The [May Day Rally in New Haven](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New%5FHaven%5FBlack%5FPanther%5Ftrials?ref=marxistunity.com#Protest%5Fand%5Funrest) in support of Bobby Seale, Erika Huggins, and other Black Panthers on trial for murder coincided with the US invasion of Cambodia. In addition to triggering a national student strike that closed down hundreds of colleges, these events also convinced several thousand student radicals that the crisis of US imperialism was intensifying and the RU was right about the necessity of creating a new revolutionary multi-racial communist party. That’s when I moved to Oakland and joined the RU.
### **1971**
Similar to Tom Hayden following the advice of Stokely Carmichael to go organize in Northern cities, Bob Avakian was following the personal advice of the Panthers to go organize poor whites when he moved to Richmond in late 1967\. At first, some RU members experimented with wearing Mao pins to work, selling the Black Panther newspaper, and calling openly for communism. Although these initial efforts generated a lot of debate and a few fights, they turned out to be poor organizing tactics. It also became obvious there was no way to organize white workers separately from black workers, so by 1969 the RU had concluded it would be necessary to form a multi-racial communist party. However, the specific relation of the black liberation struggle and black workers to such a party and the less politically advanced white working class (including its outright racist parts) remained an open question.
I began to develop my own views on these issues as a result of writing an article on George Jackson’s killing at San Quentin on 8/21/1971 (the Attica Prison uprising followed on 9/9). The editor of the RU newspaper suggested I read Lenin’s “The Drafting of 183 Students Into the Army” to get an idea of how socialists and workers should respond to instances of non-working class oppression. The article contained the line, “The worker who can look on indifferently while the government sends troops against the student youth is unworthy of the name of socialist.” That led me to read more to find out what Lenin’s conception of real socialism was, and that eventually led to Chapter III, Section E of *What Is to Be Done?* (*WITBD),* “The Working Class as Vanguard Fighter for Democracy,” and “[Political Agitation and 'The Class Point of View'](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1902/feb/01.htm?ref=marxistunity.com)”, which together defined the primary immediate political tasks of socialists as opposition to oppression of every kind and the establishment of a democratic republic. (To forestall a common objection, Lenin believed the goal of a democratic republic was the same for every country, be it a backward majority peasant autocracy like Russia or an advanced capitalist constitutional republic like France.)
From the perspective of Lenin’s unified democratic ideology, important parts of the RU’s statement of political principles and strategy now seemed questionable and confused. Most obviously, the RU considered its primary strategic goal to be socialism, not democracy; yet within this socialist strategy it wasn’t clear whether the RU thought the black struggle and Mexican-American struggle should be characterized as a struggle for democratic equality or whether black and brown workers were the vanguard of an emerging multi-racial socialist struggle. Also, despite its claim that socialist revolution was its primary strategic goal, the RU did not think the formation of a new communist party was the movement’s primary task or that socialism should be its immediate message to workers. Instead, it came up with the formulation that the central task of the movement was “building the struggle, consciousness and revolutionary unity of the working class and developing its leadership in the anti-imperialist struggle.” Many people outside the RU wondered how revolutionary leadership could be developed without openly advocating for socialism and a party. It seemed the RU was still spooked by its earlier experiments with Mao pins and Little Red Books.
### **1972**
None of these unresolved ambiguities mattered much in 1972\. Several thousand former students had by then moved into working class organizing and there was a sense the movement was reaching a critical mass. The RU itself was publishing monthly newspapers in about fifteen cities and was strong enough to play a major role in the nationwide boycott of the Farah clothing company in support of four thousand mainly Mexican-American women on strike for a union in El Paso. Seeing what the RU had accomplished and agreeing with its formulation of the movement’s main task, the Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization (PRRWO), the Black Workers Congress (BWC), and I Wor Kuen (IWK) announced in July they were joining a National Liaison Committee (NLC) with the RU to coordinate activities and discuss ideological issues. Then the *Guardian* (New York) newspaper, after becoming aware of the growth of this movement, announced in its October twenty-fifth anniversary issue it had converted to Marxism-Leninism and was committed to the creation of a new revolutionary party. That was just about the high point of the New Communist Movement.
US and Chinese foreign policy was one area that would soon confound revolutionary expectations. The New Communist Movement’s conception of imperialism was based on Lin Biao’s analysis in *Long Live the Victory of People’s War!*, which predicted, in the RU’s words, that the “reciprocating domestic and international conflict against US imperialism, mounting in intensity and overcoming difficulties and setbacks, will continue for a relatively long period, but its end result is certain—the destruction of US imperialism.” The continuing US withdrawal from Vietnam and Mao’s meeting with Nixon indicated this reciprocating intensification was diminishing. Third World liberation struggles were supposed to keep intensifying, and the Chinese had accused Nixon of being a new Hitler, but the withdrawal of the US from Vietnam and recognition of China went against these expectations.
From another direction, the Communist League (CL) published a comprehensive critique in September of the RU’s hesitancy to put Marxist-Leninist propaganda and party-building at the center of its political work. Led by Nelson Peery, a black former Communist Party member who remained loyal to Stalin, CL relied on Lenin’s arguments in *WITBD* to accuse the RU of failing to give conscious revolutionary leadership to mass movements. CL had a better understanding of Lenin’s emphasis on consciousness and leadership than the RU, but by consciousness and leadership CL meant the standard Marxist-Leninist theory of a centralized communist party contained in Stalin’s [*Foundations of Leninism*](https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1924/foundations-leninism/?ref=marxistunity.com). I also thought the RU was neglecting Lenin’s theory of political consciousness and leadership*,* but I meant by political consciousness and leadership Lenin’s theory of democratic egalitarianism.
CL also insisted that a Negro Nation existed in the South and support for its independence from the Anglo nation in the North was central to the success of proletarian revolution in all of North America. This position was at odds with the RU’s judgment that even if a Negro nation had existed in the South in the past, the Great Migration to the North and the mechanization of Southern agriculture had dispersed blacks across the country and concentrated them in working class jobs in cities. Instead of leaders of a movement for an independent nation, the RU saw black and brown workers as the most politically advanced within a larger nation-wide multi-racial working class movement.
### **1973**
Although much smaller than the RU, and smaller still than the RU, BWC, and PRRWO combined (IWK had left the NLC), CL did have some success drawing together a core of black and brown workers, most importantly some of the autoworker founders of the League of Revolutionary Black Workers in Detroit. By the fall, RU leaders were panicking at these developments and (without informing the RU membership) proposed to the BWC and PRRWO that “flying squads” should be formed immediately and sent around the country to pull together a new revolutionary communist party before CL could declare one. The BWC and PRRWO thought this proposal was nuts, in part because they would be a minority in a centralist majority-white ex-student organization, but also because the formation of a party had not yet been raised in mass work due to common agreement it wasn’t the movement’s primary task. It didn’t help that the RU’s main representative on the NLC was a black FBI informant sowing mistrust, but the political incompetence and erratic behavior were the RU’s own doing. The RU then poisoned the atmosphere even more by accusing the BWC and PRRWO of being bourgeois nationalists for rejecting the RU’s party proposal.
### **1974**
The BWC and PRRWO reaction to the RU’s party proposal focused on two questions: the meaning of self-determination and the primary task of the movement. Regarding the right of self-determination, the BWC and PRRWO still agreed with the RU’s original formulation in the early *Red Papers* that self-determination was not equivalent to separation and that separation was not at the center of the black liberation struggle, but they disagreed with the RU’s new position that since black liberation in the US required a proletarian socialist revolution first, then the democratic right of self-determination had to be subordinated to the necessity of socialist proletarian unity. The BWC argued that self-determination was the right of minorities to choose which strategy to follow and did not cease to exist in the multiracial working class struggle for socialism. (These polemics are collected in [*Red Papers 6*](https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/ncm-1/red-papers-6/index.htm?ref=marxistunity.com))
My understanding of these issues was drawn from Lenin's theory of the primacy of democracy and my personal participation in the Farah strike support activities (*editors note: the Farah strike was a two year long strike of primarily Latina textile workers in El Paso and New Mexico which ran from 1972-74*). From the perspective of Lenin’s theory of democratic revolution, the RU was wrong to contrast a democratic stage of revolution where the right of self-determination applied and a socialist stage where it did not. In Lenin’s conception of the relationship between democracy and socialism, democratic rights and democracy had to be won first, so there was no conceptual opposition between a multiracial working class struggle for democracy and the democratic right of minorities to determine their place within it. The Farah strike provides a good illustration of these concepts at work in a practical situation.
In preparation for a rally at a department store selling Farah pants, I met with Bill Gallegos from [M.E.Ch.A. (Spanish: Movimiento Estudiantil Chicano de Aztlán; "Chicano Student Movement of Aztlán")](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MEChA?ref=marxistunity.com) to write a leaflet publicizing the rally and explaining what the strike was about. Bill was an advocate of an independent Chicano nation in the Southwest and wanted the leaflet to present the view that the strike was part of that independence movement. I said that was attributing beliefs to the strikers they had not expressed themselves. I suggested we place the strike in the broad history of the Anglo seizure of northern Mexico and subsequent mistreatment of the Mexican-American population, but not inject the issue of an independent Aztlan. We compromised by saying the Farah strike was a struggle for self-determination by the Chicano people without specifying whether the direction of that self-determination would lead to Chicano separation from the US or to a multi-racial working class movement for equality within the US.
My takeaway from this discussion was that the concept of self-determination was larger and more general than whether blacks or Mexican-Americans met Lenin’s or Stalin’s criteria of nationhood. Everyone involved was making their own self-determination of what was the best strategy for liberation: the Farah strikers; MEchA members; the Chicano members of the RU; and all other strike supporters no matter their race, nationality, or political identity.
The BWC had also argued that self-determination essentially meant the right to choose a strategy and initially called for continuing the RU’s original strategy of “building the struggle, consciousness and revolutionary unity of the working class and developing its leadership in the anti-imperialist struggle.” They also still agreed that the main form of the black liberation struggle was the “fight against discrimination, the denial of democratic rights, violent police repression, against exploitation and oppression as members of the working class,” not separatism. From my standpoint, these formulations could be combined with Lenin’s theory of a revolutionary democratic party, which is what I was advocating within the RU at the time; but the BWC and PRRWO went in another direction and moved closer to CL’s position on black nationhood and the main task of forming a Marxist-Leninist party, which was understandable given that the largest white Marxist organization had just broken its trust. From there the New Communist Movement continued to fragment and disintegrate.
### **Conclusion: King and Lenin, Two Vanguard Fighters for Democracy**
The New Communist Movement was the last major effort in this country to create a revolutionary party. Despite its early declaration that this party needed to be based on Marxism-Leninism, Mao Tse-tung Thought, the Revolutionary Union was not very centralized in the beginning and held back for four years before switching to Marxist-Lenist party-building from its previous emphasis on developing mass movements. I read Lenin in that relatively loose political and organizational period from 1971-73 and came to the conclusion that democratic equality, including the democratization of the US constitutional political structure, should be the primary strategic goal of the left, not socialism. I thought Lenin’s democratic ideological framework solved the conceptual problem of how minority struggles for economic, social, and political equality were playing a leading role in the construction of a larger multi-racial working class movement and party, and I still think this democratic ideology is the framework around which a new party should be constructed, but all of my ideas about this ideology back then came from Lenin, not King.
I had read King’s “I Have a Dream” and “Beyond Vietnam” speeches and was generally familiar with his philosophy of racial equality and integration, but I had not read *Stride Toward Freedom* or *Where Do We Go From Here?* until very recently and was not aware of the profound depth of King’s commitment to radical democratic egalitarianism. The left in this country has always faced the dilemma that oppression is stratified, concentrated, and intensified by the color line. That produces a much higher proportion of radical activists in minority communities than in the majority white population, yet in total numbers white and minority activists seem to be very nearly equal. Plus radical minority activists have deeper and stronger roots in their communities than activists who emerge out of the larger white population. This creates a dilemma. King did not believe the black minority could win freedom by itself, but he did believe a minority demanding equality for itself with others could be a leader in a movement of equality for all, much as Lenin argued the workers in Russia could be the vanguard fighters for democracy and equality for all. This structure of social and political forces is not fair. It places a terrible burden on minorities to be the leaders of a struggle for equality for all in order to gain equality for themselves. King was willing to take on that burden and sought allies in this struggle and was killed for it. King’s legacy to us is to continue that struggle.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Up the Program, Build the Party!: MUG’s Convention Resolutions
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/up-the-program-build-the-party-mugs-convention-resolutions/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:15:57.000Z
The socialist movement faces many challenges as we build towards recovering from the decline of the political left in the United States in the aftermath of 2020—especially as we enter the long-haul of working class resistance to the Trump administration. Marxist Unity Group is steadfast in that our answer to the problems of Left disunity and disorganization is only, and can only ever be, the construction of a mass socialist party in the United States, united around a program of revolutionary democracy and political independence from all capitalist parties. We believe DSA has the potential to be that party, and we will fight to realize it.
To this end, we are putting forward a slate of proposals for DSA’s 2025 National Convention this August. These include continuing the work of and expanding on the 2024 Workers Deserve More platform to build towards programmatic unity in DSA, to extend and clarify DSA’s principled approach to socialist party building, to fight to put the power of electoral discipline into the hands of the organized membership, and ensuring that socialists take initiative in the struggle for voting rights for the disenfranchised sections of the working class.
Sign onto, and read the full resolutions below:
1. [Workers Demand the World: A Revolutionary Program for DSA](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r-workers-demand-the-world-a-revolutionary-program-for-dsa/41433?ref=marxistunity.com)
2. [Principles for Party-Building](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r-principles-for-party-building/41437?ref=marxistunity.com)
3. [Democratic Discipline: A Uniform Process for Electoral Censure Across DSA](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r-democratic-discipline-a-uniform-process-for-electoral-censure-across-dsa/41447/1?ref=marxistunity.com)
4. [Democracy for All: An NEC Subcommittee for Voting Rights](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/r-democracy-for-all-a-nec-subcomittee-for-voting-rights/41423?ref=marxistunity.com)
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### What is “Doing MUG”?
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/what-is-doing-mug/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:16:49.000Z
To do MUG means many things, and my conviction is that there are many “right ways” to do MUG. One of the best things about MUG is that we can interpolate even deep schisms on strategy and tactics; MUG is productively at their best when various tendencies are arguing about “most worthwhile” strategy, and productively at their worst when we attempt to rigidly constrain our diverse tactics beyond limits mandated by the whole body. We know that capital is a hydra - you slice off one head, and two more grow back. We must plunge our sword into the heart to kill it. But do we remember that we are just a group of mammals? We each have a few limbs, and when we amputate them, they do not grow back. So rather than being overly prescriptive on the “best way” to do MUG, I’d rather emphasize that to do MUG means so many different things. Doing MUG \[i.e. building a mass independent communist party, in the full sense of the word, which is capable of enacting proletarian revolution - abolishing wage slavery and unequal suffrage by smashing the existing constitutional order and ratifying a truly democratic constitution which realizes working-class control of production/society\] is a whole-body exercise. What doing MUG should not mean is to chop off our left arm believing that it will make the right stronger, or to stop using our legs in the hopes of gaining upper body strength.
To do MUG is to demystify Marxism; for us, it is not a vague signifier that represents leftish or anti-capitalist sentiments, but a scientific methodology that produces calculable data toward the political re-enfranchisement and ultimate victory of the proletariat over capitalism, exploitation, oppression, and undemocracy. To do MUG is to look at disillusionment and say, “We have a tool for that.”
To do MUG is to redirect the gains of false consciousness back into proletarianization (or *protagonization*); to cultivate “unity in diversity” which transcends the limitations of neoliberal identity politics while sublating its insights, capable of unifying the working class into a party of-and-for-itself. To do MUG is to look at the alienated and fractured masses and say, “We have the most important thing in common.”
To do MUG is to cohere the disparate and disorganized demands of the working class into an actionable minimum program they can unite in struggle toward today. It is to fight for DSA to embrace that program in America, for other American organizers to embrace DSA for it, and for the working class to inform its continued development, both within DSA and everywhere outside that programmatic demands arise. It is to work to cohere an internationalist movement around a universal Marxist program, still determined by and for the working class. To do MUG is to say, “It’s possible now if we work together.”
To do MUG is to maintain a maximum program: the insistence on the ultimate insufficiency of anything short of communism, of Absolute Freedom, of the realization of The Idea. It is to be a ruthless critic of undemocracy and alienation; it is to never be satisfied with our gains. It is to know that the minimum program could never be enough. To do MUG is to say, “We can do anything. Let’s not stop there.”
To do MUG is to recognize every worker as a protagonist - a pivotal actor whose will can (and must) fuel the locomotion of history. To do MUG is to look at every person and say, “You do have a purpose in this world, and get this - it’s getting everything you could ever dream of.”
To do MUG is to utilize a variety of tactics and strategies to achieve our aims. To do MUG is to write literature for internal circulation among the caucus, for party newspapers, for other party papers, for blogs and for zines and for pamphlets. To do MUG is to advance political education in one’s chapter or community, to facilitate cadre training or national reading groups, and to share digestible podcast links or accessible articles with friends who are curious early on in their political development. It is to talk about history at the bar, to talk about politics at the dinner table, and to talk about Kautsky at church. To do MUG is to do mutual aid, sure, but not without sitting and hearing every story, and connecting each one to a broader struggle which connects and clarifies every struggle in relation to another. To do MUG is to build out the centralizing arms of our party media, and also to appear in external forums outside of the party in order to spread our ideas to new audiences. To do MUG is to criticize and condemn anti-revolutionary tendencies within DSA, and to criticize and condemn the institutional undemocracy of the bureaucratic centralist sects which pose as alternatives to DSA. To do MUG is to be honest about why those sects succeed in organizing where we fail, but also to be boldly honest in the public sphere about their structural flaws, showing why DSA is still where Marxists need to make their political home. To do MUG is to continually and always be democratizing your union or workplace, your DSA chapter, your spontaneous demonstration, and every other instance where decisions are made which impact the many. To do MUG is to encourage others to develop the political content of their thought in every instance.
To do MUG is to look at your neighbor’s toolbox and say, “Great selection! Let me know if there’s anything I can lend you to help you get the job done.” To do MUG is to look at our own toolbox and say, “Yes, yes, and yes. This is our biggest project yet, and I may need all of these to accomplish it.”
To do MUG is to mediate between revolutionary and reformist interests without capitulating to opportunism. To do MUG is to identify political differences within the various elements and strata of the proletariat, our party, our caucus, or any other differentiated bodies within the class, and to channel their expression into generative discourses, and the products of discourses into actionable strategy. Marxists aim to transform conflict and difference in practice such that they produce strength and clarity rather than disorganization. Marxists look at the “culture war” and its disoriented subjects and say, “Hey, we can do so much better than this.”
To do MUG is to reclaim universal virtues from their perverse inversions under capitalism, and to substantiate them as products of our concrete practice. Marxists understand ourselves as the true guardians of equality, liberty, and justice for all. Marxists understand we have the most comprehensive and universal vision of democracy on offer, and we are glad to contrast it at every opportunity against the empty rhetoric spouted by regime figureheads and the forces of reaction. To do MUG is to consider the concept of freedom and say, “This is for the working class to realize.”
To do MUG is to use the undemocratic Constitution not as a convenient “card” to play in lieu of concrete economic or geopolitical analysis, but as a universally-recognizable point-of-reference with a nearly singular ability to extrapolate the “why and how” of American despotism. To do MUG is to never let a conversation about Zionist government policy to start and end with antisemitism; to never let a conversation about free speech begin and end with culture war; to never let a conversation about police brutality begin and end with abusive personalities; to never let a conversation about geopolitical turmoil begin and end with Trump or any other demagogue. To do MUG is not just to show what is happening, but why it is allowed to happen; to not just say that it should not be happening, but to describe what political conditions would be required to stop or keep it from happening, and to demonstrate how those conditions could be achieved.
To do MUG, now looking into the abyssal face of world war, is to remember that only the most resolute internationalism can keep us on course to avoid the political degenerations of so many previous Marxist parties and their regime constructions. We must remember always that the party we are building would seek to represent not solely the communizers and true-believers in their purely-studied ideals, but the whole working class as a force of democracy of-and-for-itself. We must remember, too, that we are building our party not as one island, singular and adrift, but rather as one node in a whole intercontinental apparatus of proletarian parties. We cannot see our subject as only the American working class - especially when other prominent so-called “party formations” would reduce their subject to Fordist aesthetics and transatlantic bigotries - but as the working class of the whole world. We stop not at equal exchange within our borders, but to end unequal exchange globally. We stop not at suffrage for all American citizens, but for fair and equal access to democratic self-management for all citizens of the world. This vision will be tested, hotly and sharply. To do MUG for the next few years will most likely mean handling the heat and staying the fuck in the kitchen.
What it means to do MUG expands each year. In fact, I think that to do MUG means to develop *a politics of expansion*. To do MUG is to struggle to expand politicization, historicization, and democratization in every sphere of life. and what expands must contract; to do MUG is to nurture a politic that breathes. MUG has necessarily been in a contractive period: turning inward either into priority projects, campaigns, committees, etc. or into the fine-tuning of our internal structures. To do MUG lately has been to ask, “How can we do MUG more fruitfully?”
All of this is just right, and we have so much to be proud of. We must also recognize that MUG is preparing to fill its lungs again, to enter another expansive period. The stakes are much higher this time than the last, and the expectation on us is much higher. To do MUG at this moment is to ask ourselves, “What is our responsibility as the Marxist vanguard of the DSA?”
To do MUG right now is to recognize the limitations of DSA currently as we put forward our transformative vision for it. It means recognizing that we’ve gained the recognition and power we have now for the character of our politics and not in spite of it. Our gains in DSA have been won by forwarding a political vision that is scientific, Marxist, abolitionist, internationalist, universalist, and revolutionary. We have seen more steps forward than steps back, but a few pivotal moments have already arisen where we’ve been forced to choose: do we dilute or concede our political vision for short-term political gains within the DSA, with the vague promise of potential future payoffs, or do we hold firm in our principles even when it costs us immediate bargaining power? To do MUG right now is to look at ourselves and ask, “Will DSA determine the transformation of our Marxism, or will our Marxism determine the transformation of the DSA?” Both are inevitable, but which side of the scale will ultimately tip?
To me, doing MUG still means that our work is for our Marxism to determine the transformation of the DSA.
History will speak of us. I believe that this key orientational difference will make the difference: Will history speak of our work in the context of the rise and fall of DSA, or will history speak of DSA in the context of the fall and resurrection of international Marxism? To me, doing MUG is actively creating that latter reality.
*Individual essays are not official caucus positions.*
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Red Sincerity
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/red-sincerity/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:17:34.000Z
If you’re reading this and below the age of 50, odds are you spend more than four hours a day on your phone. Taking out sleep, that’s a full quarter of your day, every day. Its also not unlikely that you’ve sunk more of your life into social media—the gamified network of interactions, not just a collection of images and text, but a patchwork of social relationships mediated by images and text—than you have most any other part of your life. And that time spent feels increasingly less meaningful, as the constant pressure for speed up increases the costs of production while also pressuring the creation of lowest-common-denominator content aimed directly, algorithmically, at the viewer.
That pressure has gradually squeezed out what little space for egalitarian participation there was on the internet. Where we used to interact with each other as equals on a forum, or parsed through each other’s social media posts with some degree of intentionality, we now mostly interact by passively watching a stream of content, or commenting under those streams. Posting, once an egalitarian form of self expression, is now a mechanized form of value generation which is getting more and more capital intensive all the time.
We can see this constant need for new *content*, meaning anything, in the boom of General AI models on social media. Many critics view AI as soulless, but it’s worse than that: the boom of AI suggests that the ‘soul’ of posting has long since left. AI lacks intent, lacks the ability to make artistic decisions, but that does not matter when so much of what we see and produce on a daily basis already has no artistic purpose other than garnering engagement. Zoom out to a whole family tree of [‘second screen viewing’](https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/2025/jan/17/not-second-screen-enough-is-netflix-deliberately-dumbing-down-tv-so-people-can-watch-while-scrolling?ref=marxistunity.com)—films, essays, and arguments meant primarily to be a voice in the room while you don’t pay attention. Plagiarism is *rife* within influencer circles because pretty much every incentive about being an influencer [pushes you to plagiarize](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yDp3cB5fHXQ&t=3846s&ref=marxistunity.com). We are all already AI.
What does it mean to spend a good portion of your waking hours looking at content like this? In between sexy dancing, a new breakfast hack, misinformation about your mental health, and foreign cityscapes, what political messages are transmitted and encouraged?
Regardless of the reinforcement loop decided by the algorithm, today’s internet politics emerge from negation. Maybe you’ll see a hysterical feminist, yelling at a man presenting a ‘logical’ position. Maybe you’ll see a stupid conservative get caught in their own argument. Don’t be racist, or woke, or a feminist, or a homophobe. Don’t be these things, and instead be what?
The question cannot be answered because social media does not teach you to understand what your own ideas even are. Under the pressure to *not* be any number of negative things, people view their own beliefs as the ‘common sense’ justification of immediate intuition. This reduces politics into an assertion of the eternal correctness of ego. Ego and, fortunately for social media companies, viewing and consumption choices.
### **Ego Politics**
Norman Rockwell’s *Freedom of Speech* depicts a 1942 town hall meeting in Arlington, Vermont, after a flood which destroyed the local school. The protagonist—the sole man brave enough to speak up about the costs of the new school, rises to speak. This image of almost rapturous glee at standing against the rest of one’s community is an image people use to assert opinions, as if they were bravely standing up to demand their own school not be built.
“Hot takes”, “controversial opinions”, and all other sorts of half-joke opinions abound, which are able to exist as a sincere belief if need be, but can also always be retracted. Phrases like “Hiding Your Power Level” or “Don’t scare the hoes”, are often intoned as a politically neutral argument for us to act ‘normal’ and hide the edges of our politics. But examined more deeply, this whole idea came from white supremacists on 4chan, who used ironic jokes to bring people into their brand of nihilistic Nazism.
This communication style cannot be used for liberatory ends because left-wing and working class movements are dependent on people-power. A billionaire can use his money to lubricate any interaction, a fascist group can use jokes to goad people down a path towards mass shootings. The Left *only* has people, and the quality of our shared plans for action. You can’t joke together a march route, you can’t ironically go on strike, can’t fight oppression if you’re unwilling to challenge the ‘common-sense’ of the status quo. You can’t build up and encourage faith in others if you do not, yourself, know what you believe. Ego-politics is non transferable. Mass politics *has* to be bigger than any of our selves, and so requires sincerity.
If that is the case, why is irony so thoroughly taken up by our generation, across the political spectrum? Part of it is a worsening version of the same problem David Foster Wallace noted in his 1993 essay *E Unibus Pluram*, that the ironic gesture is a way to feel above this four-hour-a-day compulsion, the systematized viewing of content made specifically to reaffirm us. Part of it is that there is nothing really to respect about US society at this moment. From media to geopolitics it seems like the American empire is running on fumes. The promise of a world made entirely for you is appealing for a reason. But reality has its own sense of irony. [Olivia Katbi and ](https://x.com/oliviakatbi/status/1906842779453686136?ref=marxistunity.com)her husband looked up the same question about feeding their child on Google AI, and got two different answers. If the baby had been given well water and it wasn’t okay, the baby would actually get sick. Despite the bravado and twisted humor of Musk and Trump, people are actually suffering under their rule.
When I brought this topic up to my dear friend AR Goetze, I quickly realized that ‘irony’ is a bad term for what I’m talking about. Irony as a political posture has been predominant in the United States effectively since Watergate, but it’s generally been used as a sign of detachment. Our contemporary ironist is very much attached to their irony, and uses it for immediate purposes. If the attitude of the ‘90s ironist which so disturbed Wallace was “aren’t you a fool for thinking I mean what I’m saying”, the ‘20s version would add the clause, “and you should be deported”. The immediacy of this current mode of rhetoric speaks to how poorly the attitude has prevented the realization that we’re in a dying empire. A more accurate description for this phenomenon is *insincerity.*
Although the phenomena I’ve described maps across the political spectrum, as a rhetorical style insincerity was most clearly taken up by the fascist right over the course of the 2010s. Part of its success can be attributed to the way insincere communication quickly establishes in and out groups. Insincerity allows the fascist to mean whatever they want, and the target of agitation to be included without being empowered. As a mode of political communication it is fundamentally hierarchical and hyperreal because the realization of meaning flows directly from the speaker’s social position.
Donald Trump, one of the great postmodern orators, has perfected this insincerity. His rhetoric, which avoids proper nouns and consistently makes its point within ellipses, forces the listener to act as amateur literature student, engaged in an ongoing read of his meaning. Take this quote, for example, on [U.S. talks with Iran on its nuclear program](https://www.livemint.com/news/us-news/donald-trump-warns-of-the-obvious-if-iran-nuclear-talks-fail-not-something-i-want-to-be-involved-with-11744056341046.html?ref=marxistunity.com):
> *Everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious,” Trump said, hinting at possible military consequences if diplomacy fails. “The obvious is not something that I want to be involved with, or frankly, that Israel wants to be involved with if they can avoid it.*
What does this even *mean*, comrades? This rhetoric has been so useful that it’s made Trump probably the most successful politician of our generation, and the one of the most influential orators on Earth. But take a look around. Trump and Musk do not have plans. They have jokes, they have ellisions, they have whims and desires, but nothing about the last three months have come together as a coherent political project. And it means that this administration, dangerous though it is, potentially even successful though it might be, will probably fail of its own accord because it’s high on its own supply.
But its worse: Trump *does* have plans. Tariffs have been a consistent theme of Trump’s politics since the 1980s. But the Trumpist movement did not share those plans, *because it took Trump’s most sincere political belief as a joke.* Whether the tariff scheme was ultimately about any broader project or just another pump and dump scheme doesn’t matter. Trump used this rhetoric because it is good at allowing people to hear what they want to hear and is now *trapped* within it.
Goetze thinks that algorithmic content has made a certain kind of American very bad at inhabiting the same reality as other Americans, and I would suggest that insincerity is a surrender to that failure of cohabitation. But you can’t do politics without cohabiting the world, even as a billionaire.
### **So what do we do about it?**
We live in a world where people’s politics are so thoroughly attached to their egos, they use insincerity to protect their inability to inhabit the same reality as others. In that context, being sincere, holding yourself to your words and others to theirs, earnestly presenting your actual beliefs even if they aren’t commonsensical, is a necessary act of socialist agitation. Speaking to your beliefs actively works to create a shared reality, and treats the person you’re speaking to as an equal rather than an audience. It is desperately needed if we are to respond to this moment with a shared strategy because it *can* produce a shared strategy, in a way that insincerity, and protecting your ego can’t.
The desire to have your opinions exist in a fuzzy space of being ‘correct’ while never making a positive argument is cowardly and caustic to political movements. If we want the working class to be [protagonists ](https://www.marxistunity.com/mugs-vision-of-democracy/)of their own lives, the bystander ideology currently being promulgated online is its direct inverse.
I have spoken a lot about the way insincerity pops up on the right, through half-jokes and blurred rhetoric. But there is a similar tendency on the left, which views ‘common sense’ as it’s north star, and which disdains anything not immediately intuitive, or intuitive to the ‘average person’. If the internet makes all of us bystanders, this attitude says that most people are bystanders—so best not to rock the boat.
But no one has ever joined a community because it is exactly like everything else in the world. Just like the negatively polarized ironist above, this focus on whether things will be intuitive to another imagined person is deeply disempowering because it again abdicates an honest understanding of your own beliefs.
Marxist Unity Group has a reputation for being a caucus of nerds or theoryheads, a caucus for people who are more well-read than others or too smart for their own good. But I honestly don’t think that’s true. You cannot be a socialist in the United States without being, to some degree, a weird self taught esoteric, and every DSA caucus is filled with incredibly smart and well-read people. What’s different about us, what allows us to project that reading and intelligence, is our commitment to transparency and the unity we have around our program.
We write so much, talk so much, because we want to be transparent, because we want to take our experience and turn them into general rules, and we know that that process cannot be started without taking an initial stand. Our points of unity, our program, our tasks and perspectives, allow a vast array of attitudes, strategies, analyses to all fit next to each other. MUG members disagree, and disagree often.
That transparency would not be worth anything if it weren’t in service of something, and if you are not willing to stick up for positions that aren’t immediately intuitive then you’re not doing politics in the first place. [“Politics doesn’t reflect majorities, it constructs them”.](https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/news/4854-blue-election-election-blues?srsltid=AfmBOoqYyKbn3-%5FrGTFxqqR2nmJdAD05TKHGtNAbzHIEuIRishdY%5F8ic&ref=marxistunity.com) Our points of unity include tremendously controversial elements, including a desire for a militia to replace our standing army and police and a democratic republic to allow for worker’s rule. But they are a clear list of tasks, rather than a vibe or a list of empty signifiers really meaning a clique of people with ‘good politics’. Because of that, MUG has been able to expand to include a wide array of kinds of comrades, bringing in leaders across DSA, and even bringing people into DSA itself through the clarity of our vision.
Taken together, an attitude of clarity and an orientation around a clearly stated set of tasks, is an attitude I call red sincerity. This is a necessary ethic for building a democratic culture. Four years ago I wrote “[It is the task of every socialist to build a collective mind, composed of and larger than our individual experiences](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/04/the-collective-mind/?ref=marxistunity.com)”. Although I don’t stand by everything in that essay, the ensuing years have only solidified this belief.
We live opposed to the wealthiest people on the planet, who have used their economy-spanning power to make their whims the policies of companies, political parties, and sovereign governments. Against them we only have organization, that is groups of people, and those people need to understand what we’re fighting for and why we fight for it the way we do, if we are to truly act collectively. People can take stands against our arguments, but so long as we keep making them we can expose a great deal of the dishonesty we’ve learned to live with in the socialist left under the guise of irony. My hope is that this sincerity can pull the whole movement forward alongside us, towards a better future. I am not perfect in this regard, no person is. But can we try to take this moment seriously, or at least, take it more seriously than we take ourselves?
*Individual* *essays* *are not caucus opinion.*
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Workers Demand the World: A Revolutionary Program for DSA
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/workers-demand-the-world/
Last updated: 2026-06-07T23:39:51.000Z
**Authors: Connell H (River Valley), Duncan H (Seattle), Parker M (River Valley), Tzipora S (Pittsburgh)**
### **Rationale:**
The Trump administration is waging war on the working class, attacking peoples’ livelihoods, education, safety, ability to unionize, and political rights. The Democratic Party is either rolling over or enabling fascism. The only way out is an oppositional mass movement that tells the truth about Trump and the rotten constitutional order that enables minoritarian capitalist rule over the working class. We need both a clear message about what it will take to end far right terror and a unifying base for action across the organization.
**Therefore be it resolved,**
DSA’s orientation to the Trump administration is to oppose attacks on our political rights and freedoms, without defending the existing constitutional order that divides and suppresses the working class. We do not live in a democracy, but we cannot afford to lose what little we have.
We will build a united front among the working class for the defense of political freedom from fascism. We will take common action with liberal activists when they stand against fascism, and maintain our independent messaging when they stand for the existing constitutional order.
We will organize the working class into a mass vanguard against the constitutional order and for genuine democracy. We will participate in the struggles against fascism and oppression where they appear, while persuading people that the only path to end this in a lasting way is to win the battle for democracy.
**Therefore be it further resolved,**
The following is adopted as the Workers Demand the World program, and replaces both the 2024 Workers Deserve More program and the platform adopted at the 2021 DSA convention as DSA’s unifying goals.
---
### **Workers Demand the World: A Revolutionary Program for DSA**
Capitalism is a failed system. The capitalist class has unleashed misery on the workers of the world, turning to environmental devastation, militarized policing and mass incarceration, war and genocide, all in the pursuit of profits. The Democratic Party answers to its elite donor class, and will never act as an effective political counter to the nationalist far right. Only a party that fights for working people can win the battle against fascism. Without a working-class alternative, capitalists, Democrats, and Republicans will continue to perpetuate violence and injustice at home and abroad.
DSA stands in opposition to the Constitution, openly indicting it as antidemocratic and oppressive, and will lead the struggle for a democratic republic, a genuine democracy where the working class can rule. We declare that to be a socialist is to fight for an expansive working-class democracy in which the state and society are democratically managed by the majority. In the US, this means demanding a new constitution.
DSA’s mission is to unite workers into a powerful political movement to win the battle for democracy and change the world. We stand against the capitalist class and the politicians of both major parties that serve their interests at the expense of the rest of us. Our goal is to put workers in charge of the government through a new democratic constitution which will establish democratic rights for all, allow a good life for all people, and end U.S. imperialism. DSA’s program is a set of radical democratic and economic demands aimed at removing whatever prevents the working class from ruling and, if enacted together, will put society on the path of a socialist transition out of capitalism. Our long term goal after achieving this: a world free of the market, borders, classes, and all other oppressive structures that exist under capitalism—in a word, communism.
**What We Fight For:**
**Winning the Battle for Democracy**
- Universal, equal, and direct suffrage for every citizen 16 years of age or older. Universal citizenship for long term residents within the boundaries of the state.
- The right to organize labor unions, collectively bargain in the workplace, and strike.
- The right to move freely within and without the borders of the state.
- Freedom of association and assembly and unrestricted rights of free speech and publication. Associations may participate in the political system as parties on the condition that they accept the laws of the new revolutionary order as binding.
- Abolition of the Presidency and the Electoral College, to be replaced by an Executive Council elected and overseen by Congress; abolition of the Senate. All power to be vested in the people’s House of Representatives and its number of members uncapped.
- Governing supremacy of legislatures at all levels of government, to be elected under a nationwide electoral standard with proportional representation. Elections to be entirely publicly funded. Elected delegates to be subject to recall and paid the wage of the average skilled worker.
- The right to freedom of information. Release state secrets and the open and transparent operation of government. Elimination of advertising in news media. Media to be publicly funded and democratically accessible. Abolition of copyright laws. The right of the public to appropriate intellectual property.
- Abolition of the rights and powers reserved to States; formation of regional and municipal governments to be a guaranteed right for all peoples within the boundaries of the state.
- Self-determination for all nations within the boundaries of the state, including but not limited to the right of separation, the right of return for Indigenous nations, and the right to choose to participate in the political system of the republic on a plurinational basis. The right of all peoples to receive services of the state in their preferred language. Enforcement of Indigenous treaties following the democratic will of Indigenous nations, including their right to reclaim land under sovereign control.
- The right to expropriate property for the public good without compensation for the private owner, and the right to collective, democratic ownership and management of all public goods.
- The right of the people to call a constituent assembly to reform the constitution of the republic elected by the people through their right to universal, equal, and direct suffrage.
- Abolition of the police, professional military, special forces, and the security state. Establishment of a people's militia, with service members retaining the same democratic and constitutional rights offered to citizens. Universal service and training. Reorientation towards public infrastructure projects, disaster relief, and safety. The right of conscientious objectors to alternative service options.
- The right to transformative justice and rehabilitation. Full constitutional rights retained for persons under trial and rehabilitation. Freedom for all incarcerated people, their enfranchisement as citizens, and the closure of prisons.
- Elimination of judicial review. Appointment of all judges by the appropriate legislatures, except local judges, who are to be elected directly by the people.
- Replacement of common law with an easily understandable code of laws. Elimination of private legal counsel for hire, to be replaced with public legal counsel with equalized pay.
**An Economy for the Working Class**
- Provision of quality housing, medical care, food and water, family care, and other fundamental necessities of life to all residents.
- Expropriation, without compensation, of the resources and industries most immediately necessary for the survival of the working class and cohesive functioning of the state, including railways, telecommunications, seaports, airports, energy infrastructure, medical infrastructure, and high finance. Nationalization of land, air, and waterways.
- A legal limit of a 32-hour workweek, with compensation for lost overtime and no reduction in overall pay.
- Universal access to reproductive and trans healthcare, including contraception, birth control, fertility treatment, hormone-replacement therapy, gender-affirming surgeries and abortion on demand.
- End state recognition of the gender binary and nuclear family, protecting the right to form families not based on marriage or blood relation, prohibiting discrimination based on sexuality, gender or age, and affirming the rights of children, the elderly and the disabled to live with safety and dignity and to decide where and with whom they will live.
- Universal, public, and mandatory education until the age of majority. Elimination of college tuition and residency fees. Provide ongoing literacy, technical, and vocational training for adults as a publicly accessible service.
- A living wage for all workers regardless of age, employment, or status, regularly adjusted to account for changes in purchasing power. No discrimination in pay based on race, gender, or nationality. Elimination of separate tipped wages.
- Reparations to formerly oppressed peoples through targeted investment in public infrastructure and commons, and unconditional cash transfers in underdeveloped communities.
- Creation of a state fund for public creation of and participation in artistic and cultural works.
- Periodic suppression of public and private debts owed by workers.
- Democratic control over the home, housing, and the land on which these exist.
- Replace all indirect taxes with a single progressive income tax.
- Socialized healthcare, free at the point of service. Increase the concentration of health professionals per capita. Free access to treatment and testing for infections like HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.
**Working Class Foreign Policy**
- Withdraw from NATO. Termination of all outstanding military treaties with imperialist states and withdrawal or surrender of all troops stationed abroad. Cessation of all arms transfers to imperialist states and their proxies.
- End all current sanctions, asset seizures, and tariffs.
- War reparations to nations subjected to US conspiracies and military aggression, and climate reparations to the Third World.
- Withdraw from existing trade agreements. New trade arrangements based on equality of labor-time between workers of all nations and guaranteed free passage of essential resources, technologies, and supplies.
- Enact emergency measures to curb U.S. industries with high waste in material throughput, emissions, and energy demand. Ensure that goods and waste produced in necessary industries are reused, recycled, refurbished, or otherwise restored to natural earth processes. Subsidize municipal and regional efforts to restore local ecology.
- Abolition of the United Nations Security Council. United Nations General Assembly seats to be allocated proportionally to the population of each nation, with the representatives to these seats to be elected through proportional representation. No veto exceptions for any nation in the General Assembly.
- Subordination of the World Bank and the IMF to the United Nations. Cancellation of national debts for countries burdened by loans from international capitalist institutions such as the World Bank and IMF.
- Provision of unconditional funding by the United Nations for life essentials, climate refugee travel, return of displaced indigenous peoples, preventative vaccine measures, construction of utilities.
**Our long term goals:**
The framework established by the Constitution, the surrounding legal order, the dominating influence of wealth on political power, and the repressive arm of the state—the police, military, and prisons—constitute the dictatorship of the capitalists, strangling the working class. The working class must lead the battle to sweep away this political order and establish a truly democratic republic, freeing the workers of the world from the chains of American imperialism, and setting the stage for the working class to lead a socialist transformation of our society.
The development of socialism under working class rule will gradually extend democratic planning to the whole economy and end inequality - whether between types of work, racial groups, gender, or other social divisions. This society will combine the common labor of the many with a democracy that empowers and involves all, struggling day by day for a life that enables the flourishing of the collective, rather than their oppression for a powerful few. Through this process, the special role of the state standing above society withers away and, as the revolution expands internationally, national divisions and inequalities between peoples will be eliminated.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Principles of Party Building
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/principles-party-building/
Last updated: 2026-06-07T23:41:41.000Z
**Authors: *Amy W (Seattle), Brad H (Central NJ), Cliff C (Orlando), Connell H (River Valley), Matthew S (Palouse)***
**Whereas**, the 2023 DSA convention resolved that “DSA and its local chapters remain committed to the project of building a working-class party: a mass democratic political organization capable of winning and wielding state power with a strategy for social transformation;” and
**Whereas**, multiple conceptions of a working class political party exist in history and the global working class movement; and
**Whereas**, DSA in some senses already performs the functions of a working class party, only lacking its own state-recognized ballot line; and
**Whereas**, the undemocratic US bourgeois political system intentionally places roadblocks in the way of a democratic membership organization controlling its own ballot line; and
**Whereas**, DSA is not just any working class organization but specifically a socialist organization, which fights for the universal and long term interests of the working class for political democracy, general social transformation, and a collectively owned and democratically planned economy,
### **Therefore be it resolved,**
DSA commits to the goal of becoming an independent mass socialist party, with the following principles:
1\. The fundamental purpose of a socialist party is to be a mass association of the working class formed for collective political action. The party will be united around a democratically created program that outlines goals that, enacted together, will allow the working class to rule and end capitalism.
2\. The foundation of party democracy is freedom of information, association, and discussion. Members must be able to critique the party’s program and organize to change it, as long as they are willing to accept fighting for it as the democratically-determined expression of DSA’s goals.
3\. The internal governing principles of the party must guarantee all members equal right of participation in the democratic process, regular conventions of membership as the highest decision-making body, open leadership elections at conventions, local party organizations run by membership, and the free organization of factions.
4\. Guaranteeing members equal right of participation in the democratic process requires that participation be reserved for individual members. Groups may choose to affiliate with DSA on the basis of acceptance of our program, but may not be given voting rights as an organization.
5\. Because of an undemocratic and uneven electoral system designed to maintain capitalist rule, DSA fights on unfavorable terrain and is pulled between the necessity of independent political action and using the ballot line of the Democratic Party. DSA’s approach is the party surrogate, acting as a party but without a dedicated ballot line.
6\. While DSA must move away from use of the Democratic Party ballot line and primaries, a ballot line is not the primary goal or indication of political independence. What matters most is bringing our independent organization and program to races whether on a Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot line.
7\. When considering whether to create a ballot line of our own, losing control of our candidates to an open state-run process is a non-negotiable red line. Our ability to take independent political action is essential to preserve above all other considerations.
8\. DSA orients itself in opposition to all ruling class political forces. DSA’s project is to unite workers to win the battle for democracy and bring about socialism, not to seek a governing coalition with a perceived lesser evil under the current undemocratic political system.
9\. A socialist party in the United States must be a part of the global political movement of the working class. It is guided by the international interests of the class, not narrow national interests.
10\. The socialist movement is strengthened by putting forward common perspectives and engaging in common action internationally. DSA will continue to build ties with socialist parties around the world with the goal of forming a new International.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Democratic Discipline: A Uniform Process for Electoral Censure Across DSA
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/democratic-discipline/
Last updated: 2026-06-07T23:42:59.000Z
**Authors: *Echo N. (Philly), Annie W (River Valley), Sid CW (New York City), Ben L (New York City)***
**Whereas** a censure is a formal reprimand expressing displeasure at a member’s actions; and
**Whereas** power over endorsed electeds comes primarily from the size and organization of DSA’s membership; and
**Whereas** a vote to censure by the general membership body expresses the displeasure of the majority of rank-and-file members; and
**Whereas** absent a democratic censure process, dissatisfied members of a chapter are unable to make their case to the broader chapter membership; and
**Whereas** a lack of uniformity privileges some members over others based on factors including chapter and leadership position; and
**Whereas** without a uniform and democratic censure process across DSA, members will be unable to exert control over the electoral program, leaving influence over the electeds in the hands of small leadership cliques;
**Therefore let it be resolved,** any member in good standing of a chapter may submit a resolution with greater than or equal to 5% of members in good standing of that chapter to censure an endorsed elected;
**Resolved,** the resolution to censure must be shared with general membership of the chapter and heard at the soonest possible General Meeting or Chapter Convention;
**Resolved,** a motion to censure an elected official requires a majority vote of present and voting members equal to the ratio required for endorsement;
**Resolved,** once passed, the resolution to censure must be announced and publicly posted within 72 hours;
**Resolved,** revocation of endorsement shall follow the same process as a censure;
**Resolved,** the following will be distributed by chapters to membership as the policy for democratic discipline:
- Any member in good standing may submit a resolution for the general membership to censure or unendorse an elected official endorsed by the chapter. In order to be heard, this resolution requires signatures of 5% of members in good standing at the time of submission. The censure resolution must be shared with the full membership and heard at the next General Meeting or Chapter Convention.
- A motion to censure or unendorse an endorsed elected official requires a majority vote of present members to pass. If the censure passes, the resolution must be publicly posted within 72 hours.
- If there is no chapter meeting or convention scheduled within 90 days of turning in a resolution of this type with signatures from 5% of members in good standing, a special meeting will be called to be held within 30 days.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Democracy for All
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/democracy4all/
Last updated: 2026-06-07T23:43:35.000Z
**Authors: *Jean Allen* (Rochester), *Peter M* (Central New Jersey)**
**WHEREAS** a truly democratic republic poses a major threat to the political domination of capital; and
**WHEREAS** in the United States, the withdrawal of the vote has been used to divide the working class and force disenfranchised parts of the working class into clandestine lives, broken off from the broader class; and
**WHEREAS** the removal of the right of migrants to vote in elections regardless of citizenship status has destroyed the capacity of a migrant politics, and has divided the working class in a manner very profitable for the capitalist class; and
**WHEREAS** the Republican Party has fully committed to anti-democratic politics with the introduction of more than 300 bills and counting, in 47 states, which target Black and brown communities in particular, as well as working class communities broadly, for voter suppression; and
**WHEREAS** the Democratic Party has joined in the Republican party’s attacks on migrants, and has moved to the right on our carceral system, leading to tens of thousands of people losing their voting rights and thus their ability to meaningfully control their communities; and
**WHEREAS**, DSA’s electoral successes are built, particularly at the national level, with Black and brown candidates running in districts that are majority People of Color, and we recognize that DSA wins when the working class can unite itself;
**BE IT THEREFORE RESOLVED**, that as a critical part of DSA’s anti-racist struggle, as a moral imperative as socialists, and as crux of our political organizing, we should create a body able to lead a series of targeted campaigns expanding voting rights to the incarcerated, formerly incarcerated, non-citizen residents, and people under the age of 18
**AND BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,**
- The National Electoral Committee shall create a Democracy For All subcommittee
- That subcommittee will be tasked with:
- Connecting to the migrant rights & incarcerated peoples’ movements on the grounds of struggling for expanded suffrage,
- Developing ‘suffrage campaigns’, defined as campaigns which expand voter rights to formerly incarcerated people, [non-citizen residents, people under the age of 18](https://votesforallnj.org/?ref=marxistunity.com), and currently incarcerated people, by providing
- Legal support
- Logistical support
- Translation support for Spanish & Chinese
- Coordinating volunteers for translations into other languages; mapping out what languages would be most appropriate for different state/local campaigns
- Locating states & municipalities where the struggle for expanding suffrage would be achievable and bring together the movements of socialists & the oppressed
- Designing a public pledge akin to the Strike Ready Pledge, committing electeds to joining the suffrage campaigns along with agitating the broader democracy content of our program.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The Constitutional Path to Fascism
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/the-constitutional-path-to-fascism/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:21:13.000Z
> *We will not live without freedom, and we will win that freedom, freedom without class rule, freedom up to the complete removal of all exploitation and all domination of people by people!*
— Social Democratic Party of Germany, Prague Manifesto
### **The Roots of Reaction**
We are at the beginning of a constitutional crisis. In a series of executive orders, the Trump administration has launched a campaign of terror and repression against working-class and oppressed people, and a trade war against the United States’ closest neighbors. In the midst of a purge of public employees designed to ensure absolute control over the Executive Branch, Elon Musk’s semi-autonomous Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) has gained administrative control of the Treasury Department, including its payment system and the personal data of millions of people. With the arrest of Mahmoud Khalil, the Trump administration has challenged the right to freedom of speech, and the move toward using Guantanamo Bay to incarcerate immigrants portends mass detention without due process or mechanisms for accountability. Court cases are in motion to challenge most of Trump’s orders and the legitimacy of DOGE, but enforcement will depend on US Marshals, who are under the authority of the executive. Factions of the capitalist class are moving beyond even the veneer of the rule of law, with more and more roads leading toward a coup.
With some notable exceptions, the Democratic Party has largely failed in its response to the Trump administration, floundering aimlessly while the takeover progresses. This is par for the course in the party of Biden and Harris, within which there is tension over how to respond. Senators like Chuck Schumer promote collaborationism while [AOC pressures them to resist](https://amp.cnn.com/cnn/2025/03/13/politics/ocasio-cortez-schumer-democratic-shutdown-plan?ref=marxistunity.com), and the newly elected chair of the Democratic National Committee is pushing a shift [toward messaging around economic populism](https://www.thenation.com/article/politics/ken-martin-dnc-chair-interview/?ref=marxistunity.com).
The left, too, has been largely silent. Unlike in 2017, there is minimal mass protest. DSA has suffered from a poverty of analysis, which leaves us without a clear message in response to events that unfold faster than most of us can follow. What does it mean to be a democratic socialist in a constitutional regime engulfed by bureaucratic civil war? What factions of the ruling class are in power, and what policies flow from which section of capital? What role can the working class play in a political moment so divorced from mass politics as we know it?
To determine the tasks ahead of us, we need to understand the phenomenon of Trumpism both as an outgrowth of capitalism and a form of reactionary politics adapted to our specific political order. The mass base of American fascism formed in [yacht clubs and car dealerships](https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2021/09/trump-american-gentry-wyman-elites/620151/?ref=marxistunity.com), fueled by the spread of misogynist ideology, panic over the erosion of the gender binary and heterosexual family, and the shift from majoritarian to minoritarian white supremacy. The petty bourgeoisie, particularly whites and men, feel squeezed between decades of state austerity, the monopolization of capital, and a spread of cultural and legal egalitarianism. Responding to this pressure, they began to radicalize—seeking more and more extreme methods for returning to the golden age of the American middle class, taking direct action against their perceived enemies and providing the base for right-wing policy that smothers political freedom and working-class organization.
The ruling class, forced to either join the movement or lose its base, fragments into factions, leading to what the German Marxist August Thalheimer called the *autonomization of the executive*, where the fascists in power drop the veil of legislative democracy and begin ruling by decree, [a practice already grounded in the executive order](https://www.npr.org/2025/01/21/nx-s1-5269600/trump-executive-actions-orders-memoranda-proclamation?ref=marxistunity.com). In their hands, the state transforms from a tool for mediating between sections of the capitalists into a blunt instrument for enforcing the executive’s rule.
American fascism is still in the process of making and remaking itself, finding its base at once in the ruins of the Rust Belt and the mansions of tech utopians; in the blooming of a hundred Cop Cities and the militias of rural Oregon; and even among conservative women and naturalized immigrants. Fascism’s embrace of class contradiction has long baffled the left—it makes promises to the elite and to the poor, constitutes itself as both conspiracy and mass movement, and drowns class struggle in national pride. While the white middle class flocks to its embrace, it does not content itself with them—instead experimenting with other fractions of society it can drag into the movement—and in turn developing its own rivalries and splits.
While parallels to Nazism and Italian fascism do exist, both historical movements formed in moments of deeper crisis than the United States has faced at any point in the 21st century. Instead of a generalized freefall activating every part of society, we are witness to a crisis of the American ruling class, with its sections turning on each other in the wake of declining hegemony and a wing of tech radicalizing and asserting itself as the vanguard of a new system. As a result, Trumpism seems to lack classical fascism’s capacity for mass organization and mobilization, with groups like the Proud Boys floundering during his first term. For the moment, it manifests instead as a form of passive consumerism—working through bureaucratic control of the security state rather than mass politics. This is a logical response to the failure of the January 6 putsch. Militants physically occupying a government building did not translate into political power, but instituting fascism from above through purges and executive orders has. This reliance on the internal machinations of the state has led to the surreality of our current moment, where the public is both captive audience and prop, and the Executive Branch and courts are the only real political actors.
However, factions have already emerged within the administration. Trump champions economic populism and protectionism, straining the treasury by pouring money into the border regime and waging a trade war while trying to protect Medicare and Social Security. The old guard of the Republican Party aims for the destruction of the welfare state, the only actual path to appease capital and fund the expansion of the state’s repressive capacity. Musk seems intent on accruing as much personal control as possible, either to establish his own dictatorship or just to loot.
One ideology within the movement, subject to outcry from the liberal press, has been articulated by the Heritage Foundation’s *Mandate for Leadership*. Commonly known as Project 2025, it lays out a detailed plan for the concentration of power in the Executive Branch and the destruction by decree of virtually every reform won through the system—from anti-discrimination law to environmental protections. Liberal intellectuals in publications like the New York Times and Washington Post, which have spent the last half-decade branding themselves as sentinels against fascism, produced hundreds of articles warning that the Trump administration represents a direct route to Project 2025 and the end of political freedom as enshrined by the constitution. During his campaign, Trump both embraced the Heritage Foundation’s cadre and mocked their plans, putting forward his own platform under the moniker *Agenda 47*, which lacks Project 2025’s rigor but matches its politics.
However he personally relates to it, Trump’s executive orders and his purge of government employees contain influence from Project 2025, and his [cabinet includes architects like Russell Vought](https://www.pbs.org/newshour/amp/show/trump-names-project-2025-architect-russell-vought-to-key-white-house-role?ref=marxistunity.com). The point of talking about Project 2025 or Agenda 47 is not to evoke a panic that Trump is set to transition the American state toward absolutism but to understand the branching paths in front of us, which will determine the level of political freedom available to organize in the coming years.
In response to Trump’s policies, a broad democratic movement has emerged, led by organizations like [50501](https://www.fiftyfifty.one/?ref=marxistunity.com), a decentralized network built around the demand to “uphold the Constitution and end executive overreach.” This puts DSA in a contradictory position—on one hand, the movement has fallen under liberal leadership, and abstention from it will lead to our irrelevance. On the other hand, 50501’s demands are fundamentally self-defeating, defending the causes of fascism to defeat its symptoms. It is necessary that socialists fight in defense of political freedoms alongside liberals but put forward demands that push beyond the current constitutional order and toward real democracy. When the liberals are with us against fascism, we fight together; but when they abandon us in defense of the capitalist order, we fight alone.
By contrast, sections of the left, exemplified by the Communist Party, [put forward the call for a broad “all people’s front” to defend the constitutional order](https://cpusa.org/article/resolution-on-the-2024-elections/?ref=marxistunity.com) by campaigning for Kamala Harris. Then, after Trump’s victory, the Communists declared the beginning of “Resistance 2.0” to defend against reaction. The logic is simple: because fascism represents the most reactionary sections of capital and subverts the rule of law, a broad coalition in defense of the system can split capital and overwhelm the right.
The limitation of both 50501 and the Communist Party’s approach is that fascism does not grow from the reactionary sections of capital alone but from the entire liberal constitutional regime. The austerity of the ruling class tills the soil for an autonomous reactionary movement, and the liberal police state, bolstered by the Biden administration’s militarism and border policing, becomes a tool for the realization of fascism. Biden’s policies nourished the fascist movement by driving bearers of petty capital and even the working class toward it. Under Trump, the elite of the movement have penetrated the Executive Branch. Trump may usher in a more rapid decay for political freedom, but Harris’s election would not have defeated fascism or defended a democracy we have never had. In other words, while Trump represents a genuine fascist threat, the root of the problem is the system itself.
### **Fascism With American Characteristics**
The current strategy of the far rightrepresents a constitutional road to fascism, [what Vought calls *radical constitutionalism*](https://americanmind.org/salvo/renewing-american-purpose/?ref=marxistunity.com)—not the overthrow of the republic and the end of American ideals, but the logical conclusion of our system of government designed to exclude the majority of society through “democracy” by and for white, male property-owners. Liberalism and illiberalism are vanishing twins, the former creating the legal and economic conditions for the latter to absorb the system. Trump’s executive orders demonstrate this in practice, using the existing power of the executive to test its own limits, daring the courts or the military to stop him.
Two mutually reinforcing, but not uncontested, aims emerge from the political project of the far right—finish the neoliberal project of undoing 20th-century reformism, and expand the security state to crush its opposition. The mass movements of the 20th century represented a partial challenge to the system, creating legal space for collective bargaining, winning a limited right to abortion, ending de jure segregation, etc. Reformism is an affront to, if not capitalism as a whole, one or another section of the ruling class, petty proprietors and even sections of the working class seeking privileges of their own. This sense of affront fuels the fascist movement and provides it with a voting base, though its mandate in the 2024 election depended less on growing reaction than it did on a cost of living crisis, which pushed a wider base of voters to reject the Democratic administration and into the arms of Trump.
The old reformers are dead, but a new left emerges in their wake—from the spark of socialist political action, tenant and labor unionism, and mass movements for reproductive freedom, the end of policing and the liberation of Palestine. Despite the current weakness of working-class political organization, even a limited resurgence further inflames reactionaries, confronting them with a threat as much perceived as real, a challenge to neoliberalism and Christian nationalism, and a bogeyman to generate moral panic. To wipe the old working class from memory, the right needs to smother the new working class in its infancy.
But since the Trump inauguration, the working class has been absent as a political actor, and resistance to Trump has largely taken the form of lawfare challenging executive orders. Almost a decade of organizing has failed to create a unified political subject capable of fighting the right. Progressive union leaders like the UAW’s Shawn Fain [flirt with accommodation](https://uaw.org/uaw-statement-on-tariffs-and-renegotiating-u-s-trade-agreements/?ref=marxistunity.com). Mass protest has yet to materialize in most cities. We cannot liquidate into a people’s front that does not exist. Instead, our task is to bring the working class onto the stage of history with an independent program, one that fights for real democracy and a world beyond capitalism. No other organization but DSA has the nationwide scale, the deep roots, or the internal democracy to be the political home of the working class. The responsibility falls on us.
Despite the threat of a fascist movement and a Trump presidency, we should avoid taking a mechanical view of the transition to open dictatorship. Already, we see paths compete with each other—will Trump continue to follow the Heritage Foundation’s plans or turn on them as he did so many of his allies in his previous term? Will he bow to pressure from the military or state bureaucracy? Or, will he be a loyal soldier for the furthest right policies in the room, providing a path to autonomization of the executive? How will his protectionist policies provoke backlash from finance capital, with its thirst for new markets, or the manufacturing industry, which depends on a complex web of imports and exports? Will the judiciary challenge the executive? Will deportation reach a scale that threatens the profit margins of agricultural capital? Is Musk accumulating power for his own gain or the reactionary project as a whole? If the Trump administration fails to cohere into a single political project, reaction will become its own worst enemy, limiting its ability to transform the state, which itself requires a massive expansion of law enforcement and bureaucracy.
For [some analysts](https://jacobin.com/2021/02/the-politics-of-a-second-gilded-age?ref=marxistunity.com), our current trajectory is not towards fascism but a new Gilded Age, where two parties engage in bitter, violent struggle around identity while class struggles flow through channels outside of state power. Absent enough force of will from the right, this future seems likely, but we should be careful not to imagine objective limits on the far right’s ability—in commanding a mass movement and seizing control of the state—to push beyond the existing constitutional framework.
Socialist strategy under Trump will also depend on the level and form of centralization in the federal government. If current trends continue, state governments will play a greater role in governing themselves, essentially bifurcating oppositional politics between semi-democratic blue states—with freedom of assembly, working-class organization and limited welfare measures—and oligarchic red states with little to no freedom to contest the state through elections or street protests. This would transform DSA into two fundamentally different forms of organization: a mass party in New York and an underground in Florida.
But Trump’s executive orders are a challenge to the status quo, leveraging federal funding to further centralize government control. Heralded by the Supreme Court’s [ruling on presidential immunity](https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2024/07/01/supreme-court-immunity-trump-democracy/?ref=marxistunity.com), this would mean the White House taking an even more active role in shaping regional politics, dissolving the margins of the “blue state” as a refuge for welfarism, working-class organization and reproductive freedom. Of importance to the left, it would include asserting authority over district-level criminal prosecution where prosecutors are deemed too lenient, easing towards the repression of dissent regardless of city or state.
### **Democracy Against Empire**
Regardless of which path Trump takes, and by extension, which tactics the left must take up, our basic political task remains the same: the formation of a socialist program belonging to the working class, and the struggle for democracy and against empire. Faced with the truth that the Democratic Party is no party of the working class and no bulwark against fascism, the task of building one falls on us. This requires contesting the state through oppositional, openly socialist candidates and legislative campaigns at every level of government available to us. Outside of elections, it means building mass working-class organization in workplaces, neighborhoods and social movements. Through the former, we build the political activity and confidence of a working-class constituency committed to democracy and socialism, and through the latter, we strengthen our forces for a struggle that will inevitably spill beyond the confines of the American electoral system.
Programmatically, we need to connect immediate issues faced by the working class to a higher vision of transformation, refusing to soften or abandon either pole. Operatives within the Democratic Party are engaged in a self-flagellating debate on whether to message around attacks on democracy or deeply felt, immediate economic issues. The false choice between them is, bluntly, a messaging catastrophe of world-historic proportions, and socialists would be unwise to follow them into the abyss. We need to show working-class people that we can abate the rising costs of healthcare, groceries and rent; that we can end unemployment; and that we can stop the attacks on immigrants and reproductive and trans healthcare through a radical transformation of society, not through upholding a brutal status quo.
To pull fascism up by its roots, we need to follow the [revolutionary path to democracy](https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/11/marxist-unity-perspectives-2023/?ref=marxistunity.com), building a mass workers movement to demand a new republic and a socialist transformation of the economy. Through an independent left, engaged in the mass work and mass politics necessary to activate the working class and subordinate the petty bourgeoisie to its demands, we can both starve fascism of support and defeat it directly. However, by tying the workers movement to the political program of the Democratic Party, we delegitimize ourselves in the eyes of the most politicized sections of the working class, who need a party of their own to take power. In summary, two tasks present themselves to us:
1. Build a united front among the entire working class for the defense of political freedom from fascism, with common action but never in deference to liberal activists.
2. Organize the mass vanguard of the working class into a struggle against the constitutional order, and for genuine democracy.
If we march under the banner of “defending democracy”—the failed slogan of the Harris campaign, which we have already [echoed in our messaging](https://www.instagram.com/p/DHCnzrXS2Pl/?img%5Findex=1&ref=marxistunity.com)—we tie ourselves to a system that increasing numbers of the working class recognize as a dying empire. Instead, all of our work—taking seats in city council or Congress, canvassing tenants, marching on the boss, occupying campuses—should center agitation for democratic socialism, the project of defeating fascism by changing the fundamental conditions of the world. Without both socialism and democracy, the contradictions of capitalism will continue to produce reaction, and fascism will retain its road to power.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### A Draft Program for DSA
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/draft-program/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:22:16.000Z
### **A History of Programmatic Unity in DSA**
Marxist Unity Group (MUG) views the struggle for unity around a revolutionary program as the cornerstone of the project to build a mass socialist party in the United States. In the Marxist sense, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) already meets many of the key requirements for existence as a political party—it's an operationally independent single-membership organization with tens of thousands of members, with democratically-elected leadership and member-led institutions, and endorsed elected officials across all levels of government.
What is missing, however, is *programmatic unity*—unity around acceptance of a common, democratically-decided program which can unite the various factions of the movement and the diverse tactical struggles socialists engage in around a broad historical narrative and strategy.
The modern DSA emerged out of the mass popularization of socialism during the two Bernie Sanders campaigns. Between 2015 and 2020, DSA informally and unevenly adopted the “Bernie Program,” a broadly reformist set of social-democratic demands such as medicare for all and the green new deal. This program, obviously limited by its informality and lack of democratic adoption, gave relative political coherence to a growing organization. We now live during the programmatic impasse—both of DSA and the broader socialist Left—in the aftermath of the failure of the Bernie campaigns and the George Floyd uprisings of 2020, which both ultimately dissolved back into the mainstream Democratic Party coalition.
The struggle for real programmatic unity in DSA began at the 2021 National Convention, where DSA voted to approve a [Political Platform](https://www.dsausa.org/dsa-political-platform-from-2021-convention/?ref=marxistunity.com). This platform, however, was unwieldy. Despite positive elements, the collaborative process that developed it produced a long laundry list of reform policies that socialists would find to some degree desirable, with no clear articulated strategy or theory of change. Despite its flaws, however, Marxist Unity Slate, the predecessor to MUG, sought to ‘[give the platform legs to stand](https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/08/give-the-platform-legs-to-stand-the-case-for-cb8/?ref=marxistunity.com#footnote-1).’ These delegates introduced an amendment to the Constitution/Bylaws to condition membership on acceptance of the platform. Though it failed 2-to-1, it was the first time programmatic unity had been seriously considered by the organization—the opening salvo by the consistently partyist wing to realize DSA’s promise as a programmatically unified mass Party.
The Platform was unfortunately relegated to the dustbin of the organization; it did not play an active role in the political life of DSA after it was passed at Convention. An unexpected opportunity arose, however, after 2023’s Convention passed a mandate to produce an action program ahead of the 2024 elections. The resulting document was DSA’s nationally-developed 2024 Program: [Workers Deserve More](https://2024.dsausa.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) (WDM). While still missing key Marxist tenets around revolutionary democracy and national self-determination, WDM proudly proclaimed, following the Manifesto of the Communist Party, that “DSA’s mission is to unite workers into a powerful political movement to win the battle for democracy and change the world.”
With a more developed plan for implementation, chapters across the country received the 2024 Program with widespread enthusiasm, even among the more tepidly partyist sections of the organization. Despite its flaws, WDM demonstrated in practice the vitality of a program, and tapped into an unrealized desire for programmatic unity. And in DSA’s youth-wing, YDSA, the struggle for programmatic unity has already been won, approved by a majority of delegates at its 2023 Convention.
### **Introduction to the Draft Program**
At MUG’s National Congress in November 2023, we voted to charter a program committee, who’s mandate would be to deeply investigate the history of the Marxist political program, and to produce the Draft Program found below. In the words of our [Tasks and Perspectives](https://www.marxistunity.com/tasks) also published in this edition of Light and Air, the purpose of this Draft Program is “to serve as a model for what we hope DSA will adopt.” And regardless of the course of developments, “we will fight for its drafting principles at 2025 Convention and beyond,” welcoming any victory on the terrain of struggle for a common program.
On the point of principles, we consider the pillars of this Draft Program to be it’s expression of the minimum-maximum format (elaborated below) and its radical democratic demands—the revolutionary reorganization of the state, consummated in a democratic constitution, along the lines which will allow for the rule of the working class over society. This consistent democracy expands to the international sphere, where we believe DSA must programmatically embrace the principles of decolonization and national self-determination, conceiving of the liberation of the working class as an international, and not a national, process.
Our Draft Program takes the format of a *minimum-maximum* program, the form of program developed by Marx and Engels and elaborated on by the parties of the Second International. The minimum program is the set of radical democratic and economic demands which, while individually achievable under capitalism, taken together form the basis for a revolutionary rupture with current society and the establishment of a democratic worker’s republic. In the long run, they also represent the minimum basisfor our Party’s taking responsibility for government. The maximum program, on the other hand, elaborates the history of capitalist development and the role of the working class within it. It demonstrates our commitment to the long-term struggle for a fully liberated, classless society—in a word, communism.
This design—pointing towards the real institutional blocks to establishing working class mastery over the state, while also orienting the movement towards the horizon of wage and class abolition—gives minimum-maximum programs an urgent revolutionary clarity.
At MUG’s Annual Congress last month in Florence, Massachusetts, we passed this Draft Program nearly unanimously, but not without spirited debate. This debate revolved around the purpose of the program, and how we should communicate the story of our movement to the broader working class. It clued in on the importance of widespread deliberation, both across the spectrum of DSA and throughout the broader organized Left and workers movement, to achieving a truly unifying program.
Debates will continue to rage around the history, purpose, and structure of the political program as a constituent part of the struggle to build a mass socialist Party in the United States. This Draft Program is our contribution to these debates, and we make it in the spirit of democratic collaboration. We open the Letters column of Light and Air to all those who wish to join the conversation, which we hope will spill over into many other forums, including the halls of the upcoming 2025 DSA National Convention.
## **“The Florence Program,” Adopted January 2025**
Capitalism is a failed system. The capitalist class has unleashed misery on the workers of the world, turning to environmental devastation, militarized policing, mass incarceration, wars of genocide and conquest, and radicalization of existing forms of social domination, all in the pursuit of profits. To defeat the ruling class in the United States, the working class must organize itself into an independent political party with the aim of conquering political power, replacing the slaver-capitalist Constitution with a radically democratic political system, and introducing socialism. The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is the political home for this struggle.
Capitalism transforms or abolishes all existing social structures to serve the production of surplus-value, the root of the ruling classes’ incomes of profit, interest, and rent. It is made possible only by the exploitation of a global class of dispossessed laborers. In its tireless drive to surpass every limit to this exploitation, capitalism concentrates increasing capital in fewer hands, crosses every national border, subsumes every aspect of society into one vast market, and renders obsolete every small-scale and individual means of economic production, like land-ownership and small enterprise. It gathers the majority of the world’s population together into an increasingly desperate working class that labors collectively to set increasingly concentrated means of production into motion.
Because capitalism enriches a small few at the expense of the many, it must be maintained by undemocratic means. In the era of liberalism, this has most often taken the form of a state which counterposes limited enfranchisement for the working classes with unequal suffrage, unproportional legislatures, unelected judiciaries, unlimited power in the hands of executives and the civil-military bureaucracy, alongside the direct rule of money through legal bribery, bought-and-sold elections, and business-owned media, allowing the capitalist class to keep the working-class majority out of political power. The U.S. Constitution, originally created to cement the power of capitalists and slaveowners, is one of the clearest examples of this form of rule.
The history of U.S. capitalism is inseparable from the history of colonial genocide and chattel slavery. The murder, displacement, and enclosure of Indigenous nations made way for white settlement and slave plantations in the South, which fed northern industry. Slavery was eventually abolished—and Black America emancipated—due to decades of political, economic, and military struggle by the enslaved, free Black people, and abolitionist whites against the slave owners, culminating in the revolutionary battle for a multiracial democratic republic during the Civil War and Reconstruction.
The temporary class alliance between northern capitalists and the abolitionists’ democratic revolution broke apart after the military defeat of the slaveholders. The abomination of sharecropping, imposed on freed slaves by the landlords’ and capitalists’ counterrevolution, was eventually supplanted by the mechanization of agriculture, which, combined with Jim Crow apartheid and racist white terror, displaced millions of Black Americans to industrial slums across the country. Decades of continued struggle under these new conditions ended legal apartheid in the South, but the failure to fully achieve racial equality and finish Reconstruction has necessitated continuing mass movements by the urban Black and brown working class for a decent standard of living and against police violence.
The spoils of this bloody process of national development were not enough to sate the hunger of American capital, which looked to other lands and peoples to exploit through imperialism. Forged in the hells of colonialism, slavery, and counterrevolution, the modern United States leads the capitalists of imperialist nations in economic and military blocs that have crushed the global working class’s political goals for decades. The United States and its bloc of rich nations, constituting the forces of global imperialism and the bulwark of global reaction, would much prefer to keep poorer, formerly colonized nations in a constant state of economic and political dependence to be exploited as a massive reserve of low-wage labor.
Within the borders of the United States, the working class forms the vast majority of the population. Its ranks having been formed from Indigenous laborers, dispossessed small producers and farmers, descendants of Black slavery, and migrants from Europe and across the Third World, it is one of the most diverse working classes in the world. The long, multi-faceted history of violence, subjugation, and exclusion that has accompanied this diversity has made some workers more instinctually aware than others of the injustices that permeate capitalist society, but the working class as a whole lacks a systematic understanding of how those injustices can be overcome.
Without political or economic power as individuals, the working class must organize collectively. The experience of uniting with fellow workers in the class struggle forces the working class to confront differences imposed by race, gender, nationality, labor specialization, and other forms of stratification, or suffer from disunity and mutual destruction for the sake of special privileges for a fortunate few. The working class needs democracy, both in its own organizations and in society at large, to effectively fight back against the ruling class. No part of the working class can win freedom from capitalist rule unless every worker enjoys total political and social equality and the equal right to participate in determining the fate of the society as a whole.
The workers’ movement has arisen from the struggle of workers to improve their conditions against the interests of their bosses, landlords, and rulers through demands that only partially address their domination under capitalism. These struggles and the collective organizations that wage them—trade-unions, cooperatives, mutual aid societies, and at the highest level, the political party—hold the secret to reconstructing a world without a ruling class and an exploited class: the democratic control of society by the people whose labor creates it. In producing the conditions that give rise to working class organization through the process of capitalist development, the capitalist class creates the possibility for its own overthrow. The capitalists understand this and seek to disarm the working class by opposing democracy everywhere, from the realm of trade-union struggle to the form of government. Under the political rule of the capitalist class, organized worker power is under constant attack, exhausting working-class struggles and incentivizing compromises in leadership and organization. A disorganized and disunited working class is the capitalists’ best asset.
Only socialism, the project of universal human emancipation led by the working class, can overcome such adversity. As socialists we must lead the fight for the highest possible degree of organization and unity within the working class, universalize its many particular struggles through agitation, education, and organization, and develop the most militant layers of these movements into dedicated socialists, bringing these socialist workers into our ranks. In short, we must merge socialism with the workers’ movement. As this merger develops, so too will the farsightedness, confidence, and organization of the working class that enables their emergence as the hegemonic class of society. Working class victory in this struggle—the conquest of political power—is propelled by the formation and practice of the socialist party.
The framework established by the Constitution, the surrounding legal order, the dominating influence of wealth on political power, and the repressive arm of the state—the police, military, and prisons—constitute the dictatorship of the capitalist class, strangling the working class in even its most basic struggles against bosses and landlords—let alone its conquest of political power. The working class must lead the battle to sweep away this political order and establish a truly democratic republic, freeing the workers of the world from the chains of American imperialism, and setting the stage for the working class to lead a socialist transformation of our society.
The development of socialism under working class rule gradually extends the principle of democratic planning to the whole economy and undermines the basis of inequality in the social division of labor - whether between intellectual and manual workers, racial groups, or by gender. This society will combine the common labor of the many with a democracy that empowers and involves the many, struggling day by day for a collective life that enables the flourishing of the collective individual, rather than their atomization and subordination to the powerful few. Through this process, the special role of the state standing above society withers away and, as the revolution expands internationally, national divisions and inequalities between peoples are eliminated.
Proceeding from these principles, the Democratic Socialists of America unites around a strategy of class independence from the capitalist Democratic and Republican Parties, the development of independent working class organizations to a critical mass, and struggling for consistent democracy throughout all spheres of society. In so doing, we first demand a people’s constitutional convention elected by universal, equal, and direct suffrage to establish a democratic republic that allows for the political rule of the working class. Leading up to and within this convention, the Democratic Socialists of America will fight for the following demands as the foundation for the democratic constitution of a new republic:
1. Universal, equal, and direct suffrage for every citizen 16 years of age or older. Universal citizenship for long term residents within the boundaries of the state.
2. Abolition of the Presidency and the Electoral College, to be replaced by an Executive Council elected and overseen by Congress; abolition of the Senate. All power to be vested in the people’s House of Representatives and its number of members uncapped.
3. Governing supremacy of legislatures at all levels of government, to be elected under a nationwide electoral standard with proportional representation. Elections to be entirely publicly funded. Elected delegates to be subject to recall and paid the wage of the average skilled worker.
4. Freedom of association and assembly and unrestricted rights of free speech and publication. Associations may participate in the political system as parties on the condition that they accept the laws of the new revolutionary order as binding.
5. The right to freedom of information. Release state secrets and the open and transparent operation of government. Elimination of advertising in news media. Media to be publicly funded and democratically accessible. Abolition of copyright laws. The right of the public to appropriate intellectual property.
6. Abolition of the rights and powers reserved to States; formation of regional and municipal governments to be a guaranteed right for all peoples within the boundaries of the state.
7. Self-determination for all nations within the boundaries of the state, including but not limited to the right of separation, the right of return for Indigenous nations, and the right to choose to participate in the political system of the republic on a plurinational basis. The right of all peoples to receive services of the state in their preferred language. Enforcement of Indigenous treaties following the democratic will of Indigenous nations, including their right to reclaim land under sovereign control.
8. The right to expropriate property for the public good without compensation for the private owner, and the right to collective, democratic ownership and management of all public goods.
9. The right of the people to convocate a constituent assembly to reform the constitution of the republic elected by the people through their right to universal, equal, and direct suffrage.
10. Abolition of the police, professional military, special forces, and the security state. Establishment of a people's militia with democratic and constitutional rights reserved for service members. Universal service and training. Reorientation towards public infrastructure projects, disaster relief, and safety. The right of conscientious objectors to alternative service options.
11. The right to transformative justice and rehabilitation. Full constitutional rights retained for persons under trial and rehabilitation. Freedom for all incarcerated people, their enfranchisement as citizens, and the closure of prisons.
12. Elimination of judicial review. Appointment of all judges by the appropriate legislatures, except local judges, who are to be elected directly by the people.
13. Replacement of common law with an easily understandable code of laws. Elimination of private legal counsel for hire, to be replaced with public legal counsel with equalized pay.
14. The right to organize labor unions, collectively bargain in the workplace, and strike.
15. The right to move freely within and without the borders of the state.
The Democratic Socialists of America will further fight for the realization of the following immediate measures, to improve the condition of the working class and consolidate its political and economic emancipation:
1. Provision of quality housing, medical care, food and water, family care, and other fundamental necessities of life to all residents.
2. Expropriation, without compensation, of the resources and industries most immediately necessary for the survival of the working class and cohesive functioning of the state, including railways, telecommunications, seaports, airports, energy infrastructure, medical infrastructure, and high finance. Nationalization of land, air, and waterways.
3. A legal limit of a 32-hour workweek, with compensation for lost overtime and no reduction in overall pay.
4. Universal, public, and mandatory education until the age of majority. Elimination of college tuition and residency fees. Provide ongoing literacy, technical, and vocational training for adults as a publicly accessible service.
5. A living wage for all workers regardless of age, employment, or status, regularly adjusted to account for changes in purchasing power. No discrimination in pay based on race, gender, or nationality. Elimination of separate tipped wages.
6. Reparations to formerly oppressed peoples through targeted investment in public infrastructure and commons, and unconditional cash transfers in underdeveloped communities.
7. Creation of a state fund for public creation of and participation in artistic and cultural works.
8. Periodic suppression of public and private debts owed by workers.
9. Democratic control over the home, housing, and the land on which these exist.
10. Replace all indirect taxes with a single progressive income tax.
11. Socialized healthcare, free at the point of service. Increase the concentration of health professionals per capita. Free access to treatment and testing for infections like HIV/AIDS and COVID-19.
12. Universal access to reproductive and trans healthcare, including contraception, birth control, fertility treatment, hormone-replacement therapy, gender-affirming surgeries and abortion on demand.
13. End state recognition of the gender binary and nuclear family, protecting the right to form families not based on marriage or blood relation, prohibiting discrimination based on sexuality, gender or age, and affirming the rights of children, the elderly and the disabled to live with safety and dignity and to decide where and with whom they will live.
The Democratic Socialists of America, seeking to unite the U.S. working class under the banner of international socialism, put forward the following demands to share in the struggles of workers of all nations, end unequal exchange, and ensure the survival of the Earth over which we struggle to take stewardship:
1. Withdraw from NATO. Termination of all outstanding military treaties with imperialist states and withdrawal or surrender of all troops stationed abroad. Cessation of all arms transfers to imperialist states and their proxies.
2. End all current sanctions, asset seizures, and tariffs.
3. War reparations to nations subjected to US conspiracies and military aggression, and climate reparations to the Third World.
4. Withdraw from existing trade agreements. New trade arrangements based on equality of labor-time between workers of all nations and guaranteed free passage of essential resources, technologies, and supplies.
5. Enact emergency measures to curb U.S. industries with high waste in material throughput, emissions, and energy demand. Ensure that goods and waste produced in necessary industries are reused, recycled, refurbished, or otherwise restored to natural earth processes. Subsidize municipal and regional efforts to restore local ecology.
6. Abolition of the United Nations Security Council. United Nations General Assembly seats to be allocated proportionally to the population of each nation, with the representatives to these seats to be elected through proportional representation. No veto exceptions for any nation in the General Assembly.
7. Subordination of the World Bank and the IMF to the United Nations. Cancellation of national debts for countries burdened by loans from international capitalist institutions such as the World Bank and IMF.
8. Provision of unconditional funding by the United Nations for life essentials, climate refugee travel, return of displaced indigenous peoples, preventative vaccine measures, construction of utilities.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### NPC Vacancy Appointment Vote February 2025
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/02-24-2025-npc-vacancy/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:23:15.000Z
DSA's National Political Committee voted this month to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of comrade Rose D. Marxist Unity Group's NPC members voted for comrade Kareem E. to serve the rest of the term.
Who gets to determine the composition of our leadership bodies? Members of previous NPC terms have had different answers. In the 2021-2023 term, the resignation of three members was used as an opportunity to change the political composition of the NPC. The already distorted NPC left a later vacancy open, which is also a choice about the composition of the NPC. The resulting body struggled to lead the organization for the rest of its term. Using vacancies to add additional seats for your own ideological tendency leads to an NPC which no longer represents the general membership. This replicates the problems with the bureaucratic centralist “[slate system](https://rupture.ie/articles/the-origins-of-the-slate-system?ref=marxistunity.com)” method that MUG rejects by giving factions the ability to undemocratically entrench themselves in leadership. It also encourages politics-through-bullying, with a clear incentive for social media battles or dogpiling to win seats by attrition. The answer to this question must be clear: only the membership of DSA can decide the composition of our leadership, and if we want to change the politics of our leadership bodies the venue for that is arguments made at convention.
While Rose and Kareem are both members of Groundwork, we are not seeking to enshrine caucus replacements as a hard rule. In the case of a vacancy election where the only qualified candidates have different politics we would not vote simply based on caucus membership. There are many other imaginable situations that could make replacement choices more complicated, but nothing about this particular case would change this principle. Unless DSA has agreed to some sort of party list proportional representation system for NPC and has a vacancy process that reflects that, the NPC should strive to carry out the will of convention while taking into account the context of a situation. This is the role that we elect the NPC for as our representative leadership in between national conventions.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Introducing Light & Air
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/introduction/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:24:22.000Z
We welcome you to Light & Air, the official publication of Marxist Unity Group (MUG), a faction within the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). This publication draws its name from Karl Kautsky’s book-length explanation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany’s Erfurt Program, published in 1891:
> Where the working class bestirs itself, where it makes the first attempts to elevate its economic position, it puts political demands next to purely economic ones—namely, demands for freedom of association, of assembly, of the press. These freedoms have the greatest significance for the working class: they are among the conditions that make its life possible and to which it unconditionally owes its development. ***They are light and air for the proletariat***; he who lets them wither or withholds them—he who keeps the proletariat from the struggle to win these freedoms and to extend them that person is one of the proletariat's worst enemies.
This passage, derived from Friedrich Engels’ similar prescriptions around political freedoms, places a centrality on the struggle for political democracy that has largely been lost among Marxists today. This political devolution is also related to a downgrade of importance for democracy *internal* to the political organs of the working class and its most consistent advocates, the socialists.
Connected to the necessity of a struggle for democracy—a struggle over the class character of the state—is the necessity of the workers movement to unite under the banner of a communist party. This party is necessary because the working class as individuals cannot compete with the free time or money of the petty bourgeois and capitalist class—the latter of which relies on its privileged position in the state to mediate capitalist interests while purposefully dividing workers.
Generalized political struggle is the only way to achieve the formation of the working class into a class-for-itself—economic struggles will always remain partial and disunified unless brought together under a common organization. The basis of this higher organizational unity lies in a program that builds universalist politics out of the tasks of the working class, weaving in both universal and particular interests. Last, we need a party because only a party organized on a democratic basis can hold its operatives—organizers, journalists, and elected representatives—to the will of the rank-and-file instead of working towards their own ends.
Other communists, similarly in favor of the idea of a party in the abstract, see the project as something secondary, pending a spontaneous upsurge in worker organization. Marxist Unity Group believes that the party *already exists,* in partial form, within DSA—the largest US socialist organization in generations, within which various currents of the movement have re-grouped. But the party we need, a mass socialist party of millions, will ultimately require the conscious unification of a weak and divided socialist left. We believe that the party is necessary for spontaneous struggles to become more than the sum of their parts.
Light & Air will be a theoretical journal of that party-building project, necessary because conscious unification requires that we do aside with the polite conflict avoidance the left has practiced previously. A strategy of unification, opposed to the usual communist strategy of avoiding the existing left by ‘going to the people’, requires that we seriously engage with the content of each other’s ideas. In that project we are a part of a constellation of comradely publications struggling towards a mass socialist press. Our orientation as a journal is to spur debates about strategy and bring those debates to the highest level possible.
But what is strategy? In our tasks & perspectives, we note that the party as a whole must unify around *tasks*, around a program of clear goals necessary for the working class to rule in this country. But these tasks will always confront different material conditions, different perspectives, different political visions. These differing *strategies* are the beating heart of factions, and as a faction, we agree with Mike Macnair’s argument in *Revolutionary Strategy* that the “essence” of a strategy is its “long-term character.” Strategy is “the frame within which we think about how to achieve our goals over the course of a series of activities or struggles, each of which has its own tactics.” We strive to commit DSA to the strategy of consistent democracy .
Workers need political freedoms if they are to express themselves on a higher level than this or that workplace, this or that apartment building, this or that street. For that reason, socialists must support democratic struggles “to the hilt”, and for that reason the democratic struggle contains within it the seeds of revolution. The freedoms won by this struggle are then the basis for a mass party-movement that democratizes our day-to-day institutions, with the horizon of revolutionizing the state so that it can be wielded by workers for socialist transition. This is why Lenin referred to the task of revolutionary socialists as “consistent democracy”—while every other political force will falter or turn back, we push forward to the end.
All of these factors combine to reveal a strategy of patient growth and unity, rooted in the mass organization of the working class that revolves around the core of a workers’ political party. While the socialist left and the right both seek to dissolve our socialist program into a wider, more diffuse movement under different pretenses, we seek the strategy of the center, bringing that diffuse movement together into one democratically organized socialist party. As part of the struggle for working class self-government in all spheres of life, we argue that any tactic should be grounded in clearly expounding our party program and patiently building up the organized workers’ movement through the political leadership of the party. This remains true until support for our program reaches a critical mass of society—a majority mandate for revolution.
As a faction of DSA, we aim to convince comrades of our strategy. But we don’t seek rubber stamps. We seek to make cases for our strategy through the concrete decisions around our labor and our organizational resources that follow from it. We are well aware that most of these positions—no less our program—will likely represent a minority of DSA. We wish to use Light & Air to make arguments about strategy, tactics, and the tasks that we fight for in connection with current debates and events within and without DSA.
Questions such as how to build programmatic unity as a practical project, our relationship to the Democratic Party, how socialists can win over organized labor, how we must orient ourselves to international developments and social movements of other nations, and how we will overcome the oppression that is facing us down the barrel— these questions must be explored in frank, sharp, and honest terms. Our hope is that this publication can offer such discussions to the American socialist movement at a critical moment in our history.
We would like to thank comrade Amanda L for her tremendous work helping us with design elements throughout the caucus. Without her you would not have this amazing banner. We would also like to thank comrade Duncan H, without whom we would not have Light & Air.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Letters: MUGs on MUG Congress
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mugs-on-mug/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:26:27.000Z
Over the course of Martin Luther King Day weekend, over a hundred Marxist Unity Group members convened in Florence, Massachusetts to debate our Tasks & Perspectives and Draft Program, changes to our Points of Unity and introductory readding group, and resolutions relating to our strategy towards DSA Convention. But on a larger level than any specific debate, the experience of being with so many comrades who were operating on such a high level was transformative, and these letters are in thanks to each other for that experience. Included are letters from MUG members, with a letter from a Bread & Roses observer incoming.
— Jean A.
---
### **Noah**
As a new member of MUG, it was stunning to see what democratic centralism looks like in practice. One of the MUG study group readings from Mike Macnair focuses on the difference between democratic centralism and what Macnair calls “bureaucratic centralism.” Seeing Congress first-hand showed that in practice. The congress was full of rigorous debate, differences in opinion, and a variety of voting margins.While I didn't personally have the most to contribute, I have a new understanding and appreciation for democracy. Congress showed our fight, not as the lies of the Cold War portrayed it, as a war between “democracy” and “communism”, but between a struggle of rigorous democracy through a democratic republic and a dictatorship of the ruling class under an undemocratic constitution.
### **Sofia**
This year’s congress was my first as a new member of Marxist Unity Group and so I came into it unsure of what to expect. What stood out to me immediately, in contrast to my experience as a delegate to the DSA national convention in 2019, was the level of trust, good faith, and willingness to work productively through sharp disagreement that characterized the entire body. Members largely responded to procedural maneuvering and amendments haggling over seemingly small details not with impatience and hostility but with laughter and serious engagement on the merits. The sheer joy that comrades were taking in the democratic process was palpable as MUG members navigated long hours of deliberation with skill and grace. In a moment that stands out in my memory, a controversial amendment to the proposed minimum program that would have seen us step away from prison abolition as a minimum demand was defeated, and rightly so, but the resulting debate on the formulation of the abolitionist demand in the minimum program was generative and has carried on beyond the convention. I read with interest the article in the most recent MUG bulletin on this topic and expect that this conversation will continue as we work collectively to sharpen our abolitionist politics.
### **Lavender**
> Poesía Perdóname por haberte ayudado a comprender que no estás hecha sólo de palabras.
\-- Roque Dalton, “Poetic Art”, 1974
It’s a common mistake in our movement to treat democracy like a simple substance that can be measured. But as the title of this journal indicates, it is much more like light and air–like a field through which political matter moves. But then, what is the composition of this matter? If it is made of words alone, that can’t explain why, in this era of nearly instantaneous communication, of discord and signal and zoom, socialists will travel hundreds of miles, take time off from their jobs, and spend countless hours on logistics just to have a debate face to face. Are we really so sentimental? Well, maybe, but we’re not crazy. There’s something real that we’re grasping towards, something important. I can’t fully explain it, but here’s an attempt: our politics flow outward from our collective subjectivities, and ultimately from the crystallized knowledge of sensory experience–from direct contact with the world. To be in the same place with comrades, to share if only for a few days not only the democratic process, but a collective experience of life–conversation, meals, the weather–is to remind ourselves of this truth. In this way, our Congress is a wellspring.
### **C. McAlister**
I showed up to the Quality Inn around 4 o'clock on Friday. Slightly nervous, and with the Discord chat not active, I decided that if I kept one eye on the parking lot I would eventually see a comrade that I knew. As soon as the thought crossed my mind, there goes John S. sauntering across the lot. I stepped onto the balcony. "Hey, what the fuck you doin' up there? Let's smoke a cigarette! How's your union doin'?" More of us gathered in this way, and by the end of the night I was drunkenly arguing with Sid and Ben “The Scientist” about the political economy of the Confederate States of America.
And so Congress opened the next morning. Over the next two days, I felt a sense of comradery such as soldiers in the trenches must feel. It was amazing beyond words to meet many of you for the first time, and to see many of you once again! These relationships I will cherish, come the light of socialism or come the dark of fascism in the times ahead. I did not speak up much during Congress. I never stood up to argue for or against any amendment or resolution. I sometimes feel that I have an inferiority complex when surrounded by such bright and articulate comrades!
Yet even when I found myself voting alongside a small minority in some debates, I never for an instant felt as if any of us were anything but comrades-in-arms. The decisions made in Northampton might end up being world-historical, a footnote in a history book, or completely forgotten altogether. But when we gathered in that space, despite all disagreements and arguments, we gathered around a common goal that unites us. Our goal is an inspiring one, and one that will hopefully shape the course of things to come: Fight the Constitution! Demand a new Republic!
## Two Essays From MUG Congress
*Note: The following two articles were generated from two conversations at the same table during brunch after congress*
### **Knowledge Develops Through Debate and Struggle**
**\-Sam**
> *Knowledge begins with practice, and theoretical knowledge is acquired through practice and must then return to practice. -Mao, On Practice*
> *And do you think he would ever have tried to discover the truth, or to learn what he thought he knew though he did not, if he had not fallen into puzzlement and come to believe that he did not know and desired to know? -Socrates, Meno*
At Congress, I was consistently struck by the incredible intelligence, depth of knowledge, and effective ability to explicate complex and important ideas of just about everyone present. The level of intellectual and political debate going on within MUG, condensed into two days, was very high, much higher than I’ve ever experienced in any classroom, conversation among socialist friends, or in many reading groups that I’ve taken part in. I don’t just say this to laud ourselves; in fact, I took on the role of listener more so than direct contributor to this high level of debate! Rather, this is important to emphasize precisely because of our mission of putting politics in command, of bringing high politics (socialism and the class point of view) into organizing that is so thoroughly depoliticized, or at the risk of being depoliticized (the labor movement, but also tenant organizing, electoral work; the many domains in which the mantra “just do the work” is always intoned). To effectively bring socialism and high politics to the working class, and to our fellow socialist organizers involved in organizing and mobilizing the working class, we have to have a deep understanding of socialism, and of high politics, as well as a deep appreciation for what the daily and long-term work of socialist organizing in labor, in the tenant movement, in the electoral arena, actually looks like.
All of the above only exists as a result of practice and struggle. This is on two levels: avoidance of practice leaves only abstract theorizing, while avoidance of struggle, avoidance of real substantive disagreement in favor of papering over differences, leaves all involved completely incapable of developing a real political response to the dynamic of class struggle constantly going on around us. Concerning the former, the over a hundred members present at Congress collectively have thousands of hours of organizing experience across many arenas in the class struggle. And to the latter, having real substantive disagreement and working through those disagreements, happened *at Congress*! While Robert’s Rules provided a formal structure for debate, the underlying process of conversation and disagreement was, at its core, our collective attempt to reach a deeper, more effective understanding of both the political conditions that face the socialist project into the next year, and what ought to be our priorities going forward. This working through of conflict and disagreement existed before Congress and persists after it, of course; so much of what I gleaned from conversations with other comrades at Northampton was about political struggles with groups or individuals in their respective chapters.
Going into Congress, our members came with knowledge gained through practice, like Mao describes above; this knowledge, being further informed by a reading of history and philosophy (I never could have predicted just how relevant the 1912 Bolshevik social insurance campaigns would be!), was then refined in the furnace of debate, and then, returning to our respective home chapters, we put that developed and refined knowledge into practice. We “Do MUG!” For our ideas, our political project, to not only stay relevant but to create and assert its own relevance in the face of the reactionary tide and the economistic anti-political tug, opportunities for debate and struggle, like Congress, are instrumental.
On the level of the individual, and on the level of the DSA chapter (or, perhaps, the socialist ecosystem in a given city), the level of intellectual and political understanding is similarly determined by practice and struggle. The place of Marxist politics in Columbus DSA is a case in point. In a conversation with comrades Megan and Mike from Cleveland, Megan (who had attended a Columbus DSA social) noted the lack of socialist topics or political discussion (even in an admittedly informal context) when compared with socials hosted by Cleveland DSA. There shouldn’t necessarily be an expectation of high political discussions at socials, but it prompted reflection on my part about the place of political education and political debate in Columbus.
When I first joined Columbus DSA, there was no political education programming at all; there now is, but it can be further developed, to counteract a focus on organizing work absent some difficult political questions. In conversation with several other comrades in the chapter, it has been repeatedly brought up that, historically, Columbus DSA has been averse to caucus politics. All of these things are related! As tendencies and factions within DSA differentiate themselves and develop their ideas, deepening their knowledge and bringing that knowledge into context with their practical work, the need for education, for a shared intellectual and political vocabulary to debate with, intensifies. This is not to put down anyone in Columbus DSA; comrade-organizers in the chapter have been, continue to, and will continue to do fantastic work, and I look forward to working alongside them. The point is simply that, given the mutual relationship between knowledge and struggle, as one develops, so does the other.
Knowledge develops through practice (per Mao), and dialogue (struggle through debate) can reach the truth (per Socrates via Plato). At Congress, I felt like Meno’s servant, referred to in the quote above, who fell into puzzlement and came to believe that he did not know and desired to know. When it comes to socialist organizing, while I was a leader in a small YDSA chapter for three years and joined Columbus DSA a little over a year ago, I did not know what I did not know. And now, as a direct result of seeing the development of political knowledge in action, and taking part in it myself as both observer and participant, I am determined to discover the truth.
I spoke with Rashad and Lois on a few occasions, but most important here were the organizing conversations I had with both of them on my last day in Northampton, especially when, after listening to me describe the political context of Columbus DSA, Lois encouraged me to seek leadership in the chapter. My reaction, before I had ever read these words, was encapsulated in Mao’s *On Practice*:
> *"I am not sure I can handle it." We often hear this remark when a comrade hesitates to accept an assignment. Why is he unsure of himself? Because he has no systematic understanding of the content and circumstances of the assignment, or because he has had little or no contact with such work, and so the laws governing it are beyond him. After a detailed analysis of the nature and circumstances of the assignment, he will feel more sure of himself and do it willingly. If he spends some time at the job and gains experience and if he is a person who is willing to look into matters with an open mind and not one who approaches problems subjectively, one-sidedly and superficially, then he can draw conclusions for himself as to how to go about the job and do it with much more courage.*
I was not sure then that I could handle it, and in all honesty, I still am not sure! But what I know now, and did not know before Congress, was that the only way to be sure that I can handle it is to take the step forward and to do it. Protagonism of the working class is a common theme comrades in MUG emphasize, but something that I had never really internalized before Congress, and honestly never before my conversation with Lois, did I understand that protagonism has to start with you and I. Up to now, I’ve generally avoided confrontation and tended more toward quiet disagreement or disapproval; this is not a method for enacting change!
Knowledge develops through practice and struggle, practice is deepened and strengthened by knowledge, and while one person alone cannot singlehandedly reshape political conditions, the process has to start somewhere. Seeing socialist deliberation in action reshaped my understanding of socialist politics. I look forward to bringing substantive political disagreements, expressed and worked through in a comradely and respectful way, to our work in Columbus DSA so as to develop political debate and political education: one small but crucial step toward a mass socialist party of the working class, and a democratic and socialist republic in North America.
### **Marxist Abolitionism & the Minimum-Maximum Program**
**\-Jean A.**
I’ve been a police abolitionist for only slightly less time than I’ve been a socialist. During my college years as an Obama loyalist progressive liberal in a historically radical state university, I learned an awful lot about human rights discourses. Further, as someone who politicized during the Bush years, the anti-war protests marked me with a deep distrust of the police and prison system. I distinctly remember seeing my comrades in a SUNY anarchist group insist we take the SIM cards out of our phones at every meeting we had, because so many of them were arrested during the Free Speech Zone era. And as a dirtbag barista living on Long Island, I saw first-hand the drug trade and the way that police treat crimes differently depending on the skin color of the offender. Those experiences came together when I interacted with my first protest movement post-radicalization, the 2014 Eric Garner protests in New York City. All this to say, I have a deep political and emotional hatred of the cruelty that is the American “justice” system, and a commitment to end it.
At the same time, the last four years I have been honed in on the thought that the greatest protest movement in a generation has been cresting and is in the process of dissolving. The local nature of funding battles against police departments means that, without a national-level struggle, we are each individually left to fight our own specific police department, while every individual police department effectively has the full force of the US government and capital behind it. We saw this in Stop Cop City in Atlanta, where some of the bravest and smartest political action we’ve seen this decade is slowly being broken down by an increasingly powerful police state.
Further, the nature of the demand itself poses struggles. Abolition itself is a transitional demand, a demand that we’re making of the capitalist state which we know we cannot achieve under capitalism. The issue with this is it makes our immediate tasks unclear, and the agitational nature of the demand leaves us vulnerable to a reactionary counter-attack. For the last 4 years, the press has used the election of some abolitionist city council people in some progressive cities across the country to make the argument that the police *have*been abolished in US cities, and that we basically live under a Deathwish-style crime regime. Within our movements, outside of the cadre layer, abolitionism is degenerating into a vibe, a faintly held memory of a belief, which is losing ground every day to a historic opposition to abolitionism within parts of the socialist movement.
During MUG Congress, a comrade proposed an amendment to our program which mixed the real criticisms we may have of the fuzziness of Abolition as a transitional demand with, in my opinion, unprincipled politicking. Under the justification that we do not want to be attacked for allowing Derek Chauvin out of prison, the amendment proposed that we only call for the release of Unjustly Imprisoned incarcerated people in the minimum program.
To quickly respond to that: Pu Yi did far more damage than Derek Chauvin ever did, and yet he was allowed to be rehabilitated and become a normal citizen of the Chinese People’s Republic, a resolution which I think we all prefer to the murder of the Romanovs. We live in an unjust society where *no one* is “justly” imprisoned, and rehabilitation needs to be the north star of our view on the carceral system.
The amendment was voted down by a small margin due, in the end, to this opportunistic framing, but it had so much support because it brought up another question. The total abolition of the prison or policing system is something we aspire to under socialism, but is not something we can achieve under capitalism. The fuzziness created by that difference puts us in the classic question of keeping to an ultraleft demand or compromising on the demand to “get real change done.” Either choice puts us out of the space of the Marxist minimum-maximum program and away from clarity.
Marxists did not adopt a minimum program with the intent that those minimum demands be just things we’re doing in the short term. The minimum program specifically addresses the parts of our society that keep the working class from governing it and what we should do to we remove them. Then and *only* then should we take government as socialists. Therefore, the minimum program must consist of a list of government policies that, when enacted, enable workers to take power. It is important to understand not just what is achievable or what would make a pretty demand, but what elements of the system erected around us are load-bearing. That is the heart of the minimum program which gives it a revolutionary clarity.
Socialists have attempted to parse the demand for abolition into the “achievable” demand of “defunding the police,” a defensive demand to slow the growth of the prison system. While the degree to which the police dominate municipal budgets is important, the issue with the police (as with the US carceral system) is not just its size. Our carceral system is “unsafe at any speed” and it grows from its own momentum. Again, the minimum program asks us not what is achievable, not what makes for good agitation, it asks us what elements of these institutions prevent workers from ruling. On prisons at least, I’ve identified two elements that I think propel their growth, and I would love for us to continue to think about what role policing plays in the contemporary US economy.
While we can see multiple prison regimes under capitalism and even just US history, the US today is marked by the scars of mass incarceration. The United States has the most prisoners by population. This emerged from the “prison fix,” which solved decades of Black urban radicalism through mass incarceration and the over-policing of working-class and nationally oppressed neighborhoods. This has two sides to it. First, any felon is permanently disenfranchised, putting them forever outside of the bounds of our democracy, which allows imprisonment to “solve” the problem of poor black and latino workers becoming radicalized. This had immediate repercussions (in the long-term imprisonment of many famous political prisoners) but it has also had a broader effect on radicalism in general. Because imprisonment for a felony carries with it the threat of *total* disenfranchisement, and because felonies rain so heavily on our nationally oppressed comrades, the legal threats implied in open and democratic membership, or political radicalism in general, are worsened. The “prison fix” was largely successful in its goal of destroying black and latino radical membership organizations. What exists in their stead is an ultra left/liberal ecosystem based around individual personalities and their friend groups. That organizational ecosystem is not the product of incorrect strategies, it is a response to the constant threat of police violence that marks black & brown communities. Thus, even if the police are not in every meeting we facilitate, the threat of imprisonment furthers the split between the white and non-white working class.
The second side, which promotes and advantages the jailers, is the continuation of prison slave labor explicitly allowed in the 13th Amendment. This allows mass incarceration to be used in support of any number of state industries, from desks to workbooks to firefighting, for far less than the minimum wage. This slave labor, despite being a small portion of the economy, plays a major part in the localities it is present by affecting the aggregate cost of labor, in a way we cannot affect. Try walking into a prison to organize the workers and see how far you’ll get. Hell, try and salt a prison and see how far you’ll get! Prison labor is so low cost not just because of the formal laws, but because of the amount of force needed to alienate the imprisoned from their labor. This is enforced by guards who are relatively well paid, thus locking a good portion of the population of prison towns into an alliance with the carceral system. It is no mistake that the Buffalo Tops shooter came from the area around Attica; this political economy generates white supremacy as a feature.
I think that this Congress shows us a way out of this problem, which can be elegantly expressed in a Marxist minimum program pointing out exactly how the prison system and prison fix weakens the working class. Closing prisons is important, but when we focus too much on the expansion of the prison system we can lose track of what drives that expansion: the need to have the threat of disenfranchisement hang over every crime, and the superprofits generated by slave labor. By fighting for the incarcerated to have the same rights granted to all other Americans, including the right to vote, freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, and the removal of a separate system of labor regulation and prison slavery, we will be at a point where, upon winning these reforms, despite not ending prisons, we will have neutralized the effects of the “prison fix.” I think that could be the heart of Marxist prison abolitionist politics.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### MUG’s Vision of Democracy
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mugs-vision-of-democracy/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:27:13.000Z
Why does Marxist Unity Group organize within the Democratic Socialists of America? Why is MUG obsessed with the idea of democracy and the mass party? What is the strategy of patience? What is the difference between democratic centralism and bureaucratic centralism, and why does it matter? Why does MUG love debate so much? What is protagonism? Who counts as part of the proletariat? Who is the vanguard of the proletariat? What does it mean when MUG comrades say “put members in control”? Why is MUG always talking about programmatic unity, minimum-maximum programs, tribunes of the people? This article is addressed to the reader who holds these questions in their heart but is disinclined to spelunking the depths of a 600-page textbook to find the answers.
Socialism is ultimately a means to freedom. If you don’t have a say in decisions that affect you, you are not free. If you do have a say in the decisions that affect you, your freedom is secured by taking part in **democracy**. This word once inspired nightmares of guillotines and servile uprisings in the minds of our country’s founding gentry but has since been laundered and repackaged as the spirit of the nation. Today, “democracy” is primarily deployed as an empty rhetorical device signifying geopolitical alignment with the US Department of State. Historical slave societies like ancient Athens, modern European oligarchies, and Gulf State monarchies are all labeled “democratic” while Cuba and Vietnam are called “authoritarian.” A US President losing the popular vote and still taking office is a “democratic election,” but expanding the unelected Supreme Court to better reflect the will of the electorate is a “threat to democracy”, and so on.
Socialists thus have to be precise when we discuss democracy in order to draw out the fallacies behind these prevailing liberal ideas. Bourgeois “democracy” grants freedom to a minority of large property owners and ties the concept of liberty to that ownership, arguing that everyone under capitalism is free because everyone supposedly has the opportunity to become a capitalist. We’re asked to avert our eyes from the disenfranchisement of the laboring majority of humanity and focus on the ephemeral opportunities for sweatshop workers to become sweatshop owners. To be a socialist is to recognize that this vision of individual liberty is incompatible with universal liberation. We want to create a democratic society free from class tyranny. We want to live in a world where everyone gets a say in the decisions that affect their lives, whether it be in government or the workplace.
The men who founded the United States and framed its Constitution did not want such a world to develop. In fact, they [explicitly admitted](https://avalon.law.yale.edu/18th%5Fcentury/fed10.asp?ref=marxistunity.com) their intention to form a republic impervious to the will of the working classes. This fact leads MUG members to view the US Constitution as our country’s primary political obstacle to democracy. With the goal of a democratic polity in mind, we look to history, political theory, and practical organizing lessons to help us select the tools we’ll use to overcome the tyranny of the Constitutional Regime. This process has prompted many of us to identify an independent **mass party** of the working class as the best tool for the job. As [Lenin once said](https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/7thcong/01.htm?ref=marxistunity.com): “The millions-strong masses…where there are not thousands, but millions, that is where serious politics begin.” DSA currently operates as an organization of political activists in the tens of thousands. We are currently the largest socialist organization in the United States, but still haven’t reached the same percentage of the population that the Socialist Party of America did in the last century. For DSA to become the party of the US working class, our organization needs to function as a microcosm of the wider democracy we seek to establish. In other words, we need party democracy to establish a wider polity democracy. The end goal of a democratic society is something almost everyone in DSA agrees on, but the various wings and caucuses each have different answers for how to get there. The answers to the questions listed above are all ingredients in MUG’s recipe for turning DSA into a functional vehicle for democracy.
Let’s begin with the **strategy of patience**. This is a term we picked up from Mike Macnair, who wrote about it at length in his book *Revolutionary Strategy* (2010). It boils down to the idea that socialists should not take state power until a majority of the population agrees with our ideas and is organized to fight for them. Throughout history, socialist parties have attempted to exercise state power before meeting this prerequisite, and each attempt ultimately failed. This mistake comes in two flavors: right and left. The right wing of the socialist movement often seeks to take power by getting elected into the leadership of a bourgeois government, only to end up pinned between the institutional weight of its anti-democratic foundations and the disillusionment of the working class. A few examples– the German SPD’s sporadic coalition governments of 1918-1930 which put the workers’ party in a position of managing capitalist crises, leading to the rise of Adolf Hitler; the French Mitterand government of 1981-1995 which marked the decline of the country’s Communist Party after its stint in government as a junior coalition partner; the Greek Syriza government of 2015-2019 which saw the coalition of socialist parties implement harsh austerity and swiftly lose popular support. Conversely, the left wing of the socialist movement often seeks to take power as a militant minority through armed insurrections which are crushed by reactionary forces and forgotten. Examples of the latter– the German March Action of 1921; the various bombing sprees of the mid-twentieth century by groups like the Weathermen in the US and the Red Army Faction in West Germany; the Shining Path insurgency active between 1980-2018 in Peru.
The strategy of patience requires shunning supposed shortcuts and focusing on the long-haul work of building a socialist majority in the working class. The bourgeoisie can rely on police and military action to enforce their governments’ decisions: we cannot. The bourgeoisie can rely on private mercenaries to terrorize civilian populations and subvert state power when popular forces enter government, but we cannot operate in the reverse. Our only option is to use all available means at our disposal to develop the organized workers’ movement and rally the majority of the working class to support our mission. “Base-building” efforts to form lasting workers’ institutions like mutual aid societies, sports clubs, labor/tenant unions, and more all have a place in our toolbox alongside electoral work. DSA now finds itself in a state of transition as shifting conditions prompt rethinking around our electoral work. On one side we have the previously dominant right wing pursuing a liquidationist strategy of getting electeds into office and using them to secure junior partner status within the Democratic Party. On the other side we have the left wing which was previously uninterested in electoral efforts altogether beginning to craft a more disciplined approach to this work which could lead to the formation of a serious independent socialist party. This party would be the first of its kind in living memory, since the last generation to engage the masses through a nation-wide socialist electoral program has long passed.
In MUG we maintain the necessity of politicizing our base-building and electoral tactics so that all our work is aimed at the same target: the conquest of state power by the working class (in a word, democracy). A key factor in reforming DSA’s electoral program to this end is the adoption of **tribunes of the people**. These are socialist cadres elected to legislative offices with a different mission than most of their colleagues. Rather than attempting to negotiate backroom deals and secure modest advantages for their constituents, tribunes focus on using their platform to win the working class over to socialist politics. Their best tools for this job are relentless agitation and intransigent opposition. They use every means at their disposal to block the passing of harmful laws, they vote against every budget that includes funding for military or police, they take the microphone at every opportunity to expose the rotten corruption of our constitutional oligarchy and demand that democracy take its place. When they bring popular reforms to their respective legislative bodies for a vote, they refuse to compromise or horse-trade just for some watered-down version of it to pass. With the working class rallied behind them, their message to the ruling class is simple: “Meet our demands or suffer the consequences”. As the organized power of the class grows, so does our capacity to enforce our demands, until eventually the proletariat is positioned to govern.
If we enter government this way, we can hold on to state power even in the face of vicious coup d’etat attempts, right-wing terrorist attacks, and anti-democratic judicial trickery. If we pursue shortcuts through coalitions and compromise, we will be doomed to fail under these pressures. Cuba and Chile offer an instructive case study of this dynamic. Cuban socialists built majority support by involving the people in every aspect of governance, armed the general population, and fostered a revolutionary culture as an alternative to the predominant social mores of the past. As a result, they have withstood invasions, assassination attempts, and terrorist attacks, and remain a socialist nation today. Chilean socialists were elected to government in coalition with centrists in 1970, failed to involve the masses in governance to the degree of their Cuban counterparts, and refused to arm the people, only to perish three years later when their centrist coalition partners backed a CIA-sponsored military coup. The strategy of patience is not just about waiting until we’ve gathered majority support to take power, but also redefining what “power” means by elevating the working class majority to governance. This power is the basis of democracy. We win on this basis so long as it is organized, independent, and aware of its goals.
On to **democratic centralism** and **bureaucratic centralism**. These organizational models help us understand the ways in which we can bring the working class into political struggle. The phrase we’ve inherited from the Marxist tradition to describe our version of democracy is “**democratic centralism.**” This is simply the idea that every individual in a collective body has the right to participate in decision-making, and every individual has the responsibility to carry out the decisions the body makes. Another common phrase to describe this is “diversity of thought, unity of action.” While this sounds easy and uncomplicated on paper, it often takes a wealth of bitter lessons to implement in practice. I’ve found it helpful in this regard to think of organizational mistakes as a resource– every failure builds institutional memory until democracy becomes a muscular reflex. Sadly our movement’s history is littered with examples of organizations theoretically committed to anti-democratic models of decision-making. While some socialist organizations consciously reject the idea of democratic centralism, many others attempt its implementation, come up against obstacles, and make virtue out of necessity.
Some organizations hyperfocus on centralizing or decentralizing their internal structures, which always hollows out the body over time. Exclusive focus on decentralizing leads to siloed projects, hidden informal leadership unaccountable to rank and file members, social clique dominance, and other issues which the feminist writer Jo Freeman termed “[The Tyranny of Structurelessness](https://www.jofreeman.com/joreen/tyranny.htm?ref=marxistunity.com).” Exclusive focus on centralizing leads to organizational inertia, entrenched formal leadership unaccountable to rank and file members, social cliques elevated to formal committee status through appointments and dubious elections, people voting with their feet by simply leaving or disengaging when they when they lose a vote, and a general lack of collective creativity which all combine to form what we in MUG call **bureaucratic centralism**. The tyranny of structurelessness, democratic centralism, and bureaucratic centralism all exist in various DSA spaces at the national and chapter levels, with champions of each competing to implement their leadership model. MUG wants a DSA where everyone gets a say, where political minorities are able to organize to win people over and build a majority, and where comrades accept political defeats patiently and continue to cooperate on common projects. This is what democratic centralism meant in the early days of the Marxist political project, and it remains so for those of us in MUG. The rich internal democracy elaborated here is crucial to the project of growing DSA into a millions-strong mass party.
Here we turn to the importance of **debate**. In the United States most people first encounter debate in one of two ways: high school debate clubs (arguing for the sake of getting better at arguing where interlocutors compete to score literal points) and presidential election debates (spectacles of disagreement between two members of the ruling class representing the same donor base). This leads to a popular perception of debate as pointless and superficial. This perception is further reinforced by a body of academic literature authored by educated members of the politically-enfranchised petit bourgeoisie who are exasperated by having to perform rituals of feigned democracy for an audience of disdained “median voters.” Take for example this excerpt from the [*Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society*](https://doi.org/10.1093/arisoc/aoad006?ref=marxistunity.com):
> “…a wealth of empirical and anecdotal evidence seems to suggest that arguments are in fact not very efficient tools to change minds (Gordon-Smith 2019; McIntyre 2021). For example, the well-documented phenomenon of polarization (Isenberg 1986; Sunstein 2002) suggests that, when exposed to arguments supporting positions different from their prior views, people often (though perhaps not always) become even more convinced of their prior views rather than being swayed by arguments (Olsson 2013). Frequently, argumentative encounters look rather like games where participants want to ‘score points’ (Cohen 1995; Dutilh Novaes 2021) rather than engage in painstaking consideration of different views for the sake of epistemic improvement.”
Debate doesn’t work, it’s a waste of time, people don’t change their minds, they just get entrenched in their preconceived notions and lash out in anger. This sort of thinking leads people to question the value of democracy altogether. Why should we even include habitually uninformed and politically inactive people in our decision-making process when we already have all the answers? This is historically the unified refrain of every politically-enfranchised class from 17th-century British parliamentarians to Third Period Soviet nomenklatura. Regrettably, it’s also a common notion in DSA. Some comrades, especially among chapter and national leadership, see themselves as professional organizers who know the playbook by heart and view rank and file DSA members as a politically-inert volunteer labor pool. Anyone with strong opinions who challenges the status quo is a disorganizing agitator who must be contained in order to safeguard the important work being done. I call this paradigm “NGO-brain” because it’s the standard mode of operation for most liberal 501c3’s, where many comrades get their first taste of organizing. Thankfully, it’s a bad habit that can be unlearned.
Debate is in fact crucial to the functioning of any democratic body. If comrades are expected to rubber-stamp resolutions and carry out marching orders from leadership rather than participating in strategic discussion, the few are leading the many by the nose. Aside from concerns of disenfranchisement and paternalism, there’s also the problem of inefficiency. An omniscient committee has never been assembled. Widening the decision-making body to meaningfully include rank and file members through democratic debate allows us to view our problems from more angles and discover opportunities we may have otherwise missed. It also gives us the chance to practice comradely disagreement and constructive criticism, both necessary ingredients for achieving unity through diversity. When unity is demanded from the top, it can only be feigned by the bottom. This creates a house of cards that is doomed to fall. We should recall the strategy of patience: building up an organized majority for revolutionary activity. Doing the hard work of building unity from the bottom up is far more capacity-intensive, but once erected its foundation will stand the test of time.
We call our orientation towards this hard work **protagonism**, and itis crucial to MUG’s strategy. Protagonism is not an act in itself, but a way of acting that recognizes the individual agency of the people we organize. Any tactic can be executed in a way that either condescends to or protagonizes the people. Protagonizing puts the emphasis on asking questions, listening, attempting to learn, and practicing deep democracy. Condescending puts the emphasis on making statements, talking, attempting to persuade, and establishing hierarchies of leadership. Good organizing requires all of the above, but the placement of emphasis is a subtle distinction with significant implications. If people feel led by the nose, they won’t follow us for long. This is often the case in organizations structured around bureaucratic centralism or the tyranny of structurelessness. MUG members tend to view the international proletariat as the collective protagonist in a world-historic battle to liberate humanity from oppression and exploitation. Once we’ve internalized that belief, building relationships with working-class people and putting them in the driver’s seat of democratic organizations is the only rational response. In the day to day, this can look like centering discussions of tactics and strategy in our deliberations, fighting for democratic meetings, emphasizing the political lessons to be learned from the practical work we engage in, and generally treating our comrades as serious partners in struggle.
This is how we rally the class to our politics, a pivotal step in building an independent political party with a mass base of proletarians. It should be noted that MUG’s view of the **proletariat** includes all those dependent on either their own labor or the general wage-fund for survival, including unemployed and disabled people who rely on social programs rather than private property like stock portfolio dividends or real estate rental income. This definition is especially important at the international level, since the majority of human beings who work for a living are not paid formal wages, particularly in the Global South. The **vanguard** of the proletariat is simply the contingent of the class at the forefront of the workers’ movement. The striking workers on picket lines, the tenant union members presenting demand letters to their landlords, the canvassers knocking doors for popular ballot measures and electoral candidates. When we join these proletarians in struggle and politicize their practical demands, we spread the good news of socialism and win the working class over to our ideas. MUG’s vision of class leadership involves leading from the front, not giving orders from behind. The vanguard of our class is already at the front: our job as socialists is to stand with them, to learn from them, and to rally the rest of the class to join the fight. Those who criticize from the sidelines are irrelevant. Those who assume leadership of the movement from unaccountable positions of comfort and treat their fellow workers as an inert pool of volunteer labor are doomed to create a hollowed-out bureaucracy primed for cooptation.
This is why MUG comrades commenting on internal DSA politics often employ phrases like “**put members in control**” or “control the bureaucrats.” We recognize that revolution is not possible without the hard work of professional revolutionaries. Any successful political project requires participants who are dedicated full-time to its work, and those people need to be compensated in order to reproduce themselves. Paid political leadership and organizational staff are an indispensable necessity, but steps must be taken to ensure they do not become the primary decision-making layer of DSA. The rank-and-file membership can and should run the organization. We do as much (or sometimes even more) labor for DSA compared to our paid counterparts, we are just as much members of the working class, and we are capable of intelligent collective decision-making. Democratic practices like voting at meetings rather than asynchronous online setups, employing representative election methods like STV over easily-manipulated methods like Borda, prioritizing compensation for elected leaders over unelected staff, hosting regular Robert’s Rules trainings to empower members to exert control over meetings, and so on are of the utmost importance to maintaining rank-and-file party democracy in DSA.
There is a tendency in the US left, mainly informed by the organizing model of liberal NGOs, which makes a distinction between “professional organizers” and “volunteers.” The former see themselves as the protagonists of the socialist movement, and every-day working-class folks as potential volunteers to be recruited into campaigns. Once a volunteer has accumulated enough political work experience, they can join the ranks of the professionals and become part of collective decision-making. This tendency manifests itself mostly, though not exclusively, on the right wing of DSA. It’s a paradigm that reproduces all of the problems of bureaucratic centralism enumerated above. It ignores the political activity of working-class communities we often don’t see because we’re not present in every struggle. It further ignores that, by nature of being a majority-white organization, we have racial blindspots that cloud our perception of class activity even when we do see it. Being full-time organizers can often give us tunnel vision that only grounding in the working class can ameliorate. In MUG, we believe that the basis of building trust in the working class is by engaging them politically through the medium of democracy. Importantly, we also believe that any worker can be trusted to participate in political decision-making without meeting contrived “professional organizer” criteria.
Now we finally arrive at the question of unity. Through all the methods and postures explored above, MUG hopes to unify DSA on the basis of a written political program (usually called a “platform” in the US). **Programmatic unity** in our case is the aspiration that DSA members can continue to disagree on and debate finer theoretical points and immediate tactical questions while working together on a long-term plan aimed at a collectively-shared end goal. In other words, the program is the formal basis on which we envision DSA practicing genuine democratic centralism.
There are several ways to frame a program, and we see the classic **minimum-maximum program** as the ideal model. It comprises two parts: *the minimum demands section,* and the *maximum demands section*. The *minimum section* is a list of political and economic demands which individually would improve the material conditions of the working class as isolated reforms, but if enacted together would constitute the end of capitalist state power and the beginning of the proletariat’s political rule. In other words, the minimum demands would combine to form the minimum basis on which DSA would take responsibility for governance. It should be noted that “governing” differs in the United States compared to the parliamentary systems of Europe for which minimum-maximum programs were originally devised, so in our case this would mean taking executive office. Getting DSA members elected into Congress to act as tribunes of the people by agitating against the two-party oligarchy and pushing for the implementation of our minimum program’s reforms will be a crucial step in the process, but would not entail “governing” in the sense that I mean here. Flowing from this, the *maximum section* elaborates the goals a socialist government would pursue once in power: a period of economic reconstruction and cultural reconfiguration which would totally transform society as we know it by collectivizing the means of production, abolishing the class system, dismantling hierarchies of identity, and putting unequal exchange between nations in its grave. In short, the maximum section details the socialist government’s transition from the capitalist mode of production to communism.
We would like to see *acceptance of* a minimum-maximum program and payment of regular dues become the basic requirements for DSA membership. This does not imply that *agreement with* every aspect of the program would be required or that anyone would be purged from the organization for voicing criticism of it. In fact, we regularly voice criticism of [DSA’s current Political Platform](https://www.dsausa.org/dsa-political-platform-from-2021-convention/?ref=marxistunity.com) and encourage others to do the same. *Acceptance* of the program only entails a posture of “I agree with enough of this to join, and I’ll work to change the parts I disagree with as a productive dues-paying member.” The program should be updated regularly in order to reflect evolving material conditions and the political will of the membership. This would allow it to serve as a genuine basis for unity in the organization, something we desperately need as conditions worsen and the various wings of DSA drift further apart in response. MUG sees programmatic unity as a necessity for the maintenance of DSA’s “big tent.” Our organization has two other options:
1. Theoretical unity, in which one wing of the organization imposes itself on the other and everyone is required to rigidly adhere to the ideas mandated by the organization’s leadership, which would result in most people simply leaving the shrunken tent.
2. Siloed unity, in which each wing and caucus of DSA forms its own committees and working-groups and runs them as factional fiefdoms, refusing to cooperate with others and demanding to be left alone, which will eventually result in the big tent blowing away when the winds of repression inevitably intensify.
Programmatic unity would essentially serve as the stakes keeping our big tent fastened to the ground. It would allow for the open disagreement, debate, and democracy that is essential to keeping people engaged in an organization that doesn’t compensate their labor while maintaining our combined efforts once a decision is reached. The cohesive power of a program will be especially important in the years to come, with the left facing down the prospects of heightened state repression. There is no possibility of a future where socialists in the United States are able to organize openly and with ease. Beyond the obvious ramifications of the second Trump administration, we can also look to the [Democratic Party-led](https://hammerandhope.org/article/andre-dickens-cop-city-black-politicians?ref=marxistunity.com) Cop City project in Atlanta, the [Biden administration’s mass deportation regime](https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/biden-deportation-record?ref=marxistunity.com), and the ominous [Project 2025](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/aug/29/trump-project-2025-history?ref=marxistunity.com) which was endorsed by backers of [both 2024 Presidential candidates](https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/us-politics/dick-cheney-vote-kamala-harris-b2608535.html?ref=marxistunity.com). All signs point in the same direction: the horrors that our government exports across the globe are coming home. If DSA is going to weather the storm, we need a solid program to hold us together.
It is no secret that the Democratic Socialists of America was founded as an explicitly anti-communist, pro-Zionist sect in 1982 with only a few thousand members. It saw little to no growth for decades, eventually becoming a retirement club for Democratic Party-affiliated progressives. This only began to shift when Bernie Sanders ran for President of the United States in 2016 while openly calling himself a “democratic socialist.” Through a combination of search engine optimization, media production, and sheer luck, DSA’s membership numbers exploded over the following years. A new problem arose: the younger cohort of DSA members outnumbered the original sect 15-to-1, and most of them disagreed with the old guard’s commitments to DNC politicking, redbaiting, and active-duty IDF membership. Today our organization looks almost nothing like the original DSA, prompting [bitter resignations](https://newrepublic.com/article/176781/open-letter-why-leaving-democratic-socialists-america?ref=marxistunity.com) from the 1980s Cold Warriors. We now find ourselves at the end of a road. We can return to our sectarian roots [as some on the right wing of DSA have suggested](https://dsamass.org/2022/08/08/dsa-big-tent/?ref=marxistunity.com), or we can forge ahead and blaze a new trail. There will be weeping and gnashing of teeth from those who are petrified by any appearance of “infighting” or “factionalism”, but we can see past those labels for what truly lies behind them: **democracy**.
Marxist Unity Group aspires to **unite** DSA members around a revolutionary **minimum-maximum program** informed by the **strategy of patience.** We want to **put members in control** by practicing **democratic centralism** with a rich internal culture of comradely **debate**. We want to **protagonize** the **proletariat** by rallying the **vanguard** to our organization and elevating the whole class to political rule. In order to achieve this, we recognize the necessity of organizing on every front of the class war. We will fight in the labor unions and tenant associations, in the prisons and migrant camps, in the street confrontations with police and in the halls of government. We want our comrades in elected office to act as **tribunes of the people**, agitating for our ideas to an audience of millions. This is MUG’s vision for transforming DSA into a genuine socialist **mass party**. This is our vision for dismantling the US Constitutional Regime and building a true **democracy** in its place. We would love for you to join us:
[https://dsausa.org/join](https://dsausa.org/join?ref=marxistunity.com)
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Electoralism and the Electoral System
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/electoralism-and-the-electoral-system/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:27:52.000Z
As the dust settles on the 2024 elections in the United States, the prognosis is grim. The reactionary and politically repressive Republican Party has gained total control over every branch of government. Meanwhile, the mouthpieces of the Democratic Party have failed to offer any reasonable reflection about the failure of their right-wing messaging in the lead up to November. Harris fully endorsed Benjamin Netanyahu and Joe Biden’s campaign of genocide in Palestine, highlighted support from the Cheney family, essentially adopted Trump’s 2016 immigration platform, and abandoned any elements of the economic populism that Harris pretended to embrace in her 2019 run.
In response to their defeat, establishment Democratic politicians and pundits have dug in their heels. Op-eds and interviews now embrace throwing the most vulnerable populations under the bus—calling for [abandonment of trans people](https://www.msnbc.com/weekends-with-alex-witt/watch/rep-moulton-stands-by-controversial-transgender-athlete-comments-amid-democratic-backlash-224073285910?ref=marxistunity.com), [embracing tough-on-crime policies](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/11/08/katie-porter-voted-for-californias-flawed-tough-on-crime-measure-that-divided-top-dem-00188542?ref=marxistunity.com), and, absurdly and in defiance of all [polling data](https://theintercept.com/2024/05/21/democrats-biden-voters-gaza/?ref=marxistunity.com), even [claiming Democratic politicians did not embrace Israel or crack down on Palestinian activism *enough*](https://x.com/DropSiteNews/status/1854232090075660367?ref=marxistunity.com).
Few socialists would dispute that mainstream American politics is in its darkest place since the surge of interest in socialism after 2016\. And this was clear before a vote was cast—the election pitted an administration actively engaged in genocide against the anti-democratic, cruel and vindictive ideology of Trump (who, it should be noted, is an equally enthusiastic proponent of Israel’s crimes).
[A bill pending](https://theintercept.com/2024/11/10/trump-nonprofit-tax-exempt-political-enemies/?ref=marxistunity.com) in Congress would allow the Secretary of the Treasury to unilaterally strip a nonprofit organization of its status based on their deeming the group a “terrorist supporting organization.” While the thought of Trump’s administration possessing these powers is chilling, the bill predates the election and has two Democratic co-sponsors—both AIPAC favorites. The reason House Democrats largely turned against the bill was that it would grant these powers to Trump, not Harris.
Now, more than ever, it is clear that the Democratic Party is an inhospitable environment for socialist politics. Its hostility to left-wing politics is not, as some pundits like to pretend, a function of electoral calculus, but a product of its class-backing and the resultant structure of the party. It is vital that socialists build DSA into a politically independent mass party in opposition to the Democratic Party, rather than liquidating into groups and coalitions with diametrically opposed interests.
### **The Fight for Political Independence**
How to best pursue this political independence has long been a topic of debate among DSA’s “partyist” flank. While necessary in the long run, an independent DSA ballot line is secondary to the issues of operational discipline and parliamentary strategy— a point [made excellently](https://weeklyworker.co.uk/worker/1446/charting-a-difficult-course/?ref=marxistunity.com) by Parker McQueeney in the Weekly Worker. The Democratic Party organization, and the Democratic Party ballot-line, are only tangentially related. The former is essentially an opaque fundraising shell represented by a rotating cast of familiar faces in Party leadership. There are few procedures for discipline outside of the soft-power of funding, career prospects, and institutional ties.
This is a dynamic with which DSA ought to be all too familiar. When a DSA-aligned slate won leadership of the Nevada Democratic Party in an upset, the old guard [simply withdrew the money](https://theintercept.com/2021/03/08/nevada-democratic-party-dsa/?ref=marxistunity.com), quit en masse, and formed parallel organizations to influence the Democratic Party ballot-line. In Buffalo, DSA-backed India Walton won the Democratic nomination in the 2021 mayoral election, only to be defeated by incumbent Byron Brown’s well-funded and institutionally connected write-in campaign in the general.
The Democratic Party’s day-to-day operations are invisible to the average worker, yet it retains its status through legal fiction. Universal suffrage is reduced to the infrequent, atomized choice of ticking a box next to the ‘R’ or the ‘D’—and for the more engaged voter, to enjoy the wider variety of tightly controlled party primaries,
These choices are often made in large districts that require enormous financial backing and institutional support to win in the absence of mass politics. Undergirding this is a campaign finance law tailored to individuals over parties, strict ballot access requirements for third parties in most states, and limited means to effect change to the electoral system beyond the legislature.
Our legal-constitutional order forms the structure within which the capitalist politician thrives, making use of access to money and undemocratically obtained institutional connections. Meanwhile, the legal machinations surrounding the form of the political party serve to actively stifle its potential as a vehicle for mass politics.
Socialists in the United States must recognize these facts when determining our electoral strategy. We derive our principles not simply from “doing the right thing,” or as a rote response to the conditions that we face. Our principles serve as a road map for developing tactics which can transform conditions to meet our goals. These challenges do carry a silver lining: they are answered by the substance and form of a mass party, especially in the realm of electoral politics.
Despite its legal status as a 501(c)(4) with no ballot line of its own, DSA is a political party in all but name, but not in the bourgeois sense. It is a membership organization with powers to discipline, affiliate and disaffiliate, and endorse its members. To compare with an example in the United Kingdom, the Labour Party determines its nominees for office from the top-down. Generally speaking, incumbents are automatically re-selected, although under the Keir Starmer regime exceptions have been made to de-select members of the labour left.
If Labour Party membership is unhappy with leadership, well [that’s too bad](https://labourlist.org/2021/09/labour-nec-approves-20-mp-nomination-threshold-for-leadership-contests/?ref=marxistunity.com)! A leadership challenge requires support from a large portion of the Members of Parliament, themselves largely selected by leadership. It is a system built specifically for the purpose of keeping the left from ever gaining power. Why then would a socialist ever be a member of the Labour Party? They might as well join the Democratic Party.
Most DSA chapters will need to prioritize building up end-to-end campaigns, however, to put themselves on the map as a real political option. This is necessary to build on, unify, and propel the organizing that members do in other areas—like labor, abolition, or tenant organizing. There is a crowded graveyard of socialist third-parties in this last century which can attest to this point, and which rode a spiral of ballot access campaigns into single-issue irrelevance. An adoption of a “clean break” policy (abandoning the Democratic Party ballot-line) would indicate that we clearly see ourselves as a party with a distinct program to bring to the working class with the means to organize an independent presence on the ballot.
It would also mean DSA would have to be willing to discipline members who continued to run on the Democratic Party line, even those who are committed to our program. Could we truly convince an effective DSA elected who has voted and agitated in line with our platform that she must either run third-party, and likely lose her seat, or else lose DSA endorsement? Such a tactic—adopted prematurely and under the uneven political and electoral conditions that various chapters currently face—would risk not only alienating the members who worked to get these people elected, but limit the ability of DSA members to serve as tribunes in the halls of power. Advocates of a premature break often seem to place primacy on the ballot line as the determining factor in our internal politics.
Similarly, the “dirty stay” (the belief that DSA cannot currently achieve an independent existence outside the Democratic Party), while tactically correct on the ballot-line question, shares a similarly narrow view of the political terrain. Its arguments lose sight of the fact that DSA is *inherently* distinct from the Democratic Party, and that members tend to join us for this reason. This signifies a broader desire for political independence as a motivating force in the working class.
Many comrades who support working within the institutional Democratic Party point to “victories” that demonstrate its purported benefits. David Duhalde of Socialist Majority Caucus has [recently written ](https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/staydirty?ref=marxistunity.com)an article which is replete with misconceptions about DSA’s relationship with the organizational Democratic Party in its attempt to chart the “successes” of this strategy
First noting that DSA neither endorsed a vote for nor against Kamala Harris, Duhalde sidesteps the fact that his caucus [implicitly supported](https://socialismbeatsfascism.org/about/?ref=marxistunity.com) urging members to tactically vote for Harris. He then points to the “success” of the Uncommitted Movement in urging Joe Biden to step aside, and in convincing Harris to select Tim Walz as her Vice-President. DSA embarasses itself by trying to claim such “victories.”
While the unpopularity of the genocide in Gaza may have played some role, the primary consideration in Biden’s dropping-out was his visible mental decline and the subsequent loss of faith of Democratic Party insiders. This was spurred by a loss of public support, and more importantly by donors [withholding money](https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/us/politics/biden-donors-money.html?ref=marxistunity.com) from the campaign.
Meanwhile, figures on the left flank of the Democratic Party—such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—inexplicably eroded their credibility by calling on Biden to remain in the race. Harris, once nominated, took pains not to break with Biden on Gaza in any meaningful way.
“Uncommitted,” a campaign worthy of active support under difficult circumstances, was an unmitigated failure in the objective of influencing the policy of Democratic Party leadership. It failed to garner even the token gesture of a speech at the Democratic National Convention. It failed to get Harris to shift her policy of support for Israel by an inch. Yet many of its prominent representatives still supported a vote for Harris, in spite of having won zero concessions.
Had the entire organization, rather than only a faction, supported the [No Votes for Genocide campaign](https://novotesforgenocide.org/?ref=marxistunity.com) as a continuation of the mass pressure tactic that National Uncommitted abandoned, it may have had more of an impact. This was not the case. The Democratic Party made a bet that the Uncommitted Movement was an empty threat. Although Harris bled Muslim and Arab support, her campaign was not entirely wrong in this appraisal. Many of Uncommitted’s organizers, particularly the national section that kicked off the first state campaign “Listen 2 Michigan,” lined up behind Harris.
The choice of Tim Walz over Josh Shapiro as Harris’s running mate, was sometimes framed as flowing from a fear of backlash to Shapiro’s hardline pro-Israel views. But this was of course never acknowledged by Harris, who seemed to be more focused on [campaigning form, personal impressions, and governing records](https://www.politico.com/news/2024/08/06/why-kamala-harris-chose-tim-walz-00172834?ref=marxistunity.com) than showing progressive face. In those respects, Walz soared above the “showboating” Shapiro, who also had a number of looming scandals. And Walz did well to toe the line. Rather than running moderate cover for Harris’s views, Walz took a more pro-Israel stance during the election than he ever had previously.
A desire to celebrate these phantom “successes” flows from a strategy which views DSA as a junior partner in a broad left-liberal coalition. The Democratic Party establishment sees no such partnership, and holds the left in complete disregard. Harris, who refused to allow a Palestinian speaker at the Democratic National Convention, spent weeks campaigning with neoconservative icon Liz Cheney and proudly trumpeted the support of her war criminal father.
It is difficult to remember the last election in which the left was so thoroughly rejected by the Democratic Party establishment. There is no partnership, and insisting on its existence against all evidence only makes DSA look weak.
It becomes imperative that DSA adopt the electoral strategy of “party surrogate in form, clean break in content.” As long as our electoral system is structured to fight rather than facilitate mass party organizing, we need to recognize that the “dirty break” is not about breaking *socialists* from the Democrats. It means winning the working class away from the Democratic Party’s institutional grip to organize independently through DSA.
Positions like the “dirty stay” and the “clean break” reflect partial answers to the problems that emerge from the sheer difficulty of this task.DSA shouldn’t beg for scraps from Democratic Party institutions, nor should it abstain from contesting their primaries where state laws throw up insurmountable barriers to the formation of an independent ballot line. What is needed is to build on our own autonomous, democratically-organized campaigns.
We can accomplish this by taking the fight from the primaries to the general elections, developing systematic outreach amongst the rank-and-file of working class institutions, and putting forward a clear political program that poses the question of power in clear connection with the day-to-day struggles of the working class.
We need to organize independent socialist blocs within local and state legislatures that can agitate around our program, working within the political mandate of their chapters and the national organization. Even when running on the Democratic ballot line, rooting our electoral work in DSA as a democratic political project while simultaneously fighting for electoral reforms is what will make class-political independence possible.
### **Electoral Reform and the Battle for Democracy**
This brings us to one of the most strategically difficult yet overlooked results of election night: the widespread failure of electoral reform. The first-past-the-post system used in the vast majority of elections constrains the political imagination. Allowing a candidate to win with mere plurality support all but ensures the continuance of a two-party system.
A series of referenda on the ballots this November addressed the question of adopting ranked-choice-voting, or RCV. Ranked-choice-voting is not the most representative form of allocating representatives—it is beaten out on that count by proportional representation. However, with the [federal prohibition on proportional representation](https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/2/2c?ref=marxistunity.com) and many similar state laws, advocates of a more democratic system have turned to RCV as the most immediately viable solution.
While ranked-choice-voting was adopted in Washington, D.C., it was [rejected handily](https://www.npr.org/2024/11/08/nx-s1-5183210/nonpartisan-primary-ranked-choice-voting-results?ref=marxistunity.com) in every state it was on the ballot. This includes Nevada, a state where the measure had passed previously but required a second ratification to be adopted. Meanwhile, in Alaska, one of two states that *already* uses RCV, an effort to repeal the system [failed by just 0.2%](https://news.ballotpedia.org/2024/12/10/five-states-reject-ranked-choice-voting-measures-alaska-retains-system-after-recount/?ref=marxistunity.com) after an extended recount. These votes have gone under the radar, but ought to be understood as a major blow to the effort to build political independence from the Democratic Party, limiting necessary avenues for tactical flexibility.
These movements have suffered not just from outright opposition on behalf of the Republican Party. The Democratic Party has pursued a typically opportunistic and incoherent response, vacillating between support, opposition, and neutrality based on the short-term calculus of relative harm or benefit to their candidates. These campaigns have also often been somewhat disjointed, and disassociated from any national narrative of democratization.
Advocates of more immediately achievable electoral reforms such as FairVote similarly suffer from the narrowness of their mission. Being staff-driven NGOs, they are often far-removed from any broader political movement. While FairVote does theoretically support proportional ranked-choice voting, the bulk of their activism is oriented toward advocating ranked-choice voting in single-member constituencies. While far preferable to first-past-the-post, this still falls short of an electoral system that enables workers to harness our freedom of association for political action. If anything, it ties electoral reform to the continuation of the two-party system.
The adoption of party-list proportional representation, while a distant prospect, would enable the organization of a DSA *slate*. These candidates would be selected democratically by our membership and could be removed at the next election, rather than an individual endorsee who relies on a personal brand for election, insulating them from any loss of faith by the organization. This individualist approach to political action is a product of our single-winner electoral system, which RCV does not change. This is in addition to the campaign finance laws that divorce membership organizations from accountable representation.
DSA is uniquely suited to the fight for democracy. DSA, unlike the Democratic Party or liberal NGOs, recognizes the undemocratic nature of the United States’ electoral system and constitutional order. Similarly, it also recognizes the necessity of party organizations like itself to build the democracy we need.
The cause of adopting a truly democratic-republican form of government is not a question readily put before voters in the media or through electoral forums. When electoral reforms are on the ballot, we have the opportunity to bring this political vision into focus. DSA ought to be at the vanguard of fighting for reforms that democratize the system, while tying it to a comprehensive program for revolutionary democracy and socialism. It should put substantial effort into messaging, ballot initiatives, and legislation through its elected officials towards this purpose.
### **Conclusion**
In the short term, DSA should take a two-pronged approach: (a) running candidates where chapters can focus on building end-to-end democratic campaigns and putting forward DSA’s program, which means openness to running in the Democratic primary; and (b) working toward an electoral system that will eventually allow DSA full independence—including, when the time is right, running candidates on its own ballot line. This means DSA should also support efforts towards ranked-choice-voting as an immediate reform, both within DSA publications and as a policy endorsed by our elected officials.
However, we must engage these campaigns on the condition that we can openly express an alternative path forward to the working class. We can utilize these efforts to highlight the necessity of wielding a mass party in the battle for democracy, the fundamentally undemocratic nature of our political system, and the necessity of extending these reforms to the establishment of multi-member constituencies and party-list proportional representation. DSA-endorsed candidates for federal office also must be asked to support the repeal of the federal law barring proportional representation.
These reforms alone do not amount to a democratic republic. This would require a fusion of powers under the command of the legislature, an end to federalism, and sweeping changes to the executive branch— effectively an overthrow of the Constitution. But they enable the political organizing necessary to form the class political consciousness that understands this revolutionization of the state as its primary task.
There are no shortcuts that will establish DSA as a national political force outside of patient work using all available means. That large part of the workers, trade-unionists, and even socialists engage primarily with politics through the lens of elections is inarguable. DSA’s status as an electoral force is hard-won and should not be tossed away through adventurist campaigns of questionable utility. Electoral reforms must be pursued both for the sake of democracy as an end-in-itself, and as means to further the party project by expanding avenues for political independence.
On the DSA Left, though the details may differ, there is a consensus on the necessity of building a socialist party. I argue that socialists in the United States *already* have in DSAa party in the most important sense, at least its embryonic form. DSA has the ability to remove its members, the ability to condition support on adoption of our program, and to maintain its own structures of discipline outside of—and hostile to—the Democratic Party platform. This, not the manner in which our candidates appear on the ballot, is the key to building DSA as a third force in American politics.
DSA must be unafraid to utilize all the weapons at its disposal—engaging in open struggle to build democratic structures across society—and ensure that our tribunes in the halls of power share our commitment to building a new world.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Statement on No Votes for Genocide
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/statement-on-no-votes-for-genocide/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:28:33.000Z
While we respect the democratic decision of the National Political Committee, we are disappointed the majority voted against our proposal to support the No Votes for Genocide campaign emerging within the Uncommitted movement.
Our hearts are with No Votes for Genocide because it is a concrete, nationwide mass movement for the most important demands in the Workers Deserve More program—an immediate and permanent ceasefire in Gaza, an arms embargo against Israel, and the sovereignty of the Palestinian people. Using votes in the General Election as leverage, it aims to mobilize the Democratic Party’s left-wing base against the party itself, winning an end to the genocide.
We reject the argument, put forward by some comrades, that this campaign is disorganizing for DSA. We see our comrades across the country uniting to build this movement and build momentum in working-class and Arab communities. For our program to have meaning, we must engage with live movements for our demands inside and outside of DSA. Our power is in the working-class—but to realize it, socialists must provide a pulpit and organization to sustain their activity. When a working class movement rises to force the Democrats to end their support for a genocide, socialists must be on their side to the end. Instead, a majority of the NPC decided to resign this potential power.
To the organizers leading the movement on the ground, know that many DSA members are still with you until the end, with or without the support of the NPC. This is a movement that will do more to realize Workers Deserve More than any statement or speech. We call on chapters to continue launching No Votes for Genocide campaigns and to bring our demands into workplaces and unions, faith communities and neighborhoods, to the ballot and to the streets. History will vindicate No Votes for Genocide and Palestine will be free.
### Run Zohran?
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/run-zohran/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T20:29:09.000Z
*This article was originally published in* [*The Socialist Tribune*](https://socialisttribune.substack.com/p/run-zohran)*.*
**1\. Introduction**
In July 2024, sources across New York reported that Assemblymember Zohran K. Mamdani of AD36 in Astoria was considering running for Mayor of New York City. Mamdani, being a DSA-endorsed Socialist in Office, would likely seek another endorsement from our organization before running this race. Endorsing here would essentially be uncharted territory for us. While it is technically true that NYC-DSA has endorsed in executive races in the past, this would be our first time doing so for what is essentially a homegrown DSA candidate. This race presents a wide range of opportunities and challenges for our organization. The endorsement process, should the candidate seek to go through it, will test the strength of our democracy as we navigate a deeply contentious decision together. It is my hope that we can discuss, debate, and indeed disagree joyfully and in the open.
In service of this, I want to summarize some of the main points of contention that will arise around this race. These include the role of the executive in American governance, the role of electoral campaigns in DSA, the possible strategies and tactics to be employed should we decide to run this race, and its potential impacts on our organization. I write this as a member of New York City DSA who *supports* the endorsement of Assemblymember Mamdani for Mayor, provided the conditions outlined below are met. These are by no means exhaustive, but rather seek to *begin* some of these important conversations that will impact DSA both in New York and throughout the country. I hope it will help ground our discussions as our electoral work advances into a new era.
**2\. The Role of the Executive in New York City: The Cop-in-chief problem.**
Before I begin to discuss the campaign itself, it is necessary to be clear about the role of the Mayor in New York City, and what it means to hold this office under the present state of affairs. The office of the Mayor controls, or at least supposedly controls, the 36,000 officers of the New York Police Department. For almost two centuries, this private army has waged class war against working New Yorkers, primarily people of color, with little democratic oversight. The NYPD has used its political influence to control urban affairs for decades as mayors of various political stripes have passed through Gracie Mansion. Governing the city under its present political system would require the Mayor to engage, negotiate, and compromise with a police department that has used its deep embeddedness within our city’s so-called democracy to demand more funding and resources as schools and libraries go without.
We cannot attribute the power of the NYPD merely to the relative size of its budget. Rather, we should treat the police as a political force capable of using its institutional authority (especially around issues of crime and “quality of life”) and its various advocacy organizations (the police “union,” the Republican Party, local news media stoking crime panic) to exert control over city politics.
This dynamic cannot be explained by Eric Adams alone. While he was produced by the NYPD’s patronage systems and has richly rewarded the police, the power of the city police and their “unions” go beyond the rot of any one mayor. To enact change within how the NYPD functions—and to even point the city in the general direction of abolition—will require a mass movement the scope of which has never truly been seen in the United States, with the mandate from a majority of society to fundamentally alter the relations of political power. To take executive power in the absence of the structure for that movement, in my view, is a mistake.
Doing so would make DSA responsible, at least in part, for the abuses of the NYPD, and this will be reflected in our organizing work with communities who have suffered under its tyranny.
Our inability to corral the police in any meaningful way will affect Mamdani’s ability to govern as well, which impacts DSA. Our organization will metaphorically foot the bill for any misgovernance resulting from the difficulty of leading as a socialist in the absence of either a legislative or popular coalition to provide political support. **Victory would thrust DSA into a governing coalition without a mandate to govern.** The organization would be thrown into chaos, our work would be disrupted as we are forced to tail mayoral politics, and Zohran Mamdani would more than likely go down as one of the “least effective” (to use bourgeois political terms) mayors in city history as the forces of capital muster against him. At best, he would be able to govern as a progressive while critics punch left and accuse us of attempting to sabotage his administration if our democratic processes put us into disagreement with his actions.
This does not mean that a victory would not result in gains for New York’s working-class—it very well could.After all, the Mayor has vast amounts of control over the budget of New York City, and improvements can be made in many aspects of life here. But our ability to do that will always be restrained by power brokers in the city, which include police interests. Despite the fact that the cops only comprise five percent of the municipal budget, “functional governance” at the present juncture will always hinge upon appeasing police interests. As such, **it is imperative that Zohran Mamdani does NOT run to win.**
As members across NYC-DSA largely agree that chances of victory are far from likely, I will not belabor this point at great length. But it needs to be understood that once we have abandoned illusions about winning, we can likewise abandon many of the unpleasant compromises that go into an executive electoral campaign. This does not mean we can eschew developing an actual platform for governance as we talk to voters and other stakeholders. Outwardly, we will need to run a serious campaign and present a vision of a socialist executive, even as we inwardly express doubts about its present possibility.
**3\. We need to assert our strategic goals.**
Even after abandoning the goal of electoral victory, there will be robust debate about what this campaign is actually *for.* Is it about gathering data on which areas of the city might be receptive to having a DSA candidate? Is it about gathering data about political issues more generally? Is it about using the campaign as a vehicle to put DSA messaging on the airwaves? Is it about growing our cadre of electoral organizers as our political terrain becomes less favorable? Is it about creating a political coalition that will indirectly unseat Eric Adams? Is it something else? I’m not quite sure. All of these ideas are important, and we need to sort them out *as a separate question from our platform.*
Either way, we should make an effort to make the purpose of this campaign understood among cadre members who are working to organize volunteers. **Though our goals are manifold and diverse, we need to campaign with a unity of purpose as we enter uncharted political territory.** Without being able to clearly articulate our goals, we will not be able to create the groundswell of personnel (and campaign contributions) needed to make for a successful agitational operation.
NYC-DSA will need to proactively respond to a new reality. Previously, when a campaign’s primary goal is to win at all costs, political and strategic discussions within the campaign space have often been pushed to the wayside or held among small groups of stakeholders and cadre. This has even extended to removing socialist messaging from campaign literature. While I am skeptical of this methodology even in a typical campaign, it will be wholly inimical to our operation here. We need to use our democracy to build space to deliberate our goals, both within the formal structure of the campaign and outside of it.
We cannot forget that we are trying to build a socialist party that is capable of making interventions at all levels of political, economic, and social life. An agitational electoral campaign is a unique tool for doing so, and left-wing parties have employed them since at least 1848\. However, unlike a third party that seeks to run a dead-end candidate every four years while lighting money on fire to sue for ballot access, we will be using the space of this campaign to build the scaffolding for future organizing efforts. It is up to us to ensure that they are democratically decided and targeted for maximum effectiveness.
**4\. We need to be bold in our platform.**
We have already discussed how winning a mayoral election in any major American city requires the appeasement of the police, and capital itself (which in present-day New York often means caving to the demands of the real estate lobby by lowering taxes on developers and unraveling tenant protections). **Because victory is unlikely, Assemblymember Mamdani does not need to risk alienating political and economic elites as he builds his campaign message alongside DSA.** An agitational campaign such as this one needs to **be bold** in the construction of a platform.
Despite the low risks, it is still likely that the Assemblymember will draw inspiration for his platform from a wide range of sources as he builds his campaign. DSA needs to be proactive about articulating which planks we want to see in the platform should we give him our endorsement. These will be the issues that will shape our organizing activity in 2025 (and likely well into the 2026 electoral cycle), so we should choose wisely and do so in the open. It is my view that we should urge Assemblymember Mamdani to campaign on four key issues, listed in order of those he is more likely to agree to. They are: **expanding tenant protections, showing solidarity with the people of Palestine, fighting for a democratic city, and reallocating funding and political power from the NYPD.**
**a. Expanding tenant protections.**
The 2024 electoral cycle demonstrated the power of tenant issues at the state level. At the city level, the political players are different, but no less relevant to the millions of New Yorkers living in fear of rent hikes and displacement. In New York City, the Mayor almost dictatorially controls the Rent Guidelines Board, the body that sets rent increases (or theoretically, decreases) in the city’s \~1 million or so rent-stabilized apartments. Under recent administrations, the board has generally sided with landlords, pushing through rent increases despite public opposition.
Assemblymember Mamdani has already shown his support for protecting and expanding rent stabilization during his tenure in Albany, and DSA should have no trouble in urging him to center tenant protections in his platform. Specifically, **he should run on using his control over the RGB to demand a rent freeze for the duration of his tenure in office, and then work to bring the board under democratic (read: tenant) control before he leaves it.**
**b.** **Showing solidarity with the people of Palestine.**
Socialists must continue to resist Israel’s ongoing genocide in Palestine through all means available to us. Assemblymember Mamdani has long stood in solidarity with Palestinians, both in New York and around the world. Many DSA members have suggested that his electoral base will be disaffected Muslim voters in the outer boroughs who are frustrated with U.S. apathy towards mass death abroad. **Assemblymember Mamdani should use this campaign to build public support for the statewide Not On Our Dime Act** (which strips tax-exempt status from charitable organizations materially supporting Israeli settlements) **while looking to pass a similar law at the local level. He should also offer his public support to the BDS (Boycott, Divest, and Sanction) movement while removing legal and civic barriers to its operation in New York City. Finally, he should support a law protecting workers from discrimination, harassment, and intimidation due to their activity or beliefs in support of Palestinian liberation.**
Ultimately, the onus will be on the Assemblymember to show that city-level electoral politics are an effective arena in which Palestinians and their allies can continue the fight for liberation.
Thankfully, an agitational campaign like this one will be able to engage with the movement in a diverse array of ways without having to compromise politically with institutional Zionism, especially if the university encampments resume at the beginning of the school year.
**c. Fighting for a democratic city.**
New York City is run by an elected monarch. The doctrine of “Mayoral Control” gives the Mayor broad authority over rent stabilization, the school system, and a wide range of other city agencies, all with minimal oversight from City Council. Assemblymember Mamdani should use this campaign as a space to highlight the profoundly undemocratic nature of our city. In addition to the reforms to the Rent Guidelines Board mentioned above, **Mamdani should run on a platform of bringing other city agencies under the authority of City Council, the most democratic body in the city. Additionally, Mamdani should push for other democratic reforms, including the re-implementation of proportional representation for City Council.**
The necessity of these reforms will be debated at length at NYC-DSA’s convention in October. It is important to note that this convention will be key for deciding which issues are important for our local political program. Should we pass a “fight for a democratic city” resolution, making sure of Assemblymember Mamdani’s adherence to the resolution and other aspects of our political program will be key to ensuring this campaign is capable of bringing people into DSA.
**d. Reallocating funding and political power from the NYPD.**
Over four years on from the murder of George Floyd at the hands of the Minneapolis Police Department, issues surrounding abolition appear to have receded from the political work of the Left. Given the outsized control police forces have over city politics, I regard this as a mistake. Running a high-profile mayoral campaign without the need to appease police and their unions offers us an incredible space for political intervention, but only if we properly seize the moment.
It is important that socialists do not conflate the political power of the cops with the raw amount of money they are given. A brief search reveals that the NYPD commands about five percent of the city’s annual budget. While it is true that other (and more useful) agencies draw a greater proportion of the city’s cash flow, we should not assume that actually reallocating funds from the police budget will not have both positive economic and political consequences. As such, DSA should use this campaign to challenge the authority of the police in New York. **Assemblymember Mamdani should use his campaign to take an agitational and oppositional stance to the power of the police in New York.** While I am hopeful that Mamdani will take a public stance in favor of reallocating funds from the NYPD budget, I am presently skeptical that he will do so.
For many Black and brown New Yorkers, negative (and quite frequently, deadly) interactions with New York’s uncontrollable private army are the primary engagements they have with the State as adults. Money being used to harass immigrant workers, further dispossess unhoused people, and brutalize fare evaders can instead be used to fund necessary city agencies struggling under austerity conditions. But threatening to reallocate money away from the police budget will also show that Assemblymember Mamdani is deeply concerned with the political state of affairs in New York and wants to check the power of this rogue agency. His decisions in this race may compel other politicians to do the same.
If Assemblymember Mamdani does not commit to this, there are other key things his campaign will need to do in order to demonstrate to voters that the out-of-control NYPD is a top concern. **He needs to publicly oppose the $225 million** [**Cop City project**](https://citylimits.org/2024/07/09/opinion-mayor-adams-wants-to-turn-nyc-into-cop-city/?ref=marxistunity.com)**, currently scheduled to open in Queens in 2026\. Additionally, he must demand investigations into police conduct at protests over the previous four years, and work to disband the NYPD’s Strategic Response Group (SRG), which has been responsible for the brutalization of protestors and activists at pro-Palestine marches this year. He needs to commit to closing Rikers Island, which previous administrations have promised but failed to do.** **Finally, he should use campaign media platforms to highlight the current issues with the status quo, from Eric Adams’ obsession with racist surveillance boondoggles to bloated spending on police settlements and overtime pay.** In doing so, Mamdani will provide a space for New Yorkers of all races and backgrounds to question the role of police in a moment when challenges to their authority have reached a low point.
Between the time that you are reading this and the primary election in 2025 many Black people in New York will be killed by the police. Some of these incidents will go unheralded by the media, while others will be a cause for mass mobilization. When this happens, people will look to Assemblymember Mamdani’s campaign for an affirmation that DSA is fighting for a better world. DSA needs to be able to show working-class people of color in New York that someone is going to fight back against the political and economic power of the NYPD without reservation or fear of intimidation. **Both DSA and the candidate need to be ready and not be blindsided into statements that condemn police brutality but not the existence of the police themselves.**
**e. Other issues**
These aren’t the only issues that make our city run. As the campaign develops, there will be plenty of things to talk about and plenty of things we need to fight for as we lay the groundwork for our socialist future. But **these four issues are the ones that will set Asemblymember Mamdani apart from the other candidates in this race.** These are the issues that will push the DSA difference, and these are the issues that will help build our base as we go out into our city and rally support for our candidate. There would be no point in running in this election if our candidate was not willing to establish himself as the furthest-left option in a crowded field. **“Sewer socialism” issues may be our bread and butter, but they will only get us so far on the doors and in the hearts and minds of working people.**
We need to use convention to ensure that these major issues become a part of Assemblymember Mamdani’s platform. **If his vision for the city is insufficiently bold, we should withhold our endorsement** for this election cycle and redirect our energy toward other necessary political projects. There would be no point in gathering working-class New Yorkers’ hard-earned money for the sake of running a campaign that will not try its utmost to shake the foundations of power in our city.
**5\. We should endorse a “Don’t Rank Adams” canvassing plan.**
Now that we have discussed broader campaign strategy and platform, we will now turn to some of the finer points of running a mayoral race in New York City. Municipal elections in New York, primaries included, use ranked-choice voting. This means, with some rare exceptions, every voter who votes for our candidate will also be voting for others in this race. There are pieces of this issue that require our consideration: the spoiler effect and coalitions with other candidates.
For many Leftists, a primary goal in the 2025 mayoral election is defeating Eric Adams. Fortunately, the ranked-choice system significantly reduces the effect of an agitational campaign creating a spoiler effect—that is, taking votes away from other non-Eric-Adams candidates in the race. Even so, some DSA members have expressed concern that genuine electoral activity in this campaign will contribute to the possibility of Adams being re-elected. I find this unlikely, and DSA members should not be concerned about a spoiler effect.The most likely outcome, in my view, is that an army of DSA canvassers putting our thumbs on the scale will have the effect of raising the consciousness of an electorate whose turnout has plummeted in the previous three years, even if we do not recommend a specific candidate to rank second or third**. We should just be honest about our politics: We hate Eric Adams and want people to rank anyone else.**
This kills two birds with one stone: It allows DSA to focus fully on running Assemblymember Mamdani’s campaign without having to make what is essentially a full-throated endorsement of whatever non-socialist candidates we recommend ranking second or third. DSA members will be active in campaigning against Eric Adams while not being forced to tail whichever faux progressive earns the favor of local center-left power brokers.
The potential wrinkle here is the possibility of coalitions forming (or Zohran’s campaign apparatus forming them) over the course of the race. **DSA should recommend against this, as coalitions will not increase our chance of victory, and will prevent us from using our political capital to attempt to hold other candidates accountable for bad positions.** As we have learned in this month’s discourse surrounding the Presidential election, attempting to demand better from a liberal lesser evil is much more difficult when you are already promising to vote for them anyway!
**6\. We need to ensure political independence and programmatic control.**
A mayoral campaign is a lot of work. It also has a lot of capacity to generate positive press and visibility for DSA and our vision. **This campaign can put DSA in TV ads, bring our message to constituencies we haven’t yet reached, and clarify our political program.** It will also be a massive undertaking that will bring us into coalitions with a wide range of groups that will, like us, attempt to exert pressure on the campaign to further their political goals. DSA must ensure that we will not be reduced to the status of junior partner to any other individual or group.
In order to maintain our political independence, **DSA should require Assemblymember Mamdani and his campaign staff to facilitate regular general meetings with rank-and-file members.** These spaces will allow us to discuss the goings-on in the campaign, provide a space for members to deliver feedback, and build hype for our electoral work as we enter uncharted territory. These spaces will allow Mamdani to get more buy-in from the rank and file, especially those who are skeptical of running an agitational campaign. Furthermore, conversations like these can serve as a blueprint for future DSA electoral campaigns, especially as we consider how we are growing our body of campaign volunteers and other cadres in the future.
**7\. We should be wary of drawing organizing capacity away from our other duties as socialists.**
Less than two months (yes! It was only two months ago!) after the end of the 2024 primary election cycle, NYC-DSA is now considering another major electoral venture. While it is true that the Mamdani candidacy offers a wide range of incredible opportunities for our organization, it is important that we take a step back and consider this election in the broader context of our political work. **In DSA, there is a tendency to believe that organizing capacity is *not* a finite resource.** Priority campaigns, electoral work, and membership work are almost unilaterally framed as purely additive to DSA’s resources—often with little evidence or analysis.
In a sense, this is true. Electoral, IWCO, labor, and all the other aspects of life within DSA draw in organizers who might not participate in our movement without individual areas in which to participate. Having a massive, citywide electoral operation is a thrilling way to grow our base of organizers on this particular front—one of the many reasons why I support running Assemblymember Mamdani for Mayor of New York. But we need to consider how this will reorient our political work in some key areas.
Right now, DSA is trying to establish a firm institutional foothold in Bedford-Stuyvesant, where we recently lost a State Assembly race by around five points. By opening an office and focusing on local outreach, we are working to develop the infrastructure to run again in 2026, this time with more support from various stakeholders. This is important work, in no small part because it (ideally) will bring a lot of electoral-oriented members, such as myself, into the other forms of organizing that building socialism requires.
Running an agitational campaign like this in 2025 could hinder this work, especially if Assemblymember Mamdani’s message does not resonate in the areas in which we canvass. We need to think about what it means to take money and time from working-class New Yorkers to invest in a campaign that will have limited immediate results, especially in a moment in which we are trying to develop our political work in new directions.
NYC-DSA is particularly well-developed in terms of its electoral organizing capacity. We have a robust SIO bureaucracy, and many of our members have deep and extensive electoral experience. I worry that a desire to endorse Assemblymember Mamdani is partially borne out of the idea that this race is a “path of least resistance” for members to continue to have a project to plug into without doing the deep organizing work that building socialism requires. This is, in my view, a genuine risk. But I think it is one we can bear.
First, I think bringing a bold platform to the table has the power to mobilize members who otherwise would not be involved in DSA work at all into a new project that can have a profound impact on our local politics. Our electoral movement is at an inflection point right now, and building a campaign space where questions about the future are debated freely will invigorate the work we do and the movement-builders who do it. **It is an opportunity to test out new tactics and skills that can grow DSA as we continue to orient ourselves to a shifting, post-2020 political reality.** It will give us a chance to revise our[ electoral strategy document](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1xeaGnpoWuIZTpuxgV5XV66stS2duMbHGDTyQg5zkY3w/edit?ref=marxistunity.com), which is almost seven years old, and provide us with new direction as we take on the Democratic establishment in Albany (or perhaps even Washington) in 2026.
Secondly, I think this campaign represents an opportunity for DSA to better clarify our political program as we approach city-level politics in 2025\. Right now, I think we are struggling to find a unity of purpose as we search for the “correct” interventions. The types of mandates provided by our convention and the power of running a truly citywide campaign will give NYC-DSA a chance to clarify what its program for the second half of the decade will be. By working with Assemblymember Mamdani to center issues such as Palestine, police power, and undemocratic city governance, we will be able to find new ways to make targeted interventions on all of these issues long after the campaign is over. **Again, this is only possible if Mamdani and DSA are able to lead with a bold platform for New York City.**
Ultimately, I do not know what the consequences of this campaign on the rest of our organizing work will be. I *do*think members who are not chiefly involved in electoral work, or who have bristled at the dominance of electoral work in our chapter, have a right to be concerned. The outsized role of campaigns, electoral and otherwise, have been a source of spirited debate, which I [recommend](https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/04/legislative-campaigns-and-policy-feedback-an-assessment-of-dsas-orientation-towards-the-fight-for-reforms/?ref=marxistunity.com) [members](https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/summer-2022/in-defense-of-campaigns/?ref=marxistunity.com) [study](https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/01/naming-the-system-means-as-ends-socialism-and-the-importance-of-alternative-political-culture-and-program/?ref=marxistunity.com) as we consider this race. Members must think long and hard about why we want to run this campaign. We need to be sure that Assemblymember Mamdani is ready to take bold steps, both in platform and strategy, that will guarantee that DSA continues to lead on the most important issues affecting the working people of America and the world. **To run this campaign is a tremendous leap of faith that will require input from all corners of DSA about how it will affect our organizing work.**
**8\. Conclusion.**
In an era of deep frustration with local mayoral politics, there is perhaps no better time for DSA to make a new foray into the executive arena. This is not, however, a free play. The clock is still running, the ball is live, and the stakes are higher than ever. DSA needs to make clear and concise demands of Assemblymember Mamdani if we are to devote months of blood, sweat, and tears to running his race. He has much to gain from this campaign, and little to lose: it will raise his public profile, demonstrate his acumen as a politician on a bigger stage than ever before, and prepare him organizationally for future, more winnable races.
The same cannot be said for DSA. Running this campaign is a choice that we will make, possibly at the expense of our other organizing work. It will test the strength of our democracy as we debate the merits of this endorsement. The issues addressed here will take center stage at our convention, which is only two months away. While I am hopeful Assemblymember Mamdani will rise to the challenge of building a radical vision for our city’s future, preserving and transmitting our message will require long hours and hard work from everyone involved. This conversation is just beginning. I hope everyone will join me in giving these important debates the light and air they deserve.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Marxist Unity Group’s 2024 YDSA National Convention Voting Guide
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/marxist-unity-groups-2024-ydsa-national-convention-voting-guide/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:39:41.000Z
This guide is a list of all of the Youth section of Marxist Unity Group’s voting recommendations for delegates at YDSA’s 2024 National Convention. To read Marxist Unity Group’s overarching vision for YDSA, our priority proposals for this year’s convention, or our guide to the caucuses of YDSA, follow these links:
- [2024 Marxist Unity Group YDSA Platform](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13LMs12CvhYQtpQZ5A0ZtLPP%5FLycBvGRkjyu79RaComc/edit?ref=marxistunity.com#heading=h.t8fb1yfh5n5n)
- [Marxist Unity Group's Proposals for the 2024 YDSA National Convention](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/marxist-unity-group-ydsa-2024-platform)
- [MUG's YDSA Caucus Guide](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/mugs-ydsa-caucus-guide)
# National Coordinating Committee
MUG member Steven Raney is running for a seat on the NCC at-large. Steven is a YDSA chapter co-founder and longtime chapter leader, a member of the Youth Political Education Committee, and a committed organizer for Palestine solidarity, reproductive freedom, and democratic socialism. **We recommend all delegates rank Steven #1 on their NCC at-large ballots.**
# Resolutions and Bylaws Amendments
The following resolutions are not included below because they were included in this year’s consent agenda:
- R6\. Recommitting to the Activist
- R7\. Prioritizing Red/Rural Area Recruitment and Trainings
- R8\. Recommitting to Socialist Political Education
- R13\. Towards Intersectional and Diverse Organizing in YDSA
- R14\. Building YDSA Communications for the Future
## R1\. Make YDSA An Anti-Zionist Organization in Principle and Practice
This resolution reaffirms that support for Zionism is at odds with the principles and aims of YDSA, and therefore an offense eligible for expulsion from the organization. It also outlines a process of restorative justice, allowing any member expelled on these grounds to reverse their expulsion through education. MUG is typically skeptical of expulsion as a tool for solving political problems in the socialist movement, but as we interpret this resolution, it does not seek to expel anyone who is not already have in breach of YDSA’s existing membership conditions, and it is unlikely that anyone will in fact be expelled as a result of it being passed. In this respect, it is largely a propaganda resolution, and propaganda making it clear YDSA is not a political home for Zionism is worthwhile. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R2\. Bringing Class-Struggle to Student Government
This resolution is a collaboration between Marxist Unity Group and the Reform and Revolution caucus. It aims for YDSA to treat student government elections as a site of class struggle and assist chapters in running campaigns that will help establish YDSA’s independent political identity, win victories that advance the struggle on campuses, and develop lifelong electoral organizers with the skills required by an independent mass socialist party. **We recommend a YES vote on the base version of this resolution.**
### Amendment R2-1
This amendment makes some changes which improve R2, such as clarifying which student government struggles are strategic, as well as some which do not, such as refocusing the Electoral Committee’s work from producing materials for chapters to hosting a training call. **We have no recommendation at this time—vote your conscience.**
### Amendment R2-2
This amendment’s additions concerning the Fall Drive and political independence-focused messaging during the 2024 election are constructive, and broadly in line with MUG’s approach to electoral work. **We recommend a YES vote on this amendment and a YES vote on R2 if amended.**
## R3\. For Rechartering the Youth Labor Committee, Student Worker Unions, and the Rank-and-File Strategy
This resolution calls to recharter the Youth Labor Committee and recommit to the Rank-and-File Strategy approach to labor organizing. MUG has some theoretical differences with the authors of this resolution on the nature and role of labor union work, but we agree broadly with the need for an active socialist presence in shop-floor struggles, and hope to see YDSA build on its recent victories in the labor movement in the coming year. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R4\. Towards a Workers Party
The resolution proposes “create\[ing\] a structure for direct, chapter-to-local institutional ties between YDSA and unions representing student workers,” allowing student unions to affiliate with YDSA chapters. Logistical issues aside, MUG disagrees with this vision of a workers’ party. While it is an ambitious answer to the party question, in practice it would tend to bring the party under the direct influence of trade union leadership, which has historically been a conservative force in the socialist movement. We need a mass socialist party, not a nonsocialist labor party like Labour in the UK. It is questionable whether this resolution could be implemented, but if it were, it would be a step in the wrong direction. **We recommend a NO vote on this resolution.**
### Amendment R4-1
This amendment was written by MUG members. It alters R4 to instead call for YDSA to foster the creation of distinctly socialist rank-and-file caucuses in labor unions, based on the historic socialist strategy of “boring from within” trade unions to build a working-class majority for a socialist program. **We recommend a YES vote on this amendment, and a YES vote on R4 if amended.**
## R5\. Towards a National Student Strike for Palestine
This resolution calls on YDSA to make laying the ground for a nationwide student strike our top priority in our Palestine solidarity work for the coming year. A student strike would be a watershed moment for the movement, and if the opportunity for one arises, YDSA must be ready to meet the moment and demonstrate its ability to lead. However, upheavals of this nature are not voted into existence at conventions. Just as YDSA could not have predicted the Spring 2024 Student Intifada at the 2023 National Convention, we cannot predict how the movement will develop in the coming year. We should therefore avoid being overly prescriptive about the form resistance will take in the future, or overcommitting ourselves to certain tactics. **We recommend a NO vote on this resolution.**
## R9\. Cohering a National YDSA
This resolution provides meaningful structure within our national organization; NCC members that organize committee co-chairs that can turn around and more effectively organize committee members through regular 1-1s and intentional listwork. Committee co chairs attending NCC meetings streamlines the distribution of action items, which has been a common problem this NCC has faced. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R10\. Fighting for Victory in the Heart of Empire
This resolution recharters the Youth Leadership Committee of the DSA International Committee, while proposing to open it up by removing the ten-person membership cap. The limited membership, when combined with the unique situation of the IC-YLC as a YDSA body contained within a larger DSA body, has proven to be an obstacle to dynamic internationalism work in YDSA. R10 preserves much of what is good about YDSA’s internationalism work, while identifying and reforming one of the main flaws it has suffered from. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R11\. Strong Foundations for a Growing YDSA
This resolution recharters the Youth Growth and Development Committee (YGDC). Tasked with in-depth leadership development and guiding organizing committees through the transition to new YDSA chapters, the YGDC is a crucial resource. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R12\. Responsibilities for National Coordinating Committee Members
This resolution creates a convention mandate for a practice already put in place during this year’s NCC term regarding consistent one-on-ones with YDSA chapters. This connection between national YDSA and chapter leaders has been instrumental in building a stronger YDSA, and should be continued. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R15\. No Votes for Genocide
Palestine is our red line. This resolution, written by MUG members, would have YDSA intervene in the 2024 elections by going on the offensive against the Democratic and Republican parties alike with a set of minimum anti-genocide demands and corresponding standards for electoral work on campus. It calls for us to present YDSA as an alternative to the two genocidal capitalist parties, using the slogan “No Votes For Genocide” and similar messaging to appeal to members of the working class who have been irreparably alienated from the Democratic Party and are ready for an alternative. **We recommend a YES vote on the base version of this resolution.**
### Amendments R15-1 and R15-2
MUG believes in the importance of programmatic unity in all aspects of DSA’s work, including electoralism. We see the fight to enforce standards over Zionism at both the local level (R15-1, concerning Nithya Raman) and the federal level (R15-2) as crucial to DSA’s transformation into an independent mass party. **We recommend a YES vote on both amendments and a YES vote on R15 if either or both pass.**
## R16\. Ecosocialism Beyond the Green New Deal
This resolution was written by MUG members. Its goal is for YDSA to devise new kinds of ecosocialist work that break out of tired reformist patterns. Our organizing in this area must take into account the fact that averting extinction cannot be done without challenging the logic of capitalism itself, something for which the antidemocratic capitalist state cannot serve as a vehicle. R16 would direct YDSA to produce political education on revolutionary degrowth and help chapters develop ecosocialist campaigns that go beyond Green New Deal-style reformism. **We recommend a YES vote on the base version of this resolution.**
### Amendment R16-1
This amendment would change R16 from being critical of the Green New Deal to being broadly supportive of it, calling for political education and YGDC trainings that “build on,” rather than depart from, what MUG sees as a dead-end strategy for ecosocialism. **We recommend a NO vote on this amendment, but still recommend a YES vote on R16 if amended.**
## R17\. There is Only One Solution! Intifada! Revolution!
This resolution is a collaboration between Marxist Unity Group and the Constellation caucus. It firmly establishes YDSA’s support for the Palestinian people’s struggle for a free Palestine from the river to the sea and provides for a coordinated national movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions that builds on the militancy of the Spring 2024 phase of the Student Intifada. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R18\. For a YDSA Program Committee
This resolution would establish a committee to rewrite YDSA’s political platform. MUG agrees substantially with R&R about the need for a revolutionary political program to unite YDSA and guide its work. **We recommend a YES vote on the base version of this resolution.**
### Amendment R18-1
This proposal would amend R18 to clarify the role of a program, make the proposed Program Committee more dynamic by uncapping its membership, and require that the democratic mandates of the 2023 and 2024 conventions be reflected in the initial draft of the new YDSA platform. **We recommend a YES vote on this amendment and a YES vote on R18 if amended.**
## R19\. For Protest Democracy
This resolution calls on YDSA to push for democratic structures within protest movements like the encampments which shook the country this spring. MUG believes that internal democracy is an essential ingredient for the creation of a mass democratic socialist party. Extending the principles of democratic, participatory, rank-and-file power to all areas of our political activity can only aid our struggles, making them more durable, reproducible, and responsive to changing conditions. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R20\. Building the Socialist Movement Through YDSA
YDSA received major budget cuts earlier this year. We lost one of our two staff positions and both of our interns, all committee chair stipends, $10,000 in committee funding, and most notably, our in-person convention. MUG agrees with the authors of this resolution that defunding YDSA in this way was a strategic error for DSA. While we believe winning back an in-person winter conference should be a higher priority than an in-person convention, this resolution does not prevent our NCC co-chairs from also advocating for an in-person YDSA conference, and the reality is that an adequate YDSA budget would provide for both. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R21\. Building Militant and Democratic Student Unions on College Campuses
This resolution sets the creation of mass-membership organizations of students, or student unions (note: NOT student *worker* unions, which are labor unions made up primarily of student workers), as an organizing priority for YDSA. Our disagreements with B&R on the issue of explicitly socialist intervention in labor unions may apply to the issue of YDSA’s role within nonsocialist mass organizations of this type as well, but this resolution nevertheless speaks to a felt need to supercharge new organizing on college campuses. **We recommend a YES vote on this resolution.**
## R22\. Class Struggle Internationalism
This is a symbolic resolution advocating for a specific approach to internationalism that sees it as YDSA’s primary task to “critically evaluate and exchange lessons with” left organizations in other countries instead of offering them “uncritical diplomatic support” or wading into “geopolitical bargains and rivalries.” MUG believes that the essential task of internationalism is to defeat the enemy at home, the antidemocratic state and military-industrial complex at the heart of the US empire. Principles like democracy and rank-and-file power are important, but R22 is overfocused on litigating disputes within the international left and not enough on the task of dismantling the empire from within. **We recommend a NO vote on this resolution.**
## R23\. For an Independent Youth International Committee
In contrast to R10, this resolution seeks to dissolve the IC-YLC and replace it with a Youth International Committee entirely housed under YDSA. MUG believes that YDSA’s internationalism work is most effective when done in active collaboration with DSA, which is best served by some version of the current IC-YLC arrangement. **We recommend a NO vote on this resolution.**
## R24\. Budget Autonomy for YDSA
This resolution tasks an exploratory committee with researching the feasibility of legally incorporating YDSA separately from DSA. At the tail end of DSA’s budget crisis, a separately incorporated YDSA would only hurt our organizing by putting us at needless risk for legal liability and draining valuable capacity that NCC members could be using to build stronger YDSA chapters. **We recommend a NO vote on this resolution.**
## A1\. Priority Campaigns for YDSA National
Every year, the National Convention creates more mandates than can be fulfilled in the following NCC term. This resolution would create a special category of “priority campaigns” which call for long-term, high-level investment from YDSA national, and require that only one be adopted per year. It additionally stipulates that priority campaigns would only be adopted by a two-thirds vote at convention. A1 is a creative solution to a problem which has diluted the power of a convention mandate, and therefore the political stakes of convention. **We recommend a YES vote on this amendment.**
## A2\. Towards a Workers Party
This amendment is associated with the resolution of the same name. In addition to sharing the same political problems as R4, it would allow for union locals with large numbers of non-student members to affiliate directly with YDSA, and it raises unsolved questions about the political influence of the unions on the organization and the mechanics of representation and disaffiliation. **We recommend a NO vote on this amendment.**
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Marxist Unity Group’s Proposals for the 2024 YDSA National Convention
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/marxist-unity-group-ydsa-2024-platform/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:40:34.000Z
The 2023 National Convention solidified YDSA’s status as the political vanguard of DSA by passing a series of bold resolutions and amendments that have placed YDSA at the leading edge of DSA’s evolution into an independent mass socialist party. Among these were Marxist Unity Group’s six priority resolutions that year: “Recommitting to Building an Independent Working-Class Socialist Party,” “Fighting the Right with Mass Action,” “For Building the Youth Wing of a Socialist Party,” “Winning the Battle for Democracy,” “Anti-Militarism on Campus,” and “Programmatic Unity for YDSA.”
At the 2024 National Convention, MUG hopes to see YDSA continue leading DSA into the future of democratic socialism. To this end, we have chosen to sponsor six proposals for national convention this year: two resolutions written by MUG members, two written jointly by MUG members and members of other caucuses, and two amendments to resolutions written by members of other caucuses.
With genocide, ecological collapse, and the threat of world war rearing their heads as the capitalist world-system plunges into crisis, now is the time to be calculating, but not conservative. The tasks facing our movement are enormous. We must stake out a space on the electoral field for a politics of opposition while developing the cadre and capacity to run tribunes of the people to fill that space and champion the cause of the oppressed. We must be willing to move beyond stagnating strategies in the ecological struggle, devising new ones rooted in the necessity of winning the battle for democracy on the political and then economic fields. We must draw hard lines in the fight against colonialism and imperialism, and revive the kind of labor militancy that will be necessary to do our part to destroy the empire from within. And to struggle constructively on all these terrains at once, we must unite around a revolutionary political program. This is the spirit Marxist Unity Group is bringing to the 2024 YDSA National Convention, and the spirit in which the following proposals are written.
#### R2\. “Bringing Class-Struggle to Student Government”
*This resolution is a collaboration between Marxist Unity Group and the Reform and Revolution caucus. It aims for YDSA to treat student government elections as a site of class struggle and assist chapters in running campaigns that will help establish YDSA’s independent political identity, win victories that advance the struggle on campuses, and develop lifelong electoral organizers with the skills required by an independent mass socialist party.*
---
**WHEREAS**, as thousands of radicalizing young people have joined protest movements and taken an active role in campus politics, student government interventions provide a strategic avenue for advancing socialist principles and contributing to a movement for working-class emancipation on college campuses nationwide.
**WHEREAS**, YDSA chapters have had success running student government candidates in opposition to politically moderate and careerist student representatives with ties to their university’s administration and board of trustees, using these campaigns to promote their socialist politics and fight for key issues which affect the student body, and sharing the lessons learned through these chapter-level campaigns would help other YDSA members run similar campaigns in their chapters.
**WHEREAS**, YDSA’s national structures can play a strong supportive role in these electoral efforts by working with chapters to run bold, public-facing student government campaigns with the goal of growing the organization and winning students over to socialism, and an increased level of coordination among national bodies would allow YDSA to use every tool at its disposal towards this end.
**WHEREAS**, this resolution builds upon the directives outlined in the resolutions passed at the 2023 YDSA National Convention, including R8\. Recommitting to Building an Independent Working-Class Socialist Party, which emphasized running chapter members in student government elections to train for off-campus electoral work. R8 stressed the importance of modeling campaigns after an independent working-class socialist party, presenting a strong socialist program tailored to campus conditions, and maximizing independence from liberal groups like the College Democrats and Young Democrats of America.
**WHEREAS**, this resolution also aligns with R9\. Fighting the Right through Mass Action, passed at the same convention, emphasized the need for YDSA to provide national calls teaching chapters the skills necessary for organizing campaigns, such as power-mapping campuses, navigating student governments, organizing mass actions, and building power independently from establishment organizations on campus.
**WHEREAS**, the YDSA platform calls for transformative reforms that empower the working class, counter austerity, and advocate for education as a public good; centers struggles against oppression through a socialist analysis; aims to build independent working-class politics and organization; and strives to create just campuses and communities by combating campus capitalism, advocating for disability rights, and promoting tenant organizing and sustainability initiatives.
**THEREFORE LET IT BE RESOLVED**, the 2024 YDSA Convention shall charter the Electoral Committee. It shall be responsible for developing and distributing resources, training members, and providing hands-on strategic guidance with the goal of running class struggle student government campaigns across the country.
**RESOLVED**, the Electoral Committee shall be responsible for conducting an initial period of mass outreach to chapter leaders to discuss possible interventions in student government, such as running YDSA candidates for student government positions, fighting for referendums, and potential strategies for running a successful class struggle electoral campaign.
**RESOLVED**, the Electoral Committee shall regularly meet and communicate with chapters that decide to run electoral campaigns or already have members in student government to provide political guidance and share relevant lessons from other chapters. The Electoral Committee should track student government activity to maximize its efforts and produce an electoral report for the next YDSA Convention. This direct collaboration with chapters shall be the core of the Electoral Committee.
**RESOLVED**, the Electoral Committee shall actively support and empower YDSA chapters to advocate for the following political issues and socialist governance initiatives within their universities:
- Encourage YDSA chapters to advocate for university governance structures that promote equal representation and decision-making by students, faculty, and staff, including:
- Increasing student representation on university boards and committees.
- Implementing initiatives to enhance transparency, accountability, and participatory decision-making within university governance.
- Fight the privatization of universities by supporting the construction and maintenance of student housing, pushing for student management wherever possible, and promoting sustainable food systems that are subsidized and accessible to all students.
- Advocate for debt relief programs to address financial burdens that impede equitable access to education for poor and working class students.
- Support faculty, graduate and undergraduate labor unions on campus and advocate for unionization efforts in universities.
- Standing for the rights of students and faculty by defending academic freedom, especially in the face of growing political repression on university campuses.
- Intervening in critical issues such as the Palestine solidarity movement and the struggle for trans and abortion rights against right wing attacks.
**RESOLVED**, the Electoral Committee shall provide additional support to chapters running student government campaigns by providing unified messaging and resources, including pamphlets, graphic design resources, and social media templates as needed. These materials should be designed to resonate with students and effectively communicate socialist principles and campaign objectives.
**RESOLVED**, the Electoral Committee, after an initial period of mass outreach and hands-on collaboration with chapters, shall develop and distribute a broader Student Government Campaign Resource Package for chapters to use. This will contain comprehensive guidelines, templates, and resources for organizing successful student government interventions, including:
- Detailed guidelines for understanding the variations in student government structures and processes across universities. Include strategies for tailoring campaign approaches accordingly to effectively navigate different political and institutional contexts.
- How to choose strategic battles and demands which connect to political issues directly involving the student body, as well as how to use student government as an agitational platform for chapter-wide priority campaigns.
- Share strategies for building principled coalitions and alliances with other student organizations, labor unions, and community groups to amplify the impact of student government interventions.
- Chapter guidelines on forming disciplined electoral teams such as Socialists in Office Committees which are committed to YDSA's broad-tent platform and membership participation.
- Instructions on how chapters can organize a student government platform convention, ensuring a democratic process which builds buy-in from chapter members, creates a coherent program for the chapter’s electoral intervention, and applies the political issues outlined above and the content of YDSA’s national political platform to the chapter’s conditions.
**RESOLVED**, the Electoral Committee shall collaborate with the YDSA Communications Committee to nationally promote the electoral campaigns of chapters, with the goal of bringing attention to these local efforts as well as building YDSA’s reputation as a strong electoral presence on university campuses.
**RESOLVED**, the Electoral Committee shall collaborate with the Campaign Organizing Committee whenever possible to promote student government as a strategic platform for other campaigns or key national issues which YDSA is organizing around.
**RESOLVED**, the Electoral Committee shall run a workshop at the next YDSA Winter Conference on how to run class-struggle student government campaigns. It will also present a report at the next YDSA Summer Convention on how many chapters are running or have run student government campaigns, and on the progress it has made in building YDSA as an effective electoral force.
#### R15\. “No Votes For Genocide”
*Palestine is our red line. This resolution, written by MUG members, would have YDSA intervene in the 2024 elections by going on the offensive against the Democratic and Republican parties alike with a set of minimum anti-genocide demands and corresponding standards for electoral work on campus.*
---
**WHEREAS,** on February 24th, DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) voted to open an organization-wide period of deliberation to determine the best approach to DSA’s intervention in the 2024 election,
**WHEREAS,** as socialists in the United States, we have a duty to oppose the imperialist agenda of our ruling class, which has prioritized the genocide of the Palestinian people by providing effectively unlimited support to the apartheid regime of Israel in its war on Gaza, and,
**WHEREAS,** the Democratic Party has been an indispensable asset to the forces promoting the genocide in Palestine, supporting Israel’s unjust and criminal war by the following means:
- The Democratic Biden administration’s transfer of billions of dollars worth of weapons to Israel, including by the use of emergency executive authority to ship munitions to Israel without Congressional review,
- The Democratic Biden administration’s support for the defunding of the UNRWA, a political maneuver intended to induce famine in Palestine as a form of collective punishment,
- The repeated U.S. veto of United Nations resolutions calling for a ceasefire, under orders from the Democratic Biden administration,
- The passage of $26 billion in funding for the Israeli regime with the support of an overwhelming majority of Democratic Senators and Representatives and the Democratic Biden administration, and,
**WHEREAS,** the Israeli-American genocide of Palestine has provoked historic acts of resistance within the United States, including mass demonstrations, port and highway occupations, and the recent wave of campus rebellions known as the “Student Intifada,” creating a movement of millions of workers, youth, and the oppressed which correctly identifies Biden and the Democrats as its enemies and sees the connections between imperialist war and genocide abroad and racist police terror, border policy, and other forms of oppression domestically, and,
**WHEREAS,** the Democratic Party has played a key role in the repression of this movement by the following means:
- Condemnation of criticism of Israel by Democratic politicians at all levels of government in the wake of October 7th, including condemnations of DSA members in public office and DSA itself,
- Overwhelming support by Democrats in Congress for the federal adoption of the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which defines opposition to the existence of the state of Israel and comparison of Israeli policy to the policy of Nazi Germany as antisemitic hate speech,
- The Democratic Biden administration’s attempts to use the President’s national platform to slander the students involved in the Student Intifada as violent antisemites,
- The brutal police violence against students protesting the genocide in cities governed by Democratic city councils, mayors, state legislatures, and governors, and represented by Democrats in both houses of Congress, including but not limited to New York City, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston, all with the implicit endorsement of a Democratic President, and,
**WHEREAS,** the aforementioned conditions have effectively accomplished a “dirty break” between DSA and the Democratic Party in practice, yet DSA has not officially recognized this reality or reflected it in our electoral policy, and,
**WHEREAS,** DSA’s most advanced electoral intervention against Biden thus far has taken the form of various “Uncommitted” campaigns in the Democratic primaries, and the logical continuation of this strategy which most adequately addresses the reality of the de facto “dirty break” already underway is to continue the threat of withholding support from Biden and the pro-genocide Democrats from the primaries into the general election,
**THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED,** YDSA’s political communications strategy for the 2024 elections will be to signal that DSA is the political home for organized and unorganized workers looking for a political alternative to the Democratic Party as a result of their support for the occupation’s genocide in Palestine.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** YDSA’s political communications strategy for the 2024 federal elections will tactically prioritize and center the slogan No Votes for Genocide.
**RESOLVED,** YDSA will encourage all chapters to adopt the following anti-genocide minimum demands as conditions for the endorsement of candidates for student government:
- BDS
1. Support the disclosure and termination of all school investments in Israel,
2. Support the termination of all school contracts with corporations on the BDS list,
3. Support a complete commercial and academic boycott of Israel and its universities.
- Freedom of expression
1. Support student-worker resistance to the genocide, including but not limited to spoken or written criticism, rallies, encampments, occupations, and strikes,
2. Oppose repression of student-worker resistance, including but not limited to student conduct charges, academic sanctions, suspensions, use of the police or national guard, and arrests,
3. Support unconditional amnesty for all students and workers facing repression for resistance to the genocide.
**RESOLVED,** YDSA will encourage members and supporters to exclusively vote for federal candidates who meet the following anti-genocide minimum demands, withholding support of any kind from candidates who do not:
- On US intervention:
1. Support a permanent ceasefire,
2. Oppose all military aid to Israel, and oppose cutting aid to Palestine.
3. Oppose expanding US intervention into a wider war with Yemen, Iran, or any other actor in the region.
- On immigration:
1. Oppose immigration restrictions including, but not limited to, the militarization of the US-Mexico border.
- On state repression:
1. Oppose restricting the self-activity of the working class and oppressed, like the punishment of the Palestinian solidarity movement, including, but not limited to, the rights to strike, freely assemble, protest, or criticize.
**RESOLVED,** YDSA will endorse and promote planned demonstrations at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago in August, and will encourage chapters with the means to participate in those demonstrations to do so using the slogan No Votes for Genocide and the minimum demands listed above.
**RESOLVED,** during the 2024-2025 school year YDSA will encourage chapters to run members for student government, or where practical, local office, stressing the minimum demands listed above and drawing attention to the Israeli-American genocide in Palestine and the role of both capitalist parties in orchestrating it, and will further encourage chapters to disrupt local campaign events for candidates of either major party who do not meet the anti-genocide minimum demands.
**RESOLVED,** YDSA urges the NPC to adopt the No Votes For Genocide proposal motivated by NPC members Rashad X and Amy W, applying the spirit of this resolution to DSA as a whole.
**BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED,** by convention mandate, YDSA binds the incoming YDSA national co-chairs to use their shared vote on the NPC to vote in favor of the aforementioned No Votes For Genocide proposal.
#### R16\. “Ecosocialism Beyond the Green New Deal”
*This resolution was written by MUG members. Its goal is for YDSA to devise new kinds of ecosocialist work that break out of tired reformist patterns. Our organizing in this area must take into account the fact that averting extinction cannot be done without challenging the logic of capitalism itself, something for which the antidemocratic capitalist state cannot serve as a vehicle.*
---
**WHEREAS,** capitalism has brought humanity to the point of annihilation by creating the conditions for a sixth mass extinction and catastrophic climate change, and,
**WHEREAS,** the primary way DSA and YDSA have thus far engaged with this existential threat has been through the framework of the Green New Deal, which has served as a locus of popular mobilization against the neoliberal status quo, yet,
**WHEREAS,** the Green New Deal has been stalled indefinitely by the undemocratic structures of the United States government, including the Senate and Presidency, proving the underlying strategic assumptions faulty, and,
**WHEREAS,** even if fully realized, the program of the Green New Deal would fail to adequately address the scope of the ecological crisis, because the ecological crisis is rooted in the fundamental tendency of capitalism towards infinite growth on a finite planet, and the Green New Deal does not aim to lay the foundations for a society beyond the fundamental laws of capitalism, and,
**WHEREAS,** the Green New Deal, furthermore, is unequipped to address ecocidal capitalism as a world-system, because its vision of supplanting fossil fuel energy with renewable energy in a growing economy would necessarily lead to unprecedented levels of imperial extraction from the global periphery, and,
**WHEREAS,** overcoming the ecological crisis will require reducing material and energy throughput in the imperial core countries whose economies are the engine of climate catastrophe and mass extinction at the expense of the entire world, which will in turn require the restructuring of society to meet human needs without endless economic growth, a process known as degrowth, and,
**WHEREAS,** revolutionizing society at the scale and scope necessary to begin rationally governing the relationship between humanity and nature, i.e., to guarantee the survival of the human species, is an immense, long-term project which necessitates a fundamentally different political strategy than what DSA has thus far pursued through the Green New Deal, and,
**WHEREAS,** given the gravity of the crisis we face, and our belief that DSA is and should strive to continue to be the vanguard of the socialist movement, it is our responsibility as an organization to intervene decisively in the ongoing debate around both long-term and short-term ecosocialist strategy,
**THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED,** YDSA’s platform shall be amended as follows:
(additions in bold italics)
Socialism means the democratization of all of society in order to end oppression, exploitation, and domination ***of people and the planet.*** We fight for a world without classes, ***with an economy democratically planned to meet human needs within ecological limits***. The working class is the only social force capable of carrying out this fight, ***saving humanity from extinction***, and ultimately creating a more free, equal, and democratic society. The working class means everyone who is forced to sell their labor, people who work for a wage or a salary and the people who depend on them — children, the elderly, the poor, the sick, the jobless, the homeless, the incarcerated — regardless of borders or citizenship.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** YDSA calls on the Youth Political Education Committee to take the following steps to help develop socialist consciousness about the strict necessity of revolutionary degrowth in the path towards ecosocialism:
1. To draft and collect educational materials on this subject to be included in YDSA’s Socialism 101 syllabus, replacing the existing content of the Ecosocialism module.
2. To draft a sample political education curriculum on this subject to be distributed to all YDSA chapters, which are to be encouraged to hold topical political education meetings.
3. To consult with representatives of YDSA chapters and organizing committees upon request, assisting them in the formulation of political education curricula and campaign action items relating to the struggle for ecosocialism.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** a committee tasked with providing trainings to chapters on campaign issue selection, such as the Youth Growth and Development Committee of the 2024-2025 term, will include potential ecosocialist campaign issues in those trainings which will emphasize political mobilization and which will include messaging and rhetoric connecting campus-level action to long-term strategy in the struggle for political power and a revolutionary overthrow of the current order. These issues may include:
1. Divestment from environmentally and socially destructive industries that fuel the growth-oriented, imperialist regime of global capitalism, including but not limited to fossil fuels and arms manufacturing;
2. Organizing workplaces for reduced working-hours in order to fight the domination of both labor and the natural world by reducing exploitation in the workplace and curtailing destructive and unnecessary economic output;
3. Protection of natural spaces on and off campus from the expansion of both capital and the police state, understanding that their expansion reproduces the political and economic structures which prevent both self-government of the working class and rational planning of the economy made possible only through self governance;
4. Democratizing campus administrative structures, especially those related to the management of investments and campus environmental policy, to win lasting student-worker power and model the kinds of transformations necessary in society at large to win the battle for working-class sovereignty and a livable environment.
**BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED,** YDSA urges DSA writ large to adopt analogous measures, and to meet the demands of the moment by taking practical steps to move beyond the Green New Deal paradigm of ecosocialism in favor of one grounded in the necessity of revolutionary degrowth.
#### R17\. “There Is Only One Solution! Intifada! Revolution!”
*This resolution is a collaboration between Marxist Unity Group and the Constellation caucus. It firmly establishes YDSA’s support for the Palestinian people’s struggle for a free Palestine from the river to the sea and provides for a coordinated national movement for Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions that builds on the militancy of the Spring 2024 phase of the Student Intifada.*
---
**WHEREAS,** since October 7th, 2023, over 35,000 Palestinians have been martyred as of the primary deadline for resolutions (May 26th, 2024), constituting an act of genocide and ethnic cleansing which above all is a continuation of the 1948 Nakba, committed the imperial, settler-colonial project of Israel, hereafter referred to as the Zionist Entity,
**WHEREAS,** since the 1948 Nakba, the U.S. Empire has fully funded the military activities, including genocide, of the settler colonial Zionist Entity, up to 2024 sending $158,000,000,000 ($158 billion), including an additional $17,000,000,000 ($17 billion) passed through Congress in April 2024,
**WHEREAS,** the U.S. Empire treats the Zionist Entity as an imperial project, historically partnering with it to resist self-determination in the Middle East and North Africa,
**WHEREAS,** the Zionist genocide has been supported by the establishment of both major parties, the Democrats and the Republicans, since 1948, and is currently actively defended by Democrats from both houses of Congress and President ‘Genocide Joe’ Biden,
**WHEREAS,** the U.S. military-industrial complex is sustained by the recruitment of academics, specialists, and other degree-holding individuals from colleges and universities in the heart of empire to sustain research, development, and manufacturing of weapons, including those which have and continue to be sent to the Zionist Entity for use in their genocide of Palestinians,
**WHEREAS,** many colleges and universities directly or indirectly invest part of their sometimes multi-billion dollar endowments in companies such as weapons manufacturers which are directly complicit in the Zionist genocide,
**WHEREAS,** following months of post-10/7 escalation and pressure, in April 2024, hundreds of campuses across the country rose up with encampments, rallies, sit-ins, and other direct actions to demand disclosure of financial investments and divestment from genocide, among other demands, mirroring the anti-apartheid movement directed at South Africa in the 1980s,
**WHEREAS,** the Young Democratic Socialists of America was a leader in the anti-apartheid movement of the 1980s and is a leader of the anti-apartheid movement in the 2020s,
**BE IT RESOLVED,** the Young Democratic Socialists of America fully support the people of Palestine in their historic struggle for liberation against the Zionist Entity, a puppet of the U.S. Empire, mourning the martyrs who have lost their lives as a result of the genocide in Gaza,
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** the Young Democratic Socialists of America will continue to be a firmly anti-Zionist organization, committed to decolonial and anti-imperialist principles not just in the case of Palestinian struggle, but struggle wherever it may occur,
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** the Young Democratic Socialists of America supports the establishment of one free, sovereign, and democratic Palestinian state, and the dismantling of the Zionist Entity in totality,
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** YDSA makes the continuation of the “Student Intifada” the main priority of the organization through the establishment of a national campaign,
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** the main demands of this campaign will be that our universities:
- DISCLOSE all university investments both direct and indirect,
- DIVEST from all companies and which actively participate in the colonization and ethnic cleansing of the Palestinian people, and
- BOYCOTT any and all partnerships with the Israeli educational military-industrial complex.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** that to achieve these demands, as many YDSA chapters as possible should run long term divestment campaigns on their campuses. These campaigns may include tactics such as:
- Petitions
- Email Blasts
- Teach-ins
- Banner Drops
- Career Fair Disruptions
- Birddogging University Administrators
- Sit-ins and Die-ins
- Protests
- Encampments
- Building Occupations
**BE FURTHER RESOLVED,** that YDSA encourages chapters to participate in coalition with other organizations on their campuses which are committed to fighting for divestment and Palestinian Liberation; especially chapters of Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP), Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM), and other grassroots Palestinian organizations. When entering these coalitions YDSA chapters should strive to be leading coalition partners, avoid liquidating into the coalition, and still maintain a distinct and identifiable presence within the coalition and the movement for Palestinian Liberation without co-opting the movement.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** that YDSA members are encouraged to organize members of the faculty, graduate, and undergraduate unions to support the demands of their campaign. This organizing should not be done by “shouting from outside the house” but by identifying amenable leaders within the unions, having one on one conversations with them, developing strong organic connections between the rank & file members of the union and the campaign, and where there are Y/DSA members present within the union, participating directly in the union’s politics as a contingent of rank-and-file membership.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** that during times of mass escalation, such as encampments, YDSA commits itself to pushing for mass protest democracy. This mass democracy should at a minimum include:
- Electing leaders of negotiating and/or bargaining committees, a commitment to open bargaining, and otherwise practicing complete transparency in the bargaining process
- Holding mass assemblies to vote on escalations, agreements with university administration, or other tactical decisions about the movement
- Establishing open and democratic committees for the operations of encampments
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** that the main national tasks for this campaign will be providing training and direct mentorship to chapters running divestment campaigns on their campuses as well as coordinating the national communications strategy for divestment campaigns around the country:
- These trainings will revolve around building a sustainable and long term mass movement for divestment and Palestinian Liberation. Topics for these trainings should include but are not limited to:
- The Organizing Cycle
- The “Labor Notes Bullseye”
- Listwork
- Campaign Escalation
- Effective Comms Strategies
- Press Relations
- Info Security
- Protest Safety
- Relationships with Organized Labor
These trainings should be put on both in the form of national calls as well as via one on one mentorship with the leaders of chapters running divestment campaigns.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** the NCC and the International Committee’s Youth Leadership Committee (IC-YLC) or its successor shall be the main committee tasked with the execution of this national campaign. They shall coordinate the activities of this national campaign with DSA’s Palestine work occurring within the IC’s Palestine sub-committee such as this committee's work on the national Chevron BDS campaign. In coordination with this work, campuses with academic or financial ties to Chevron shall be identified and the YDSA chapters there -- if one exists already -- shall be encouraged to focus their campaign on getting their university to sever ties with Chevron.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** that the IC-YLC or its successor shall be additionally tasked with establishing relationships with grassroots Palestinian political organizations in the diaspora, Gaza, and the West Bank.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** in coordination with YDSA’s national Communications Committee this national campaign shall attempt to coordinate the announcement and escalation of actions on campuses across the country. To better facilitate this work, the co-chairs of the national communications committee will attend the planning meetings for this campaign.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** that the Youth Labor Committee (YLC) will assist the campaign in providing trainings to chapters on how to best establish relationships with organized labor on their campuses and to members on how to organize their own unions to support Palestinian Liberation.
**BE IT FURTHER RESOLVED,** that the NCC will continue to reestablish and repair YDSA’s relationship with grassroots Palestinian organizations such as Students for Justice in Palestine (SJP) and the Palestinian Youth Movement (PYM). Additionally, the NCC will also work to repair DSA’s relationship with these organizations and if applicable YDSA’s Co-Chairs, as members of the NPC, will, within reason, submit and vote for NPC proposals which would work towards this goal.
**BE IT FINALLY RESOLVED,** that the NCC will investigate how best to get DSA to support this national campaign and the YDSA Co-chairs will then submit a proposal to the National Political Committee (NPC).
#### **Amendment to R4\. “Towards a Workers Party”**
*This amendment was written by MUG members based on a resolution written by uncaucused members of YDSA. While MUG supports the transformation of DSA into an independent party, the conception of a workers’ party based on direct union affiliation is flawed. The amended resolution would instead call for YDSA to foster the creation of distinctly socialist rank-and-file caucuses in labor unions.*
*Additions in red, removals struck through.*
---
**Whereas,** socialist and labor parties around the world and throughout history have built deep connections to strong footholds in the labor movement and created strong institutional ties to a distinct socialist presence in labor unions. In many such parties, unions are directly affiliated with parties and are thus entitled to send representatives to the decision making bodies of the parties. These powerful institutional ties interventions give keep socialist and labor parties the ability accountable directly to unite the working class in their struggles against the capitalist class while uniting unions behind a socialist class struggle and a coherent policy program. In many such countries, socialist and labor parties and unions organized together, being connected from their inception. In the US, this did not occur. Without ties to a working class party, unions in the country have been vulnerable to attacks by employers, leaving the US with one of the lowest rates of unionization among industrialized countries. Instead, at the historical peak of the US socialist movement, the Socialist Party had to develop strategies to organize within a labor movement that was roughly half as large as it is today, but still much larger than the socialist movement. The “boring-from-within” strategy, which entailed intervening in labor unions on an openly socialist basis to build a working-class majority for the Socialist Party’s programmatic demands, was highly successful, enabling socialists to credibly challenge the labor bureaucracy for control of the American Federation of Labor, and even win socialist majorities in unions like the United Mine Workers. However, with the collapse of the Socialist Party and later the purge of Communists from the Congress of Industrial Organizations, for decades the US labor movement has lacked a distinctly socialist presence, and as a result has largely aligned itself with capitalist political parties and US imperialism. Rebuilding the militant labor movement in the US means moving beyond narrow trade unionism and towards industrial, class-class struggle unionism linked to socialist political organizations.
**Whereas,** many chapters’ connections to labor on campus are based on personal connections which depend on individuals who will eventually leave the academic institution, as well as campus-specific coalitions. Chapters could benefit greatly from lasting institutional connections, recognized and fostered by national YDSA.
**Whereas,** the previous national convention affirmed its support for the Rank and File Strategy, prioritizing the goals of
“Rebuilding the labor movement through shop-floor organization, advancing democracy and a class-struggle orientation in our unions, and challenging conservative union bureaucracies, and “Merging socialism with this rank-and-file movement.”
Through this strategy, YDSA has led efforts to organize student workers around the country, building student worker power and influence on campuses, reducing job insecurity and increasing pay at a time when college is notoriously unaffordable.
**Whereas,** democratic socialism is built upon working class power, and the multiracial working class is the only agent that has the ability to create democratic socialism, a direct accountability to and representation for unions will make YDSA’s connection to the working class stronger. intervention in the labor movement to build a multiracial working-class majority for a democratic socialist program is essential to the struggle for a new society beyond capitalism.
**Therefore, be it resolved,** YDSA intends to create a structure for direct, chapter-to-local institutional ties between YDSA and socialist interventions in unions representing student workers YDSA members.
**Therefore, be it resolved,** the National Coordinating Committee will be tasked with holding at least one public forum on creating institutional ties between YDSA and student worker socialist rank-and-file caucuses in labor unions per year, in addition to facilitating discussion on this question at the YDSA Winter Conference.
**Therefore, be it resolved,** if constitutional amendment \_\_ (the sister amendment proposed by myself) R3\. For Rechartering the Youth Labor Committee, Student Worker Unions, and the Rank-and-File Strategy passes, the National Coordinating Youth Labor Committee will create guidelines and provide direct support to chapters with student worker established cohorts of YDSA members involved in unions on their campus to encourage chapter-to-local affiliation the formation of openly socialist rank-and-file caucuses.
**Therefore, be it resolved,** if constitutional amendment \_\_ (the sister amendment proposed by myself) R8\. Recommitting to Socialist Political Education passes, the National Coordinating Youth Political Education Committee will, for one year semester, study the historical implementation of the chapter-to-local affiliation process “boring-from-within” strategy. The National Coordinating Youth Political Education Committee will collaborate with the Youth Labor Committee to draft a report detailing the successes and failures of the chapter-to-local affiliation process. Based on its findings, the National Coordinating Committee will draft a plan of action for making the process of chapter-to-local affiliation more effective. The National Coordinating Committee will also draft a plan for making national-to-national ties/affiliation possible between entire unions and YDSA, not only locals. educational resources on the process of forming an explicitly socialist caucus within a labor union, including:
1. A module for the Socialism 101 curriculum;
2. A national training call;
3. A module for the 2025 Red Hot Labor Summer curriculum.
**Therefore, be it resolved,** all efforts by the NCC, YLC, and YPEC regarding the formation of socialist caucuses in labor unions will prioritize chapters where an established cohort of YDSA members already exists within a local labor union, and where there is a clear degree of difference between the organizing practices, objectives, and political alignments of the local’s leadership and the principles espoused in YDSA’s political platform and convention mandates, for example, union locals which prioritize collaboration with employers over militant class solidarity, union locals which protect their sectional interests at the expense of other sections of the working class, union locals which represent police or correctional officers, and union locals which are deeply embedded in the machinery of capitalist political parties.
**Therefore, be it resolved,** if constitutional amendment, A2\. Towards a Workers Party, does not pass, the National Coordinating Committee will draft a plan of action for creating a process of chapter-to-local affiliation between student worker unions and YDSA chapters. The National Coordinating Committee will meet with student workers and chapter leaders on campuses with student worker unions, studying how unions and chapters cooperate and seeking consensus on how to best create a chapter-to-local union affiliation process.
**Therefore be it resolved,** The Activist’s editorial board will be tasked with soliciting and facilitating interviews and debates on labor union affiliation to socialist and labor parties, as well as on the strategy for building these affiliations within YDSA. YDSA’s strategy for building a distinctly socialist presence within labor unions and building a socialist majority within the labor movement generally.
#### Amendment to R18\. “For a YDSA Program Committee”
*This proposal would amend a resolution written by Reform and Revolution. MUG agrees substantially with R&R about the need for a revolutionary political program to unify YDSA and guide its work. The changes proposed below clarify the role of a program and would make the proposed Program Committee more dynamic while requiring that the democratic mandates of the 2023 and 2024 conventions be reflected in the initial draft of the new YDSA platform.*
*Additions in red, removals struck through*
---
**WHEREAS**, the 2023 Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) National Convention adopted the DSA and YDSA platforms as the basis for its organizational aims.
**WHEREAS**, the 2023 YDSA National Convention resolved to become “an organization which seeks to build power on and beyond campus, and in the workplace, building the struggles of young people where they're located, recruiting them to socialism, and building up their political and organizing skills and leadership.”
**WHEREAS**, the 2023 YDSA National Convention passed “Amendment 5: Programmatic Unity For YDSA,” making acceptance of “the aims of the platform of the organization” a requirement for membership in YDSA.
**WHEREAS**, becoming such an organization requires a clear articulation of the political and organizational goals of YDSA.
**WHEREAS**, historically successful revolutionary movements have operated from the basis of a clear political program.
**WHEREAS**, a clear program is the basis of principled recruitment and the effective articulation of the organization’s politics.
**WHEREAS**, drafting a program and arriving at unity on one will require extensive debate which will cohere the politics and develop the analysis of YDSA.
**THEREFORE BE IT RESOLVED**, YDSA recommits to the project of building a socialist party.
**RESOLVED**, an ad hoc Program Committee will be created, which is composed of 10 current or former YDSA members appointed by the National Coordinating Committee (NCC) in general proportion to the results of the 2024 YDSA Convention. a national Program Committee is hereby chartered for the purpose of drafting a revised national political platform for YDSA.
**RESOLVED**, the Program Committee will consist of at least two members of the NCC, no more than two members from any one caucus, and at least two non-caucused members, but will otherwise be open to all members of YDSA and will not be restricted in its total membership.
**RESOLVED**, the Program Committee will be tasked with drafting a short program for YDSA to be voted on at the 2025 YDSA Convention with a program being defined as the clear articulation of the organization’s immediate demands, the goal of a socialist society, and how these two are connected. This program will be used to unify the organization’s politics, express its ideas through chapters across the country, give coherence to campaigns, and provide the basis for literature, graphics, and messaging. to replace the current YDSA national political platform.
**RESOLVED**, the draft platform will be presented to the 2025 YDSA National Convention in the form of a resolution, amendable according to normal convention rules, and will be adopted with the approval of the majority of delegates voting. The Program Committee will be tasked with holding at least one YDSA membership forum on its draft program proposal before the 2025 YDSA Convention, leaving enough time to facilitate discussion, receive feedback, and incorporate edits on the proposal from YDSA members prior to the 2025 YDSA Convention.
**RESOLVED**, the Program Committee will hold an initial research period of at least three months to read and discuss historical programs, and these meetings will be open to all YDSA members to observe.will compile and study a list of historical and contemporary socialist political platforms and auxiliary resources, and submit regular reports on their findings during a period of research prior to the drafting of a revised YDSA platform.
**RESOLVED,** the regular reports of the Program Committee will be made publicly available to all members of YDSA through national membership emails, which will also encourage members to write articles for The Activist and hold discussions in their chapters about the development of the new platform.
**RESOLVED**, this draft program will be based on the platforms which have been adopted as the basis of the organization’s unity, the demands which have been adopted in campaigns, and the committee’s analysis of historical socialist programs. must meet the following criteria, although these will not be binding towards the content of amendments submitted after the document is presented as a resolution for the 2025 National Convention:
1. It must contain a section clearly explaining YDSA’s strategy for the conquest of power by the working class and the abolition of capitalism;
2. It must contain a section or sections clearly and concisely listing a set of demands for YDSA as a national organization and its constituent chapters to organize towards as an extension of the stated political strategy
**RESOLVED**, in keeping with the democratic mandates of YDSA’s national convention, the highest governing body of the organization, the draft platform must contain the following:
1. Demand(s) regarding freedom of speech, assembly, and inquiry in schools, in the spirit of 2023’s “R6: Platform Amendment: The Struggle for Free Expression and Inquiry”
2. Demand(s) related to queer liberation, reproductive freedoms, and other forms of bodily autonomy, in the spirit of 2023’s “R19: For a Mass Socialist Campaign for Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy”
3. Demand(s) related to political democracy and the need for a new Constitution, in the spirit of 2023’s “R21: Winning the Battle for Democracy”
4. Demand(s) related to anti-imperialism and the demilitarization of campuses, in the spirit of 2023’s “R22: Anti-Militarism on Campus”
5. Language codifying the political content of any other platform amendments or major national campaigns passed at the 2024 National Convention
**RESOLVED**, this program will be designed to briefly convey the organization’s politics, in the vein of the Demands of The Communist Party of Germany, the program of the Black Panther Party, and other historical programs.
**RESOLVED**, this program and its demands will be targeted specifically towards an audience of students and young people, and will not attempt to replace or supplant the messaging of DSA.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Marxist Unity Group-New York City statement on the Jamaal Bowman endorsement
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/marxist-unity-group-new-york-city-statement-on-the-jamaal-bowman-endorsement/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:41:43.000Z
NYC-DSA has been approached for a last minute endorsement of Jamaal Bowman for the Democratic primary in the 16th Congressional district. There are mere weeks left to go before the June 25 election, leaving no time for NYC-DSA’s usual [multi-step endorsement process](https://socialists.nyc/getting-our-endorsement/?ref=marxistunity.com). Given the [organizational strife caused by Bowman’s vote to support Iron Dome funding as a DSA-endorsed congressperson in 2021](https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/04/socialism-of-the-oppressed-the-stakes-of-the-bowman-affair/?ref=marxistunity.com), a fresh wave of debate has erupted within the chapter and DSA. Members of NYC-DSA have been discussing the strategic considerations around the endorsement. One concern rises to the top above all others—how do we avoid repeating history?
Marxist Unity Group NYC implores fellow DSA members to condition any possible endorsement of Jamaal Bowman on pledges to support DSA and its political and organizational principles. Firstly, we ask that he pledge public support of the BDS movement and that a firm line be drawn against funding Israel’s Iron Dome and providing other economic aid. In addition, we ask that Bowman work to establish a “Federal Socialists in Office” slate with other DSA endorsees in Congress and to build unity of program through bloc voting, cross-endorsing our candidates, and using his office to grow DSA.
Unfortunately, Bowman has not made either of these pledges to the chapter thus far. Moreover, it does not appear that chapter leadership is interested in asking these important questions as we prepare to vote. The questionnaire sent to Bowman by the leadership of NYC-DSA is completely inappropriate for any Congressional endorsement, let alone for the catalyst of the fiercest political debate in DSA of the last few years. Certainly, this represents a lack of vision on the part of Bowman, who does not appear to have made any of the above pledges in his responses. More importantly, it reflects on the drafters themselves, who did not seem to be invested in pointing Bowman towards answering these questions. Declining to ask even the mildest direct question how his previous actions have impacted DSA and what relationship he will have with DSA in the future does a disservice to us all. These questions are even more important given the irregular and rushed endorsement process.
This is a failure of the leadership of NYC-DSA. This process has given us an opportunity to present our expectations for a relationship with a Congressional candidate. Unfortunately, the biggest questions about Bowman's future conduct still remain unanswered. While we hope that the candidate forum will offer some opportunity to correct these silences, the format of the town hall leaves little room for serious discussion of these points.
To wield power, we need to fight to organize our elected officials according to revolutionary strategic principles. It will be up to members to ask at the candidate forum about the three things MUG members in NYC think are essential to earn a chapter endorsement. NYC-DSA members need to know if Bowman can:
- Publicly commit to DSA’s democratically decided support of the BDS movement and not vote for military or economic aid to Israel,
- Agree to form a Federal Socialists in Office bloc and a Congressional Socialist Caucus with other allied legislators, and
- Articulate how his previous actions have impacted DSA and explain how he wishes to sustain our relationship going forward.
As the Bowman campaign reaches out at the conclusion of a close race, we should be seizing this opportunity to set expectations for how to be a socialist in Congress. Conflict is not prevented by refusing to ask necessary questions. A multi-tendency organization requires people with different political perspectives to work together on shared goals. More ideologically narrow organizations find unity by limiting their membership. In DSA we must find our unity through open political discussion and the democratic process. We cannot hesitate to ask the tough questions—to fail to do so prevents members from being able to weigh their options and cast an informed vote. We must prove that we learned something from the past. We must openly discuss expectations and conditions before endorsement.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Towards a Mandated, Nationalized, and Disloyalist Congressional Endorsement Strategy
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/towards-a-mandated-nationalized-and-disloyalist-congressional-endorsement-strategy/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:42:16.000Z
**Beyond AOC: Building an Electoral Opposition**
Marxist Unity Group is committed to building a revolutionary opposition to the ruling class, independent of the Democratic Party, through DSA’s chapter-level electoral programs and the newly opened National Electoral Commission, which forms the basis for a socialist party. This strategy guides every decision we make as DSA members.
Toward that end, we plan to vote no on renewing our national-level endorsement for Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and yes for endorsing Rashida Tlaib.
At Convention, we passed an amendment to NPC Recommendation #8 which instructed the NPC to consider a series of red lines around Palestinian liberation in endorsement decisions, including but not limited to:
- Pledging to oppose legislation that harms Palestinians, such as
- Any official adoption of a redefinition of antisemitism to include opposition to Israel’s policies or legal system, or support for BDS (e.g., IHRA definition of antisemitism);
- Legislative and executive efforts to penalize individuals, universities, and entities that boycott Israel (which, in addition to harming Palestinians, violate rights to freedom of speech and expression);
- Legislative and executive efforts to send any military or economic resources to Israel.
- Pledging to support legislation that furthers the cause of Palestinian liberation, such as
- Legislative and executive efforts to end Israeli apartheid and ethnic cleansing against Palestinians and promote Palestinians’ rights to return to and live freely on the land (e.g., H.R. 3103, most recently introduced in the 118th Congress);
- Condemnation of Israeli apartheid and colonial practices (e.g., H.Res. 751, introduced in the 117th Congress);
- Attempts to end the spending of U.S. tax dollars on Israel and/or sanction Israel until it ceases its practices of apartheid and colonialism (e.g., “Not On Our Dime!”).
In light of Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s yes vote on H.R. 888, “Reaffirming the State of Israel’s Right to Exist,” which defends Zionism and conflates criticism of Israel with anti-semitism, her abstention on H.R. 5323, the “Iron Domes Supplemental Appropriations Act,” which funds the Israeli military and the ethnic cleansing of Palestine, and her recent signature on a statement expressing support for “strengthening the Iron Dome and other defense systems,” we believe her actions are in opposition to the Palestinian liberation movement and our mandate from Convention.
DSA members should be under no illusions about Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s political home and what party she is building. Her remarks about DSA’s role in her coalition, the $260,000 donation to the DCCC, and Biden's endorsement make that clear. There are two open questions that must be addressed by the NPC during the endorsement process: Representative Ocasio-Cortez’s intent on support of the Iron Dome or any other aid to Israel, and plans for the Democratic National Convention in August.
We recognize that within DSA, there is disagreement on how to orient to Biden and the Democrats in an election against Trump, despite Biden enabling the genocide of Palestinians. However, we believe it is uncontroversial that aid to Israel is unacceptable. While there have been disagreements about messaging and tactics, DSA members have been united in action against the genocide in Gaza. This commitment is non-negotiable. There can be no national endorsement for anyone unless there is a guarantee that they will not vote in direct contradiction to our commitment to Palestinian solidarity and the tireless organizing of DSA members across the country.
As a result of the discussion circles around the 2024 election and No Votes for Genocide, we believe that the path to the greatest unity for DSA right now is to focus on the DNC as the culmination of the Uncommitted campaigns around the country. We have submitted a [resolution to this effect](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1LHr7g5C6pikL%5F4DNBavfL828VAn8ATDMAwxq%5FDBTgHg/edit?ref=marxistunity.com) to bring DSA National into coordination with the plans Chicago DSA is already making. Whether or not this passes, DSA will be in Chicago to protest outside the convention. DSA might also be able to challenge Biden and the Democratic Party’s genocidal policy as Uncommitted delegates. Will our most prominent elected official be inside the hall with the same message as the rest of DSA or not? The whole world will still be watching.
By contrast, Representative Tlaib has been a champion of the Palestinian movement and the workers of the world, leading the fight against the United States ruling class and the genocide in Gaza, and we are proud to support her endorsement, [exemplified by her statement on H.R. 888](https://tlaib.house.gov/posts/tlaib-calls-for-peaceful-coexistence-between-israelis-and-palestinians?ref=marxistunity.com):
> Israel does not have a right to carry out illegal occupation and apartheid—which will never
> lead to a just and lasting peace. Unfortunately, this resolution is a one-sided attempt to
> rewrite history, contributes to the ongoing erasure of Palestinians by not even
> acknowledging their existence, and fails to recognize the historical and ongoing Nakba in
> which countless Palestinians have been and are actively being killed, displaced, and driven
> from their homes.
DSA should continue to build our relationship with Representative Tlaib, uplift her leadership in the Palestinian liberation movement, and fight Zionist and liberal-democratic attacks against her in the media, in the streets, and at the ballot box.
We are open to reconsidering our position should we see movement by Representative Ocasio-Cortez toward consistent solidarity with Palestine, both in word and deed, and opposition to Joe Biden and the leadership of the Democratic Party. We will continue to support common action between Representative Ocasio-Cortez and DSA when we are on the same side of the barricades, but until then, it is time for DSA to move beyond endorsements that put charismatic leadership over political principles.
Rejecting an endorsement is no substitute for the difficult and patient work of building an electoral opposition. We retain both our commitment to DSA’s electoral project, as exemplified by the Uncommitted campaign in the Democratic Party primary and DSA-led campaigns for office and ballot initiatives across the country, and our opposition to abstention from electoral politics, which abandons the struggle for political leadership of the working-class to liberal Democrats.
**Radical Democracy or Digital Democracy?**
MUG will be voting no on Groundwork’s [Resolution to Initiate a Deliberative Membership Engagement & Debate Process Regarding Congressional Endorsements](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1C2lWaq2jF4zt6Hrl8kzRo4DuJW1D-rIti1yDBs9EyjA/edit?ref=marxistunity.com) unless amended to remove the advisory poll, extend the timeline for mass deliberation, and remove all references to Representative Tlaib.
DSA’s power is rooted in the strength of our representative democracy, including mass discussion and deliberation, election of leadership, and common action around majority positions. [Online polling atomizes democracy by turning it into a passive consumer choice 2](https://jacobin.com/2019/02/mass-party-structures-internal-democracy?ref=marxistunity.com), where rather than winning members to their ideas, factions rely on email lists to turn out voters who have not been brought into our deliberation, and who are able to tune out as soon as voting is complete. Polling places bureaucratic power in the hands of the leaders responsible for writing the questions, boxing members into a set number of rigid choices by removing the ability to amend or table decisions in parliamentary deliberation.
We will also move to amend the resolution to extend the scope of discussion further, leading a nationwide discussion about the role of local and national endorsements, our expectations for DSA-endorsed elected officials, and our response when those expectations are broken. We need to involve members not just in the conversation about this endorsement vote, but about our electoral strategy as a whole, stewarding mass debate and visioning about the future of DSA.
We agree that it is important for members to discuss our electoral strategy. We believe that the centerpiece of this discussion is on the national endorsement of Representative Ocasio-Cortez. Representative Tlaib and the already endorsed Representative Cori Bush are widely known as champions of Palestinian liberation. There is no controversy about re-endorsing Representative Tlaib. Mandating a membership discussion about her endorsement would not be a productive use of time. The questions we are facing that membership must discuss are how we relate to an elected official who wavers on Palestinian liberation and is out of alignment with DSA on the most important work we are currently doing.
DSA’s strength is its mass membership and its commitment to democracy, and we must carry that commitment to its logical conclusion, opening up and democratizing our organization, fighting to overthrow the capitalist constitutional order, and leading the working class to power through a democratic and socialist republic.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### MUG’s YDSA Caucus Guide
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mugs-ydsa-caucus-guide/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:42:49.000Z
***What are caucuses in YDSA?***
Caucuses within the Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) emerge from internal debates encompassing central questions about organizational structure, internationalism, labor strategy, and political priorities.
These organized groups or factions provide a platform for YDSA members who share common interests or perspectives to engage in discussions, collaborate on resolutions, and contribute to shaping the direction of the organization.
The formation of caucuses reflects the diversity of thought within YDSA and allows members to actively participate in internal discussions about socialist principles and strategies.
Caucuses are also a product of the DSA's history. The initial focus on grassroots activism at the local and national levels inadvertently led to the absence of formal mid-level, state, and regional structures within the organization. Functioning within the framework of the Democratic Party, the DSA's internal mechanisms are decentralized and dependent. DSA continues to grow and detach from the Democratic Party, caucuses have been filling the void left by the lack of these intermediate organizational structures, once again revealing the challenges of socialist organizing absent an independent party.
Marxist Unity Group views caucuses as essential to YDSA’s internal democracy, drawing a positive distinction from the **sect model** that organizes around a rigid political line. Aspiring to be neither a fragmented collection of isolated fiefdoms nor a **sectarian** combat organization, DSA caucuses should actively resist the tendency to silo off into different projects or committees. Instead, they should strive for full integration across DSA, rejecting the idea of exclusive domains within specific areas of activism. By fostering collaboration and collective decision-making, DSA caucuses can contribute to the organization's political platform, steering away from factional retreats and towards programmatic unity.
Glossary:
- **Sect model**: A derogatory term for organizational structures that enforce unity on theoretical principles, restrict internal disagreement, and tend to concentrate power in the hands of entrenched leadership.
**Sectarianism**: A disorganizing style of politics that isolates groups or individuals from those who do not share their rigid ideological positions.
***Marxist Unity Group (MUG)***
The Marxist Unity Group advocates for a political project rooted in a historical understanding of the entire Marxist tradition and a commitment to transforming DSA into an independent socialist party through programmatic unity. Unlike unity based on adherence to specific theoretical doctrines or ideological dogmas, programmatic unity focuses on a common understanding of the demands and tactics necessary to advance the interests of the working class.
MUG advocates for political independence as a strategic principle, urging DSA to liberate itself from the Democratic Party and all capitalist influences. Proposing a shift towards a distinct socialist identity through unity around a revolutionary **minimum-maximum program**, MUG wants DSA to build a mass movement through independent campaigns and grassroots organizing, emphasizing the deliberate cultivation of a popular mandate for **revolution**. Our caucus’ seven points of unity encompass programmatic unity, electoral discipline, nationwide struggle, resistance against the imperial police state, opposition to the US Constitution, and the demand for a new democratic socialist republic in North America.
MUG's political vision of **democratic socialist republicanism** is what guides the faction’s active engagement in electoral work, labor organizing, and coalition-building within DSA. MUG collaborates with other caucuses that promote internal democracy, programmatic politics and political education, without losing sight of the need to fight for a socialist republic.
MUG draws from various theoretical traditions within Marxist thought, adopting an approach to historical analysis that rejects divisive sectarian interpretations. Our cadre curriculum includes readings from different socialist authors and perspectives, incorporating classical Marxist texts of the First and Second Internationals, perspectives on Leninism, and critical engagements with historical developments within the socialist tradition.
Glossary
- **Minimum-maximum program:** A political program divided into two parts. The first part, the maximum, states the party’s principles, aims, and important tasks. The second part, the minimum, states the minimum conditions for a socialist government in the form of demands. The second part is often divided into two sections: the first is the political section, which puts forward demands that democratize the political system; the second is the economic section, which puts forward reforms that allow the working class to get more consistently involved in politics as well as immediate socialization measures.
- **Revolution**: A societal rupture leading to the overthrow of the existing political order, opening the door for the creation of a new economic and social order.
**Democratic socialist republicanism**: A political orientation that emphasizes the conquest of political power for the working class through a democratic republic and the extension of radical democracy into the economic and social spheres of society.
Read MUG’s Points of Unity here:
MUG’s Cadre School Curriculum can be found here:
***Bread and Roses Caucus (B&R)***
Bread and Roses is the oldest caucus in YDSA, wielding considerable influence since its establishment in 2019\. Emerging from organizations such as ISO, Solidarity, and Labor Notes, B&R defies simplistic ideological labels by incorporating insights from a multitude of sources, including but not limited to Kautsky, Trotsky, MacNair, Kim Moody, Hal Draper, and others.
Bread and Roses advocates for “the democratic road to socialism,” which amounts to a very similar theory of change to MUG’s, also emphasizing a patient building of forces. The key difference is that while we would agree that the road to socialism is necessarily democratic, Bread and Roses would not assert that there needs to be a revolutionary rupture with our undemocratic political system prior to this democratic road to socialism. Bread and Roses also embrace a version of Moody's rank and file strategy, aimed at recruiting socialists into strategic industries and fighting for democratic and militant orientation within labor unions While the rank and file strategy has been widely accepted as the basic labor strategy of our organization, including by MUG, we have disagreements on its implementation.
While Bread and Roses is on the **partyist** wing of DSA, it distinguishes itself by its emphasis on advocating for a labor party rather than a socialist party. The caucus is known for its reluctance to openly organize as socialists within the labor movement, opting instead to solely support reform caucuses within trade unions. MUG is critical of B&R’s **economism**, and believes that political-socialist agitation should be a crucial part of our labor work.
B&R has historically been the dominant force in YDSA, having a majority on the NCC for most of YDSA’s existence. In DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) deliberations on the national budget, MUG has found common ground with B&R in protecting YDSA and the future of the socialist movement.
Glossary:
- **Pro-party/Partyism**: The principle that DSA’s most important task is to establish a separate party independent of existing capitalist political structures.
- **Economism**: A narrow focus on the economic aspects of the class struggle, rooted in the idea that labor or tenant organizing must precede political action, or that these economic struggles will organically develop into socialist political activity.
You can read B&R’s *Where we stand* here:
[**https://breadandrosesdsa.org/where-we-stand/**](https://breadandrosesdsa.org/where-we-stand/?ref=marxistunity.com)
B&R draws on various theoretical traditions within the broader socialist and Marxist framework. You can find B&R’s Socialist Politics: A Reading List here:
[**https://breadandrosesdsa.org/reading-list/**](https://breadandrosesdsa.org/reading-list/?ref=marxistunity.com)
***Constellation***
Constellation emerged from the Collective Power Network, a major caucus in DSA until its collapse in 2021\. CPN believed in creating a centralized national organization for DSA, strong international solidarity with “**Actual Existing Socialist” (AES)** countries, and an emphasis on a DSA identity above the identities of any individual tendency. Their youth wing, a YDSA caucus called Towards Power, survived for another year.
In 2022 Towards Power in a weakened state joined forces in a coalition with Marxist Leninist elements of the organization into an opposition slate to Bread and Roses known as T.R.A.I.N. T.R.A.I.N. consisted of national committee leaders who were aligned to international politics of the International Committee of DSA. TRAIN was defeated in the NCC elections of the 2022 YDSA convention. After this defeat, the slate reconsolidated into a caucus known as Constellation. Constellation is the only major caucus on this list that does not have a DSA wing and is strictly a YDSA caucus.
Constellation’s politics are much like CPN’s, with an emphasis on international politics supportive of **AES** and organizational centralization. They are part of the **partyist** wing of DSA, supporting the distancing from the Democratic Party and stronger integration between DSA and YDSA.
Constellation currently has two NCC members, an at-large member, and a co-chair who represents the caucus on the NPC. Their website does not include any public reading list or theoretical references.
Glossary:
- **AES**: Actually Existing Socialism, referring to countries considered by certain socialists to be implementing socialist or communist principles in the present, including Cuba, Venezuela, China, Vietnam, etc.
You can read Constellation’s points of unity here:
[https://www.ydsaconstellation.org/points-of-unity](https://www.ydsaconstellation.org/points-of-unity?ref=marxistunity.com)
***Reform and Revolution***
The Reform & Revolution (R&R) caucus within DSA’s **partyist** left wing aligns itself with the revolutionary socialist tradition, aiming to embrace the growing momentum of socialist ideas to transform DSA into a mass socialist party rooted in working-class and oppressed struggles.
Advocating for a **Trotskyist** perspective with a focus on the transitional method, the caucus seeks to bridge the gap between the immediate demands of the working class and the ultimate goal of socialist revolution. They have proposed strategies within YDSA focused on mobilizing campaigns and days of action. The caucus believes that by championing these immediate demands, DSA can function more like a political party, actively breaking away from the Democratic Party, holding elected representatives accountable, and pursuing a rank-and-file strategy within the labor movement.
R&R draws from various theoretical traditions downstream of Trotskyism to emphasize their conception of historical materialism, class struggle, and the significance of the working class in revolutionary change. The core of their approach lies in the application of the transitional method and the **united front strategy**, dedicated to forging alliances with various left-wing factions. MUG sees the transitional method as a departure from the classical Marxist **minimum-maximum program**, pushing back on R&R’s semi-**economistic** orientation that places undue agitational emphasis on immediate concerns and spontaneous mobilizations without systematic links to conquering state power and its transformation.
Despite strategic differences, R&R and MUG occupy a similar space within internal DSA politics. At times, the two caucuses have collaborated, such as in the case of the [five joint MUG-R&R resolutions](https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/03/letter-mug-and-rrs-joint-resolutions-for-the-2023-dsa-national-convention/?ref=marxistunity.com) for the 2023 DSA National Convention.
Read R&R’s *What We Stand For* here:
[https://reformandrevolution.org/2019/07/30/what-we-stand-for/#ForASocialist](https://reformandrevolution.org/2019/07/30/what-we-stand-for/?ref=marxistunity.com#ForASocialist)
You can find R&R’s *Readings* here:
[https://reformandrevolution.org/readings/](https://reformandrevolution.org/readings/?ref=marxistunity.com)
Glossary:
- **Trotskyism**: Heterogeneous political tradition associated with Leon Trotsky, a prominent leader of the Left Opposition within the Bolshevik Party and later within the Communist International. Emphasizing the importance of the working class in socialist revolutions and advocating for a transitional method to bridge immediate demands and long-term goals.
**United front strategy**: A strategy to fight the far-right by bringing all independent working-class forces into alignment, based on the premise that capitalist interests make it harder, not easier, to fight the right in coalition with liberal parties and institutions.
***Red Star***
Red Star (RS) has existed for several years, primarily operating at a local level in San Francisco. However, it recently transitioned into a national caucus, adopting a new identity and pivoting towards an emphasis on the principle of good governance. With this shift, RS aims to establish a presence within YDSA and broaden its influence on a national scale.
The Red Star caucus criticizes what they perceive as **reformist** and **sectarian** tendencies within socialist groups. They argue against the formation of isolated splinter groups with rigid ideologies that may prioritize internal ideological purity over building a broader base within the working class. At the same time, they express concerns about movements or organizations that might compromise their goals by casting too broad a net of ideological inclusivity. Citing the failures of past movements, such as Occupy Wall Street, Red Star justifies its emphasis on a centralized organizational focus.
This organizational focus also aligns with the **pro-party** wing of DSA and the question of political independence. The RS is critical of attempts to reform or push existing political parties, particularly the Democratic Party, further to the left. They argue that such efforts can lead to compromises that dilute socialist principles and ultimately serve the interests of the ruling class. Like Constellation, Red Star has a strong emphasis on solidarity with AES.
Red Star is new within YDSA. MUG has worked productively with Red Star on the NPC and national DSA, although one point of disagreement has been their support for cuts to YDSA’s funding to address the budget crisis.
You can read Red Star’s Points of Unity here:
[https://redstarcaucus.org/points-of-unity/](https://redstarcaucus.org/points-of-unity/?ref=marxistunity.com)
***Groundwork (GW)***
Similar to Red Star, Groundwork has only recently established a presence within YDSA. Initially a slate of DSA National Political Committee (NPC) candidates, Groundwork has formalized into a caucus focused on electoral and legislative organizing. Groundwork emerged out of the milieu around the Green New Deal (GND) slate of candidates for the NPC in 2021, and local formations like the NYC-based Uniting to Win Caucus. Groundwork currently has four members serving on the NPC.
Although Groundwork consistently opposes the political priorities of the partyist wing of DSA, it differs from Socialist Majority Caucus (which does not have any significant presence in YDSA) in that it explicitly sees a socialist party as one of DSA’s horizons. The caucus believes DSA is currently in a phase of building “party infrastructure” for a “proto-party,” which causes it to regard proposals like MUG and R&R’s Towards a Party-Like Electoral Strategy infeasible. For Groundwork, staff are the most important form of party infrastructure, which has set it and MUG at odds in the ongoing budget debate. MUG considers Groundwork to be a **reformist** and **popular-frontist** caucus.
Glossary:
- **Reformism**: A focus on incremental changes and reforms within the existing political and economic system rather than revolutionary transformation. Reformists may be opposed to revolution on principle or out of pessimism.
- **Popular front strategy**: A strategy to fight the far-right by forming the broadest possible alliance of anti-fascist or “progressive” forces, including liberal ones, based on the premise that decisively defeating the far right is a necessary precondition for independent working-class politics, often entailing self-censorship of revolutionary forces and an adoption of a nationalist and reformist road to socialism.
You can find Groundwork’s website here:
[https://www.groundworkdsa.com/](https://www.groundworkdsa.com/?ref=marxistunity.com)
***Libertarian Socialist Caucus (LSC)***
The Libertarian Socialist Caucus was once known as the largest caucus in DSA with a list of 900 members. In 2019, they were associated with proposals to decentralize DSA, such as the Pass the Hat proposal. While less prominent as of late, some members created an outside organization called Horizon to work both inside and outside of DSA. Between 2020-2022, LSC had a presence in YDSA through their eco-libertarian socialist proxy caucus Green Bloc, which collapsed during the anarchist exodus of ‘22\. LSC returned to DSA in 2023 and has revamped their caucus to be more in line with the partyist perspective. LSC’s presence in YDSA is small but growing and we welcome their participation with open arms.
The Libertarian Socialist Caucus advocates for a form of socialism that emphasizes decentralization, direct democracy, and common ownership of resources. They reject traditional hierarchical forms of governance and aim to create a society where individuals and communities have direct control over their lives and workplaces. The LSC promotes worker-owned firms, radical trade unions, and other grassroots institutions as the primary vehicles for advancing socialism.
Despite being a caucus within the organization, LSC sees DSA mostly as a space for discussing and organizing for libertarian socialist values, maintaining their independence from the broader organization.
You can read about Libertarian Socialist Caucus’ points of unity here:
[https://dsa-lsc.org/](https://dsa-lsc.org/?ref=marxistunity.com)
***University of Central Florida***
While not formally a YDSA caucus, UCF is the largest chapter in the country and wields as much voting power at national conventions as a major caucus. Due to the material difficulties of sending a delegation of its size to in-person conventions, UCF uses an interpretation of democratic centralism that binds its delegates to vote as a chapter. This has historically made UCF a “swing bloc” whose politics are somewhat difficult to predict.
UCF elected two members to the NCC in 2023, including one co-chair.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Fund the Future, Build the Party!
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/fund-the-future-build-the-party/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:43:13.000Z
#### **Statement from the youth of Marxist Unity Group on the defunding of YDSA**
The YDSA members of Marxist Unity Group are deeply disappointed with DSA’s NPC for seeking to ameliorate the ongoing budget crisis by voting for historic cuts to YDSA’s budget. We share the frustrations that have been expressed across the political spectrum in YDSA since the decision, and we welcome [the NCC’s call for united action](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zZkdznZb-CHZAIULwf08kCKfpr6xj8XprtOigqlaZKA/edit?ref=marxistunity.com) by all YDSA members to defend YDSA’s funding. The following points form the bedrock of our position on this issue:
**Defunding YDSA was not unavoidable—it was a political decision.** There is a conservative tendency within DSA which takes a managerial approach to running the organization and sees areas where organic membership democracy flourishes, of which YDSA is a prime example, as of secondary importance. Marxist Unity Group rejects this logic. MUG’s members on the NPC supported fully funding YDSA with every vote. We consider this the standard and are displeased to note that Red Star, Groundwork, Socialist Majority Caucus and independents failed to meet it. Of the multiple competing visions for how we should resolve the budget crisis, a vision that sees defunding YDSA as preferable to other measures has been chosen as a consequence of an internal political struggle in DSA. That political struggle is not over.
**YDSA can move mountains when we unite in our diversity.** Years of persistent, united work won us an unprecedented level of investment in YDSA at the 2023 DSA National Convention. The current budget crisis requires us to remain united, collaborating towards a solution that not only honors the democratically elected priorities of our organization but also charts a course for the future of DSA. Through continued persistent, united work we can win back every dime YDSA has lost during the deficit crisis, and more.
**YDSA is more than just a line on a balance sheet.** YDSA is a vital site of social reproduction for DSA. Year after year, our work develops some of DSA’s most committed and skilled organizers as we grow even in times of contraction for the rest of DSA. In addition to representing a disproportionate fraction of the active membership of DSA, the organizers currently coming into their own in YDSA will be the cadre leading the way for DSA as a whole during the coming decades. This period will be decisive for the socialist movement as our undemocratic political order, capitalist economy, and ruined biosphere continue to collapse. Choosing to invest in YDSA now will be paramount to our ability to one day win the battle for a better world.
**Defunding YDSA is not fiscally responsible.** Despite the arguments we have heard from the tendencies in DSA responsible for the cuts to YDSA’s budget, underinvesting in an important engine of growth and on-ramp for young members will be actively detrimental to DSA’s financial health in the long run. To convince working-class youth to become dues-paying socialists, we must fight to bring more, not less, of their money back to the sites of class struggle they organize around on their campuses and in their communities.
**Our foremost task is to build a mass workers’ party.** Stipends for elected leadership make it possible for working-class socialists to seek leadership in DSA, shaping it into a membership-led party that puts politics in command and gives workers the power to emancipate themselves. For this reason, we congratulate YDSA members on successfully defending NCC stipends, and express our strongest possible disagreement with any further efforts to reduce or eliminate them, especially from tendencies which have made it known that they see staff layoffs as a red line to be avoided at all costs. Between a democratic, rank and file-oriented party and a bureaucratic, staff-oriented one, MUG chooses democracy and the rank and file every time.
**YDSA is the vanguard of DSA.** As we saw at the 2023 YDSA National Convention, it is the youth who lead the way to new horizons in the movement for socialism. MUG was proud to see YDSA pass resolutions affirming the need for a mass socialist party, independent class-struggle electoral campaigns, programmatic unity, a political strategy that aims to win the battle for democracy against the antidemocratic slaveholders’ Constitution, and an approach to internationalism that centers the fight to undermine and ultimately abolish the imperialist US military. Instead of holding us back, DSA must give YDSA the strength we need to keep pushing the socialist movement in this country forward into a new era.
We, the YDSA members of MUG, are proud to be in a caucus that always has and always will give everything for the future of the socialist movement. We invite all other members of DSA, old and young, caucused and independent, to make the same commitment. The revolutionary youth are the hope of the world.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Statement on DSA Budget Priorities
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/fkvheb3igdf3v3zdnsigwwsn6t2neu/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:45:37.000Z
### Ending the Deficit
DSA is in a serious financial crisis, and we have incredibly difficult decisions ahead of us. Without question, there will be cuts, and all of us will lose funding for important things. On the NPC, MUG will work to put members first, make decisions as transparent and participatory as possible, and make decisive choices about where we need to cut.
We do not have time to waste fighting about items that will not meaningfully impact the budget, like quarterly reports and earmarked fundraising for the Labor Solidarity Fund. We need to work together to make the decisions to keep the organization from insolvency. We have faith that all of our comrades on the National Political Committee can come to the table to make those decisions with us rather than getting lost in piecemeal debates about the responsibilities of chapters or bureaucratic limitations on fundraising, neither of which will save us from the crisis.
DSA is in this position because of financial mismanagement by past terms of the NPC while membership dues were known to be declining. Our situation is not a surprise. DSA hired more people than our dues could sustain. The decisions made and why are important for membership to discuss, but in this moment we must look for solutions that ensure DSA will continue to exist at all. $3.6 million of the budget goes to personnel, by far the largest expense of our $5 million in income. Nothing else comes close. It is exceedingly unlikely we will balance the budget—and be able to stay in operation—without some kind of cut to personnel. The idea that we will fundraise ourselves out of the hole or run a deficit while our cash on hand dwindles is more of the same magical thinking that got us here.
We must find savings everywhere we can while preserving the member-led organizing that gives people a reason to be DSA members. We support ending the national office lease and the NHGO contract as soon as possible. The NPC should start talking to chapters to ask if they are able to voluntarily reduce or pause dues share for a set period of time. None of this does enough to ensure that DSA survives.
Our comrades in Bread and Roses have [put forward a proposal](https://socialistcall.com/news/a-temporary-stopgap-to-protect-the-future-of-dsa/?ref=marxistunity.com) to eliminate $500,000 from the Personnel budget. MUG will be supporting this as we think it is the best chance to keep DSA alive. To our other comrades on the NPC, we ask that if you cannot vote for this proposal as written, put forward an amendment that would earn your support. It is irresponsible to wait until the brink of shutdown forces our hand in the span of weeks rather than months. Moving forward, we also support investigation into staff responsibilities and use of time, toward the end of reorganizing staff to support membership better.
### Member-Led Organizing
[Socialist Majority Caucus](https://www.socialistmajority.com/theagitator/how-the-dsa-deficit-happenedand-how-to-fix-it?ref=marxistunity.com) suggests we reduce dues share to chapters to balance the budget. Putting aside that even eliminating dues share completely would fail to wipe out the deficit, dues share is the lifeblood of our organization. It provides a material link between chapters and national, and allows us to build member investment in nationwide struggle through organizing projects they can engage with and shape directly. It funds meeting spaces for chapters, printing costs, web hosting costs for chapter websites, and a very modest budget for organizing. A top-down cut would lead to a *localism spiral*, where members who primarily interface with DSA disinvest from national and send their dues directly to their chapters, worsening the deficit and ultimately crashing our national organization.
Other suggested reductions include suspending stipends for leadership of both DSA and YDSA. MUG supports paid political leadership because it is critical to being a democratic, member-led working class organization. Since the elected leadership of the organization are not employed full-time, they need to dedicate time outside of DSA to work that can fund their livelihood and political activity. The more time our elected leadership needs to work, the more political decisions fall to director-level staff who do not have a mandate from membership.
In the long run, we should move toward paying all of our leadership, giving them oversight of the entire national organization. NPC Steering Committee stipends are budgeted to be $130,000, or 2.6% of our projected income. The stipends help SC members free up time for leadership by covering childcare, food, etc., or by reducing their hours at work and giving more to DSA. Leadership in DSA must be possible for working class people, regardless of their employment, income, or life circumstances.
Cutting YDSA leadership stipends would be an incredibly shortsighted mistake. YDSA stipends are only 1% of our $5 million in revenue at $52,150\. The extremely modest stipends let YDSA’s elected leadership give up campus jobs to focus on leading and working to develop the socialist cadre of tomorrow. They have made a night and day difference in the capacity of the National Coordinating Committee and should be protected. Hailey, our YDSA NCC member, wrote that “this stipend has created a more inclusive space on the NCC where disabled organizers \[such as myself\] are able to participate. Cutting stipends means cutting capacity and that is not something that should be sacrificed in future NCC terms.” It is imperative for both the NPC and the NCC that we ensure that the leadership elected by members are the bodies making the important decisions between conventions. YDSA is very literally the future of the socialist movement and should be one of our highest priorities for funding.
MUG will fight to preserve, as much as financially possible, those line items that fund member-led organizing, internal democracy and debate, and work in mass movements. Some cuts in these areas will be made no matter what, but we need to prioritize member organizing when we triage. DSA members join (and stay) because of the organizing that puts us in charge of making a better world. If we starve the political work that gives DSA life, we will make our collapse a certainty. We can either emerge from this crisis on the path to becoming a democratic mass party or a staff-driven NGO, and we know which we will be fighting for.
In summary, two of our highest priorities following critical functions for DSA’s continued existence will be:
- Dues share, to support chapters and prevent an existential rise in quits.
- Paid elected leadership, including YDSA, to empower our internal democracy.
### Our Path is Solidarity
On a final note, every hard decision we make becomes easier the more income we bring in. Without private capitalist or state funding, DSA is kept alive by its membership dues. If you feel invested in any aspect of the budget—dues share, electoral grants, paid elected leadership, staffing—please [switch to income-based solidarity dues today](https://act.dsausa.org/donate/ibd%5Fcampaign?ref=marxistunity.com), and ask your comrades to do the same.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### MUG on the NPC Vol. 4: Putting Political Governance in Command
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mug-on-the-npc-vol-4-putting-political-governance-in-command/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:46:27.000Z
Sup comrades!
The December NPC meeting demonstrated the need to speak on our approach to governance on the NPC. To us, governance is primarily about making political decisions. Assessing the following questions can help determine the NPC’s governance practices:
1. Are we agendizing political decision-making?
2. Are we making timely decisions?
Unfortunately, our newly elected co-chairs' original agenda was too light on political decision-making. The proposed agenda allotted a total of 40 minutes for open discussion. Meanwhile, the new business section had 60 minutes for eight items that could take up to 15 minutes each.
### On making NPC meetings politically substantive.
To ensure the NPC spent its time making political decisions, we motioned to cut the political discussion on the 2024 elections and add time to the new business section, which carried with majority support. Later in the meeting, we also motioned to move two items more suited for email to create even more time for new business without extending the meeting length.
We put forward these motions because:
- We introduced our [Federal SiO](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1agr6Sp1dI90gxSMBvuzDRcWvuWGpNZMtn8Jp1jl2AYo/edit?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) resolution over a month ago, yet this is the first opportunity the NPC has had to consider it.
- The NPC could’ve ensured the [opening up of the National Electoral Committee](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1kKwkXEh7jHiS9nSAfFJ993bQ%5FQIvSXfPuL56leOc5vI/edit?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com).
- The NPC needs to talk[ with LA DSA](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1vQrtQmGYTZ6r3zKfXNFUtlhoEogdSpLOwCdl0UDCt9E/edit?usp=drive%5Flink&ref=marxistunity.com) about their local endorsement of Nithya Raman. Raman is an elected official and candidate for the LA city council. [DSA Members have called for the NPC to expel Raman and for LA DSA to disendorse her campaign because of legislative actions.](https://medium.com/@chefrs12345/an-open-letter-to-the-npc-regarding-nithya-raman-c03d10309ea0?ref=marxistunity.com)
With the amended Agenda, the NPC was, unfortunately, unable to pass any of the above resolutions; however, the NPC did consider and thankfully pass the following resolutions below:
- A password manager request from the National Tech Committee to create a simple org-wide password management solution so chapters and national bodies can stop purchasing or implementing their own password manager.
- Approving an experienced multi-tendency Editorial Board slate, including MUG’s own living legend Donald—the outgoing founding editor of Cosmonaut. Additionally, it included representatives from tendencies not represented on the NPC, like our comrade Faye from the Libertarian Socialist Caucus.
- [Opening the books on the inner workings of the NEC](https://docs.google.com/document/d/19C3j%5FT0i1Y-3QVYjMRnpy99W0FDWicHQmgnIV0H2aO0/edit?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) by getting the full picture of how and why the body makes its endorsement decisions.
### On making concrete decisions as the 2024 election approaches.
Our strategy for the Presidential election season must prepare the working class for the inevitable reality of a right-wing president in 2024, either in the form of a Republican challenger or the re-election of Genocide Joe. Given the magnitude of this task, we will not develop our intervention for the 2024 election through 20- to 60-minute open-ended conversations. Instead, the NPC must begin deliberating on tangible solutions.
Thankfully, the NPC has already mandated the For Our Rights Campaign (FORC) to shape our 2024 electoral intervention. Led by Co-Chairs Frances and Rashad, this group of multi-tendency NPC and rank-and-file members from across the country have spent the past month deliberating on proposals about creating a program and united nationwide 2024 intervention. Going into the 12/17 FORC SC meeting, our MUG member on the steering committee, Lois, worked with Rashad and proposed the committee to recommend the following [program ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vS45KaxgCtQBXsN6-qGJ-DxHajJSfo3nxZrG--DJowWzF0E6O0BpFYQWu7mN0QNNvzJ19pwpSLUdaqa/pub?ref=marxistunity.com)and [united 2024 intervention](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vTf5X1nsw0dwGZGM%5Fap0EJYNxFCetLheRFqmxY4RZDDAaGLEXMPY1f3i8e%5FdqDyRcbz9p1Y1XFjtJPg/pub?ref=marxistunity.com) to the NPC.
The exchange between Sam from the Socialist Majority Caucus and MUG’s own Annie and Curtis in [Socialist Forum](https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/spring-summer-2023/sanders-or-sawant-which-way-for-dsas-party-surrogate/?ref=marxistunity.com) was a key influence on Lois and Rashad’s proposal.
Sam’s first piece suggests that “If DSA pulls away from candidates following in Sanders’s footsteps without a proven alternative, we risk returning DSA, and the nation, to the pre-2016 wilderness of an irrelevant left.”
- Our proposals don't tail Sanders because if we keep following someone late to support a ceasefire, we risk being irrelevant to a working-class majority who has supported one. Additionally, we have a proven alternative - focusing on the House, where Rashida is showing workers socialist leadership.
In Annie and Curtis’s response, they share, “We \[shouldn’t\] abandon the fight for reforms and focus solely on establishing a constitutional convention…In fact, because of the oligarchic system \[we’re\] clashing with, the logical conclusion \[of reform\] struggles…is to fight for democracy so that the capitalist class can’t overturn them unilaterally, which also means that the struggle for reforms will be the best means of pushing for a new constitution. Where once they may have seemed completely separate, increasingly single-issue reforms and anti-constitutional revolution are connected at the hip.”
- Our proposals put this theoretical insight into practice by connecting a program calling for a democratic constitution to enshrine majority rule with a campaign to pressure the House to pass Medicare for All legislation that guarantees abortion and gender-affirming care and cutting aid for Israeli occupation from the budget.
### On Bread & Roses’ concrete proposal to help defend Rashida.
In Sam’s response, they share that when they wrote their original piece, “the stakes were more academic,” and now “they are more serious. \[The\] NPC...has a governing coalition led by the Bread and Roses caucus \[where\] MUG \[has\] a substantial voice.”
- We agree that the stakes of our electoral strategy are more serious now, so we hope members of Sam’s caucus SMC support our concrete proposal for united 2024 intervention, bring amendments, or vote it down and bring their own original proposal.
- Additionally, Sam is right about B&R’s leadership, considering they [brought a resolution to support Rashida against AIPAC to the December NPC meeting](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1IbioLGHLeU-8ht2obLDOgWsXOT8xNzkg73-nH1YSCqw/edit?usp=drivesdk&ref=marxistunity.com) that we supported.
Rather than the “disciplinarian impulse” Sam suggests we have in the same response, our concrete proposals and support for B&R’s resolution demonstrate that we have no sudden strong and unreflective urge to lead with a stick vs. carrots. Instead, we’ve thoughtfully focused on principled and conditional carrots!
### On MUG’s official perspectives following our annual Congress.
The [perspectives document](https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/11/marxist-unity-perspectives-2023/?ref=marxistunity.com) passed by MUG at our annual Congress, which outlines our analysis of the current political situation and DSA’s role in it, informed our FORC proposals via the following outlook on the 2024 election season:
- The 2024 presidential election will be a centerpiece of US politics for the next few years. The undemocratic political system, “winner take all” electoral college, and dominance of the Democratic and Republican parties create a highly hostile terrain for independent working class politics in the contest. The potential for a repeat of the 2020 race with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as the major party candidates looms, with the added element of escalating constitutional crisis due to the legal charges against Trump and his attempted self-coup to overturn the results of the election on January 6, 2021.
- Marxist Unity Group advocates for DSA to use the election to expose the anti-democratic nature of the two-party system, the Electoral College, and the presidency. Through the For Our Rights and Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy campaigns mandated by the 2023 Convention, DSA should intervene in public discourse around the election to indict the system itself, building a constituency for mass democratic socialist politics. DSA should organize our elected representatives around shared messaging in opposition to Biden and Trump, carving out a base among non-voters and left-leaning Democrats and independents.
- DSA should also mobilize against instances of voter repression and intimidation, defending suffrage while openly working toward a new republic. Using intervention around the 2024 election, DSA can build capacity for future elections on the national stage, including running cadre members for Congress and uniting local and state-level electeds around shared messaging.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### MUG on the NPC Vol.3: It’s Raining Comrades
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/a-hrefhttpswwwmarxistunitycomlight-and-airmug-on-the-npc-vol-2mug-on-the-npc-vola-3-its-raining-comrades/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:44:00.000Z
Sup Comrades, welcome to MUG on the NPC Vol 3!
The November 4-5 NPC meeting was our first time seeing each other in person since convention. Being in person allowed us to deepen our comradery, from picking Luisa’s brain on Third Worldism before taking a picture in front of the famous precinct burned down in the 2020 uprising to a beautiful rendition of It’s Raining Men coming from the two most divided blocs!
Since we were in person, we structured meetings to focus less on business and more on broader political conversations. Given the shift to a retreat-style meeting, this MUG on the NPC will also shift from our traditional format that centers our perspectives in isolation. Instead, we’ll share our reflections about how we relate to what our peers had to say this weekend.
### On Palestine Solidarity & Areas of Anti-Imperialist Unity on the NPC
Comrade Laura from B&R led our Palestine solidarity conversation around the different audiences DSA targets in our work as one of the central divides. Through this, three strands of vital perspectives we agree with became apparent:
1. We agree with Ahmed from the Anti-Zionist Slate that DSA should prioritize merging the socialist movement and the most advanced segments, or those with the most ideological proximity to socialism, of the pro-Palestine movement. We agree with this orientation because it will allow us to grow with both efficiency and diversity, while simultaneously creating the conditions to build a pro-Palestine working class that is more expansive than the existing Democratic Party base we often target. The most advanced elements are likely to be found leading or participating in direct actions, from mass demonstrations to Block the Boat-like disruptive actions.
2. Given this focus on the most advanced segments of the pro-Palestine movement and their presence in direct actions like demonstrations, we agree with the critical assessment Luisa provided when she highlighted that we didn’t have a speaker at the historic march on Washington last weekend. We also agree with her assessment of why—our disunity with many of the most advanced pro-Palestine movement organizations in the face of pressure from the Zionist media and propaganda apparatus.
3. While the direct action leaders of the pro-Palestine movement may not platform us at the moment, we are still able to lead mass advocacy tactics like phonebanks for our endorsed electeds, including Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib’s ceasefire resolution. These tactics, best demonstrated by campaigns like No Money for Massacres, allow us to reach other advanced elements in the pro-Palestine movement. The opportunity mass advocacy tactics provide is why we agree with the affirmative assessment that our phonebanks have been a resounding success and have demonstrated DSA’s mass pressure campaign capabilities, presented most passionately by numerous comrades in the Groundwork and Socialist Majority NPC Slates.
### On Winning The Battle for Democracy and Revolutionary Processes
In addition to the Palestine solidarity conversation described above, we discussed working backward from socialism. In this discussion, we framed socialism as our goal, and everyone provided their perspective on what would need to happen to create the conditions for it.
This session, however, lacked the same structure that helped to highlight the nuances between our different positions, so we want to sketch out our politics using the same structure:
- As communists, socialism is not our end goal but a means to transition to a communist society. Therefore, we would structure the conversation by working backward from there rather than from socialism. We would start by mapping the conditions needed for communism to arise to shape our priorities today.
- Given our communist horizon, we understand that for communism to arise, it would take an overwhelming change in property ownership from social welfare to the nationalization of industry. These changes are what we would describe as a socialist transition. To facilitate this socialist transition, the working class must conquer political power to defend against capitalist reaction, and adequately make democratic decisions.
- It is a dead-end strategy to limit our horizon to conquering power within the existing structure of the anti-democratic republic enshrined by our constitution. Instead, we need to make our immediate horizon winning the battle for democracy by fighting for a democratic republic, established through constituent assemblies.
### On Building a Mass Socialist Workers Party with Strong Internal Democracy
We did not discuss internal democracy over the weekend, but we’re highlighting it here because Democracy Commission elections are coming up; therefore, we want to highlight how statements from MUG-endorsed candidates Nick W, and Connell H, [related to an article in DSA Mass](https://dsamass.org/2023/11/09/we-can-still-build-stronger-democracy-in-dsa/?ref=marxistunity.com) suggesting we “abandon multi-caucus representation as a necessary measure of how to choose the composition of national working groups and commissions entirely,” and questions, “What is the purpose of caucus diversity in a body that should first and foremost be carrying out the will of the national convention and the organization’s elected leadership?”
- Connell addresses why we cannot abandon multi-tendency commissions entirely:
“In examples of DSA at its best, members from different tendencies unite in organizing projects, competing for their political visions while still collaborating on shared work. DSA is unable to function without collaboration across its political spectrum...In order to keep DSA together when it is so easy for people to split or quit, we need structures that maintain the multi-tendency nature of DSA.”
- Nick addresses why bodies like the Democracy Commission must be multi-tendency:
“While conflict and serious disagreement over our political visions are inevitable, it is up to the democracy commission to make that conflict productive. This body is a careful balancing act and all the major perspectives on the democracy commission need to be rigorous in our research and analysis, and open-minded when discussing our ideas. I intend to fully fight for a membership-based DSA, but we will be stronger when we find common ground where we can.”
These are not just the perspectives of these comrades as individuals, [but were enshrined by our caucus at our annual Congress](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/perspectives-of-mug-2023).
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Perspectives of MUG (2024)
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/perspectives-of-mug-2023/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:44:22.000Z
*Adopted by Marxist Unity Group in November 2023*
**1**. The epoch of global transition to socialism has seemingly been stalled in the face of the collapse of the 20th Century ‘actually existing socialist’ states, as a result of the mutual reinforcement of their encirclement by the imperialist camp as well as their own bureaucratic degeneration. Those regimes and the formal schools of thought associated with them, though they dramatically changed history, especially in the colonial and semi-colonial world, have ultimately shown to be a dead end to socialism in a similar manner to other failed historical transitions, such as the medieval Italian bourgeois merchant republics acting as dead ends to capitalist society. The result is the fracturing and atomization of the organizations and institutions of the working class and the left globally, opening the present period of confusion, demoralization, and disorganization of the global forces of the working class movement.
**2**. Capitalism’s counterrevolutionary offensive, symbolized by global US economic, military, and political hegemony, has been catastrophic for humanity and the rest of the biosphere. Ecological collapse, imperialist wars, pandemic diseases, and economic crises are an inevitable result. However, history marches forward and as long as the working class exists, so too does the possibility of socialism.
**3**. In the United States, the capitalist minority dominates the working class majority through an undemocratic Constitution. The Constitution's various minoritarian checks - including a bicameral legislature with disproportionate representation in the Senate, unelected Supreme Court Justices, the imperial presidency, and an impossible amending process - empower reactionary elements in society and protect private property. The Democratic and Republican parties are united in loyalty to the Constitution. During a growing constitutional crisis in which our nation’s founding document is scrutinized, Marxist Unity Group will develop and expand its political agitation for a democratic constitution and a democratic republic.
**Building the Party**
**4**. The historic task of the working class is to form itself into a communist/socialist party with the aim of raising itself to the level of ruling class by winning the battle for democracy and establishing a democratic socialist republic. This must be both a “mass” party and a “vanguard” party to break through the impasses facing our class. These concepts are only regarded as separate because of the historical confusion caused by the 20th century. This party should neither be a party of government seeking to come into office within the current constitutional regime, nor a sectarian ‘combat organization’ unified around strict theoretical lines seeking to be the ‘general staff of the revolution’, but rather an ecumenical revolutionary party of electoral opposition and independence unified around a minimum-maximum program.
**5**. The maximum program describes the final, communist aims of the party. The minimum program represents the minimum conditions for the party to assume power - and consists of demands for an alternative political system through which the working class can rule as well as economic measures to take upon the assumption of power and measures for the emancipation of women, nationally and racially oppressed peoples, and gender and sexual minorities. The political demands include the unrestricted right of free speech, abolition of the Senate and independent presidency and the concentration of power into a single popular assembly elected by proportional representation, the abolition of the Supreme Court’s power of judicial review, the end of the reactionary federalist fragmentation of power through the states, and the replacement of the police and standing army with a people’s army characterized by universal service and training as well as democratic rights of political organization for all its members.
**6**. This conception of the tasks of the proletariat for the conquest of political power is based on a recognition that the existing oligarchic constitutional regime contains key blocks on the social transformation the working class has a vital need to effect. We do not seek to replicate the experience of the Popular Unity government in Chile, which came to power with a political minority and counted on the center-right “playing by the rules.” Under the economic terrorism of the United States, the pressure on the “moderate” elements of the bourgeoisie to unleash the reserve powers of their class was irresistible. Promising not to touch the bourgeois constitutional structure with its checks on popular democracy or the military and bureaucracy is folly. There are no shortcuts to the problem of a proletariat that is not strong enough to defend the transition to socialism. The only path is to organize its advanced section into a party that builds the strength of the class, measured in its political and economic organization and the growth of its advanced section. The workers’ party must conduct consistent propaganda and agitation for a wholesale constitutional alternative to capitalist class rule well before the assumption of political power. It must win a crushing majority of society and the rank and file of the armed forces to the necessary reordering of social decision-making. In short, we must follow the revolutionary path to democracy in order to take the democratic road to socialism.
**7**. The path to this kind of “mass vanguard” party runs through a merger of the existing forces of socialism, guided by Marxist politics, with the elemental forces of the workers' movement. This combines the program for working class self-emancipation with the practical organization, militancy, and numbers needed to carry it out. This requires a mutual transformation of both sides of the merger, in recognizing the strengths of each side and the necessity of a merger for both.
**8**. On the side of the socialist movement, DSA is one of the most significant organizations in the history of the US Left. Though small relative to the population, it is a genuine mass organization, funded by membership dues, with chapters on the ground in nearly every region of the country engaging in the practical work of class struggle. This includes not only trade union and electoral work, but housing struggles, mutual aid, political education, and other areas of activity. It is also a fundamentally open and democratic party with the practical freedom to form factions, despite the as-yet unenforced clause for the exclusion of “democratic centralist” organizations and an inherited culture of avoiding open political debate between factions.
**9**. While it is likely to be formed out of a process of splits and fusions, there is no other single force on the Left that could form the raw material for the party we need. There is no route to the conquest of political power outside of the existing Left by a small group “appealing directly to the class.” This is an assumption held by those who imagine their small group could merge with the class in a spontaneous uprising by virtue of correct politics, or in a non-revolutionary period, on the basis of pure economic organizing or transitional politics.
**10**. The remnant of the "official" Communist Party, CPUSA, along with descendants of the dissident communist movement like Party for Socialism and Liberation, Socialist Alternative, International Marxist Tendency, Freedom Road Socialist Organization, and other groups collectively represent a force on the socialist left, but are characterized by the stifling of genuine democratic centralism and an abundance of scandals and abuse that flow from a careerist conception of the monolithic party. To the end of creating a mass communist party in North America, we encourage all militants with similar aims in such sects to openly publish critique and internal debate, even if against existing leadership, to both clarify political differences and educate the broader class. Ultimately, principled and democratic unity in a mass organization like the DSA can combine the advanced working class and increase our forces (a “snowball effect”) towards the goal of merger with the greater working class movement - rather than toiling in the same milieu of grouplets.
**Convention and Beyond**
**11**. At the 2023 DSA convention, the initial agenda had minimal debate on important political questions, but delegates overruled it to bring politics to the convention agenda. At all levels of our internal democracy, from chapter meetings to the floor of convention, agendas should be set to give members the chance to debate the most vital and controversial questions of our movement. The path to an organization with real political diversity is not to paper over the major questions that divide us, but to have sharp and politically consequential debate on the burning questions of DSA. We must have these debates in order to democratically decide the path our organization will take in practice, while allowing those in the minority to publicly express their views. Attempting to avoid these debates within the membership and governing by leadership fiat will inevitably result in conflict exploding, as members who have no avenue to fight for their political perspective become disruptive or leave. One of the key tasks for reforming DSA’s internal democracy in the near future is to ensure that membership has democratic rights between conventions.
**12**. In addition to committing to meaningful debate over rubber-stamping uncontroversial proposals, DSA members should seek to require proportional voting systems for DSA delegate elections. Approval-based voting systems encourage the election of candidates blandly palatable to enough people, rather than encouraging sharp political discussion and representation of multiple tendencies. They also can magnify slight majorities into clean sweeps for full slates. The delegation of a chapter to convention should proportionally represent the range of political views within a chapter. Metro DC (MDC) and LA, two of the largest delegations to convention, had elections conducted with a non-proportional, approval-based voting system. Voting patterns from these chapters were notably less diverse than chapters of similar size that used single transferable voting systems, stifling the diversity in political representation of their membership. Voting systems should not be able to be swapped in and out based on whatever is most advantageous to whoever happens to hold chapter leadership. DSA should commit for the long term to proportional voting methods that support the multi-tendency nature of our organization. While standardizing this nationally will have to come through convention resolutions or bylaws changes, DSA members should work to mandate proportional voting at the chapter level before next convention.
**13**. DSA’s capacity for democratic deliberation will be enhanced by the convention’s passage of a resolution on expanding DSA’s editorial capacities. Marxist Unity Group (MUG) was the driving force behind this resolution, which passed as one of the most popular resolutions at the 2023 Convention. Energy must now be put into reinvigorating these publications, with the eventual long term goal of Democratic Left becoming a daily news site with millions of views, Socialist Forum becoming an expanded print weekly, and regional, sectoral, and other topical publications becoming part of this constellation of publications. We encourage DSA members of all tendencies to contribute to our expanded party press. Our organization will be strengthened by members from across the political spectrum writing their perspectives down for membership to discuss and debate.
**14**. To achieve its self-transformation into a mass vanguard party of the class, DSA will have to grow both quantitatively and qualitatively. As instructed by a convention resolution, DSA members should put 1% of their income towards dues. DSA has moderately shrunk, but can regain momentum by effectively intervening in mass struggles when they appear. Two national priority campaigns - the trans rights and bodily autonomy campaign, and the “For Our Rights” campaign - represent a possibility of intervening in these mass struggles. The convention resolutions initiating both indicated a politics of independence from the Democratic Party, which is of crucial importance for avoiding these campaigns’ capture by the liberal-NGO apparatus. However, the framing of “defending democracy through political independence” contains an important error by failing to acknowledge a basic truth, as stated in DSA’s platform: “\[t\]he nation that holds itself out as the world’s premier democracy is no democracy at all.” To be maximally effective at organizing the class around a minimum-maximum program for the democratic socialist republic, these campaigns must avoid this error in their strategy and messaging, and instead target the undemocratic political system as a key barrier to social emancipation. We encourage all MUG and DSA members to participate in these campaigns and fight to win democracy for all.
**15**. Despite delegates rejecting a right-wing majority on the National Political Committee (NPC), it is unclear how the current majority will cohere on an agenda for transforming the organization. Two members of Marxist Unity Group were elected to DSA’s NPC, and they will work to “throw open the books,” making information about the organization’s day-to-day decision-making available to the membership. This will help bring transparency and democracy to the organization’s national politics, “putting membership in control” of DSA’s political destiny. They will also seek to put DSA’s political vision in command of all aspects of its work and organization, in contrast to a model that defers to the preferences of the most well-connected individuals and management-level staff. There is some reason to be optimistic: in the past few years, DSA’s political tendencies have demonstrated a growing sophistication, and there is a burgeoning culture of open political debate.
**16**. Despite these reasons for optimism on the national level, the “iron tendency of oligarchy” affects DSA, as it does all organizations. The struggle for a democratic, member-led DSA cannot be left just up to a few members of the NPC. Director-level staff, national committees, chapter leadership cliques and other elements of DSA’s bureaucracy have a tendency to defend their fiefdoms as petty proprietors. These defenses take many forms, ranging from opposition to amendments, to the suppression of critical political speech by subsidiary bodies within DSA, and de facto “cone of silence” rules that limit the extent of information available to the general membership about key leadership bodies. This affects tendencies covering the entire political spectrum within DSA, from left, center, to right. DSA members everywhere should seek to make sure membership has information and meaningful control of the organization.
**17**. Convention delegates overwhelmingly voted to affirm a commitment to acting like an independent party. This is a positive step from previous years, where such ideas have lost. While not yet required, convention enthusiastically approved of recommending that DSA’s electoral program work towards goals past MUG resolutions have put forward like common messaging nationally that emphasizes DSA as an independent political project, an expectation to cross-endorse other DSA candidates, and once in office to organize separately from the Democratic Party and bloc vote together. Convention still shied away from setting standards and expectations that would allow DSA to function as a coherent national organization. Until we take this step, electoral standards set only at the local level will mean DSA contains divergent political projects. Delaying this will only make reconciling these contradictions worse if it happens after our electoral work is more established. MUG will work with all other interested DSA members towards ensuring that standards and expectations for electoral work are democratically set by membership in advance.
**18**. As recommended by vote of convention, DSA needs to build principled, open and democratic Socialists in Office (SIO) committees at all levels of government. Where there are existing benches in state legislatures and city councils, they must be organized into socialist caucuses that vote as a bloc and wage an uncompromising fight for DSA’s political program, building Democratic Socialist consciousness and bringing more elements of the workers’ movement into DSA in the process. The most difficult task is getting US Congressional socialists to act as a disciplined party fraction and independent opposition to both capitalist parties. The best chance of that is to build up DSA’s independent electoral apparatus while continuing to deepen DSA’s relationship to existing socialists in Congress and planning towards the election of a socialist to Congress who can actively organize the existing electeds into a disciplined socialist caucus. As with labor, MUG has many members involved in DSA electoral work, but we must work to embed ourselves more deeply in DSA’s field apparatus and National Electoral Committee while promoting this political vision of electoral politics.
**19**. DSA’s strength comes from being a multi-tendency organization with open debate and the freedom to form factions. It unites tendencies from across the left under a single banner, forcing us to work together despite our differences. This gives the left a vehicle to work through disagreements and come to a higher level of unity, even if the process is publicly messier than sects that maintain ideological purity at the cost of mass membership.
**20**. In examples of DSA at its best, members from different tendencies unite in organizing projects, competing for their political visions while still collaborating on shared work. Members are able to learn about the goals and strategies of different tendencies within the organization and decide between them. DSA is unable to function without collaboration across its political spectrum. Important skills, organizing experience, membership numbers, and practical administration are provided by all parts of the organization. Splits and purges would demobilize DSA as experienced leaders and organizers and the rank and file members who provide the mass power for DSA’s campaigns would be suddenly torn apart across arbitrary lines. In order to function as a multi-tendency organization, we must seek unity in diversity.
**21**. To find unity in diversity we must decide how to work together towards shared goals, while maintaining the freedom of debate that allows the various tendencies to put forward their visions. In order to maintain our existence as a multi-tendency socialist party, we have to come to some agreement on political work that does not put different sections of the organization at odds with each other. DSA members do not all have to believe the same things or have the same theory of winning socialism, but in order to function as a multi-tendency organization we must democratically make some decisions about what we are doing so that work done in one area does not damage the organizing done by others.
**22**. One mistaken path to unity in diversity common in DSA is tendencies siloing off into different projects or committees. This is essentially operating as a sect within DSA, nominally being part of the same organization but refusing to collaborate on shared work and sometimes pushing political rivals out. When factions refuse to share the same space in campaigns or committees, they begin to retreat into themselves, making decisions as factions, rather than participating fully in the democratic process of the entire organization.
**23**. MUG will not seek to establish fiefdoms in any particular committee or field of struggle, but to be fully integrated across DSA. We will work towards winning DSA members away from appeals to localism towards programmatic unity, so DSA members democratically decide together our shared political goals and standards. DSA is a national organization, and the choices made in one chapter or committee impact all of us. The internal strife caused by not coming to agreement on standards ahead of time will only grow as DSA’s organizing becomes more successful and prominent. We have a responsibility to each other and the working class to find ways to work together and to win.
**Labor Strategy**
**24**. On the side of the workers’ movement, union labor represents a historically low percentage of the overall workforce. This is a major challenge facing the left; however, within the unionized section of the class, the militant or progressive reform wing is on the rise, and socialists have an outsized presence. DSA has allied itself with this reform wing of the labor movement, and its industrialized part has played a role as one of the driving forces in propelling the reform wings to victory in important unions such as UAW and the Teamsters.
**25**. Both the UAW and the Teamsters had threatened strikes over the summer of 2023\. DSA initiated a national “strike ready” campaign that successfully promoted solidarity work in the UPS practice strikes as well as the UAW “stand up strikes.” Historically, solidarity work on the picket lines is where DSA most stands out in the labor movement.
**26**. However, DSA generally takes an uncritical attitude towards the reform wing and the progressive union bureaucracy (except for those sections that criticize reformers from the right). Socialists should not be afraid to criticize the progressive bureaucracy when it is warranted, such as when Teamsters leadership went back to the bargaining table after negotiations had initially ceased and the movement was preparing for a monumental strike. While we don’t want to alienate the reform movement by being automatically critical of every tactical calculation, socialists shouldn’t be afraid to admit we want to spread class struggle throughout the widest layers of society and must remember that the immediate goals of the class have to be subordinated to the greater goals. The “rank-and-file strategy” as practiced by DSA contains many useful tools for organizing the workers’ movement, but it lacks a clearly theorized connection to socialists’ long-term political goals. Democratic Socialists must work to unite the labor and socialist movements into a fighting party for the conquest of political power. This means we must seek to direct the militant and reform section of the labor movement in a pro-party direction, against the elements of labor liberalism within the reform wing:
1. We must fight for socialist-oriented democratic unions represented by leaders who are directly elected, recallable, and compensated by the average wage of the members represented.
2. We must fight for uniting various crafts together in wall-to-wall, industrially represented unions.
3. We must fight for membership control, deliberation, and access to information through the whole contract bargaining process.
4. We must fight for unions that only suspend or end strikes by a vote of the striking workers.
**27**. MUG has many members involved in DSA labor work, but we have not centralized our practical labor work into a coherent effort. MUG members must get involved with the NLC and push for a deeper theorization and politicization of the rank-and-file strategy.
**Internationalism**
**28**. DSA must also seek to strengthen the capacity for common action and political struggle of the workers’ movement internationally. For an organization in the process of becoming a principled mass socialist party, this means prioritizing unity with principled forces rather than tailing the largest or most prominent organization in a given country, though relationships with reformist organizations should still be formed. The highest level of unity for the workers’ movement is on political grounds in an international party. For the international workers’ political movement, the struggle against war and the imperialist hierarchy of nations is of utmost importance. Common action across borders in trade union struggles is also a powerful weapon, but concessions to the pro-imperialist politics of the trade union movement in many countries are not permissible.
**29**. In setting priorities for the international workers’ movement, US imperialism must be recognized as the most reactionary force on the planet. Not only is the United States an enemy of socialism everywhere, but as its capacity to impose itself as hegemon and rule-setter of the capitalist world-economy declines, it has turned to a purely destructive form of power projection.
**30**. The US can no longer deliver a form of capitalist progress and development to its subordinate allies, as it did to a number of frontline states in the aftermath of World War II, but can only deliver destruction and barbarism to states which attempt to escape its control in one way or another. This can be seen in the economic measures the United States has imposed on Left governments in Latin America, the direct military force exerted in Iraq and Afghanistan and through the NATO intervention in Libya, and the economic effects of the US proxy war in Ukraine on the German and other European economies. These measures lead to mass levels of displacement across borders, and the creation of migrant populations that become easy targets for racist scapegoating and economic exploitation.
**31**. The most important client state of the US in the Middle East, Israel, practices apartheid, ethnic cleansing, and colonial wars against Palestinians with almost unlimited political and military support from the global hegemon. The gathering of 2 million people in an economically blockaded and regularly bombarded open-air prison in Gaza and the ongoing expropriation and routine police and military terror exercised against the population of the West Bank, the Golan Heights, and East Jerusalem inevitably breed justified resistance from those being imprisoned, blockaded, expropriated, displaced, terrorized, and killed. In October of this year, Palestinian resistance forces from Gaza engaged in an act of armed resistance on an unprecedented scale, breaking out of their city-prison and inflicting military defeats on the IDF inside the territory occupied by Israel since 1948\. Israel has responded with a barbaric bombing onslaught that has killed thousands and is beginning a land invasion of the Gaza Strip. No communist can find credible the idea that Palestinian self-determination is possible alongside a Zionist Israel, which is constantly working to make it more and more an impossibility. The granting of formal sovereignty to the West Bank, Gaza, and East Jerusalem while they remain economically subordinated and riddled with settlements would render them as bantustans offering nothing more than ideological cover for Israeli apartheid.
**32**. The only progressive political solution for de-Zionization and the end of Israeli colonialism would be a single secular and democratic plurinational state with a right of return for Palestinian refugees and equal rights for all its inhabitants, including integrated democratic trade unions and the right to national self-determination for the Hebrew-speaking people within a broader socialist regional union or federation. This cannot be achieved on the basis of the forces present in former mandate Palestine alone - it will require regional working class unity and the revolutionary transformation of the Arab world, particularly its eastern part. This possibility is shown in embryo by the recent mass demonstrations in support of Palestinians that have occurred in Jordan, Tunisia, Egypt and many other countries in the region, often putting the people in conflict with their US-backed governments, some of which have been on the path to normalizing relations with Israel.
**33**. In the United States, the duty of internationalists is to join with the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions movement to combat imperialist support for Israel, particularly US military aid. The ability to stand up against US military support for the genocide of Palestinians is an important test of the socialist movement in this country and should be considered a non-negotiable responsibility of those it has elected to public office and labor leadership. At our best we can be key catalysts of anti-imperialist consciousness and lead the fight against imperialism’s world policy and the crimes committed in pursuit of it. All too often, though, the impulse has been to recoil from mass expressions of solidarity and to fall in line with the imperialist foreign policy consensus while muttering pacifist excuses. The many large demonstrations in support of Palestinians’ freedom and huge sea change in public opinion on the question, especially among young people, coupled with near-lockstep support for Israel from both Democratic and Republican politicians opens up clear space for principled independent working class internationalism to make meaningful headway, contributing to the general achievement of working class political independence.
**34**. The grand strategy of US imperialism at present centers on its attempt to prevent the rise of a potential peer competitor through the imposition of such destruction, conflict and economic mayhem. In particular, in response to the economic and geopolitical rise of China after its cold transition to capitalism in the last quarter of the 20th century, sections of the US ruling class have adopted a ‘New Cold War’ mentality and direction of policy, which involves aggressive trade policies, military maneuvers, and saber rattling over questions such as the political status of Taiwan. In addition, the United States is funding and arming the Ukrainian government in the present war with the aim of exhausting the Putin regime in Russia, knocking it out as a significant military power, and further subordinating it economically, so that it cannot serve as an ally to a rising China.
**35**. The war in Ukraine, the onset of which was the result of both the massive eastern expansion of the US-dominated NATO military alliance over the past three decades, and the dominance of far-right pro-Western Ukrainian nationalism in that country’s politics since the 2014 Maidan events and the following civil war between nationalist and regionalist forces, has ground to a brutal stalemate reminiscent of the trench warfare of World War I. The great power politics, cynical manipulation of small countries’ claims to self-determination, and hysterical ideological justifications invoked also have more than a whiff of World War I about them. With a heavily nuclear-armed Russia fighting a hot war against a direct US proxy, however, the danger is even higher, with the possibility of massive nuclear destruction growing by the day. Communists find nothing progressive in the Russian “special military operation,” which, while primarily a strategically defensive response to the actions of the United States and its allies, is also a political extension of the gangsterism of the Putin regime and its aspirations to restore the great power status of Russia and become an imperialist exploiter country. However, the main enemies of revolutionaries in the United States are at home. Those who neglect the struggle against our own ruling class’s militarism and the grand strategy of US imperialism, or support US and NATO arms to Ukraine, whatever the “left” justification, are social imperialist traitors to the working class or pacifist daydreamers.
**In Summary**
**36**. The 2024 presidential election will be a centerpiece of US politics for the next few years. The undemocratic political system, “winner take all” electoral college, and dominance of the Democratic and Republican parties create a highly hostile terrain for independent working class politics in the contest. The potential for a repeat of the 2020 race with Joe Biden and Donald Trump as the major party candidates looms, with the added element of escalating constitutional crisis due to the legal charges against Trump and his attempted self-coup to overturn the results of the election on January 6, 2021\. Marxist Unity Group advocates for DSA to use the election to expose the anti-democratic nature of the two-party system, the Electoral College, and the presidency itself. Through the For Our Rights and Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy campaigns mandated by the 2023 Convention, DSA should intervene in public discourse around the election to indict the system itself, building a constituency for mass democratic socialist politics. DSA should organize our elected representatives around shared messaging in opposition to Biden and Trump, carving out a base among non-voters and left-leaning Democrats and independents. DSA should also mobilize against instances of voter repression and intimidation, defending suffrage while openly working toward a new republic. Using intervention around the 2024 election, DSA can build capacity for future elections on the national stage, including running cadre members for Congress and uniting local and state-level electeds around shared messaging.
**37**. MUG’s continued political consolidation and development remains a priority. In addition to improving our capacity for practical electoral and trade union work, we plan to develop a theoretical and practical approach to the Black freedom struggle and other freedom struggles of oppressed minorities with claims to sovereignty; anti-imperialism in the context of declining U.S. hegemony and a developing international socialist movement; and ecology in the face of an emerging ecological collapse. The ultimate goal of this project is to move beyond our points of unity and develop a draft minimum-maximum program for a Marxist party and to win a majority of DSA to it in the form of a platform revision. After implementing a platform revision, our task is winning DSA to requiring acceptance of this revised platform as a condition for membership.
**38**. To this end, we shall also commit to the democratization and politicization of DSA, working to build a political culture of discussion and democratic process across chapters and national commissions. This will include building open and democratic publications around these bodies, encouraging maximal political deliberation and a culture of comradely debate, increasing informational transparency, democratizing skills, and resituating these bodies within an accountable and democratic process that links together all parts of DSA. As with all priorities mentioned herein, MUG will seek out collaborators in an aim to ensure our interventions are as refined and widespread as possible.
**39**. In all our work, MUG members must push for the merger of socialism and the workers’ movement. On the one hand, this means convincing activists outside of DSA about the importance of joining DSA; on the other hand, this means fighting within DSA to make it an organization worth joining for advanced elements of the workers’ movement (i.e., one committed to political independence, organizational democracy, and the minimum-maximum program).
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### MUG on the NPC Vol. 2
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mug-on-the-npc-vol-2/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:44:50.000Z
Sup comrades! Welcome to Volume 2 of MUG on the NPC, our post-NPC meeting report series, covering our work to advance DSA’s anti-imperialist platform, position DSA as a leader in the fight for democracy, and transform DSA into an independent mass socialist party.
In this edition, we’ll be covering:
1. **Palestine:** Our work to hold the NPC accountable to our convention-decided platform and how DSA can help build a pro-Palestine mass movement.
2. **Unity in Diversity:** What it is, why it matters in DSA, and our ask of members.
3. **Robin Wonsley:** Why we voted yes on her national endorsement.
### On Palestine
- Politically, we believe Palestine cannot be free under an apartheid system, with colonial borders preventing the free movement of its people. This necessitates a single, plurinational republic with equal rights for all of its inhabitants, rather than a two-state solution under the illusion of a separate but equal policy. Our movement must commit itself to the full decolonization of Palestine and the democratic empowerment of its people. Our primary task as socialists in the belly of the beast is to struggle against US imperialism, which requires dismantling the anti-democratic rule of the presidency and Senate and dissolving our standing military, establishing a new republic with the right to self-determination for oppressed people within our current borders.
- While we work toward winning members to our politics, we ground our immediate work in DSA’s platform sections on Palestinian liberation:
- “Support self-determination for the Palestinian people and a political solution to the current crisis premised on the guarantee of basic human rights, including an end to the military occupation, an end to discrimination against Palestinians within Israel, and the right of return of refugees, as outlined in the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.”
- “Discontinue US support of Israel’s oppression of the Palestinian people, including an end to all military aid and resisting the “normalization” of relations between the Israeli government and other governments.”
- “Stand in solidarity with the Palestinian struggle against apartheid, colonialism, and military occupation, and for equality, human rights, and self-determination, including the Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions (BDS) movement.”
- When the NPC makes decisions on statements, we must return to the tenets of our platform, rather than working within the framework Zionist media wants us to. However, messaging alone will not make these demands a reality. Our solidarity will be through building a pro-Palestine majority in the working class and a fighting mass movement, not just releasing statements. One potential route we’ve identified is making Palestinian solidarity a core part of our national campaigns, like the For Our Rights committee. The “our” in our rights must include the rights of the global working class, and the fight against the right is a global one that includes fighting Zionism.
### On Unity in Diversity
- **What it means**: Unity in diversity means working together as comrades to follow the democratic decisions of the Convention and the NPC, while highlighting our differences and encouraging open debate and freedom of criticism. We are committed to working within DSA and following the will of the membership and the NPC, but will always be open with our politics and work to win people toward our perspective. So long as a decision is made democratically, we are committed to unity in action.
- **Why it matters within DSA right now**: The political tensions within the organization around the Palestine question will likely increase as Zionist repression and the Palestinian resistance develop in the coming months. With this rise in tension, it will be vital that we, as NPC members, accept democratically made decisions as legitimate and aid in their implementation. At the same time, the NPC must not repeat the prior term’s rule or ruin attitude toward members like the BDS Working Group, punishing them for voicing dissent, and MUG will work to fight bureaucratic suppression of criticism.
- **Our ask of members**: We empathize with those comrades who feel DSA is beyond repair because of its friction with sections of the Palestinian solidarity movement and some chapters retracting their statements in the face of Zionist pressure. Rather than leave, we ask you to join us in continuing to struggle for an anti-colonial socialist movement within DSA. Because members have a right to criticize leadership and form factions, struggle is possible within DSA, unlike within a top-down sect or disorganized movement. We can organize around our vision and win members to it, gaining ground just as we did at the 2023 Convention. Unity in diversity is our path, and an unreservedly anti-Zionist DSA is our goal.
### On comrade Robin Wonsley
- After voting against a number of recent national endorsements, we were motivated to vote yes on endorsing Comrade Robin Wonsley in Minneapolis, who is running for re-election to city council as an independent in opposition to the Democratic Party, running openly and outwardly as a democratic socialist, and rejects a legislative strategy rooted in [horse-trading](https://reformandrevolution.org/2023/01/18/i-dont-horse-trade-you-can-vote-for-saving-lives-or-not/?ref=marxistunity.com).
- The [Act Like a Party](https://docs.google.com/document/d/13AN2qSJpIfifCixu6DS7nrTJSbQxmoGh-eYBtUqXc0I/edit?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com) resolution passed by Convention is a major consideration in our endorsement decisions. While explicitly addressed to the National Electoral Commission, the NPC should be accountable to clauses like “wherever possible, establish an independent identity from the Democratic Party in the public consciousness. This includes running our candidates explicitly and proudly as ‘democratic socialists’ and developing our own ‘party identity’ and common messaging. A common identity will unite all our candidates across the country. It will emphasize the existence of DSA as an independent political project from the Democratic and Republican Parties that working-class people can identify with and think of as an alternative to the two parties.”
### What’s going on in the caucus?
We’ve assembled the MUG Kitchen Cabinet we mentioned towards the end of [Volume 1 of MUG on the NPC](https://www.marxistunity.com/light-and-air/mug-on-the-npc-vol-1), so please welcome:
- Annie (River Valley DSA)
- Curtis (New York City DSA)
- Aliyah (Sioux Empire DSA OC)
- Nick (Lower Hudson Valley DSA)
- Lucas (Seattle DSA)
This team made this edition of MUG on the NPC, and our most recent[ joint statement with Red Star possible](https://bit.ly/MUG-and-RS-on-the-Palestinian-Uprising?ref=marxistunity.com).
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Red Star-Marxist Unity Group Joint Statement on the Palestinian Uprising
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/red-star-marxist-unity-group-joint-statement-on-the-palestinian-uprising/
Last updated: 2026-06-03T15:29:05.000Z
### For a Free Palestine
Red Star and Marxist Unity Group stand in solidarity with Palestine and its ongoing struggle against colonization. Palestine will only be free when there is no territory held under Israeli apartheid, ending 75 years of occupation and oppression by the Zionist entity. We support the right of the Palestinian people to defend themselves from harm and to determine their own fate.
The United States is the dominant imperial power of the modern world, enriching itself through the exploitation of billions in the Global South. The US subsidizes the Israeli war industry through direct purchases and funding of over $3 billion a year, using Israel as a bulwark in West Asia and North Africa while working-class Americans, including millions of migrant workers and prisoners who are denied the right to suffrage, live with rising prices and stagnant wages. Despite this, the Biden administration is currently pushing for additional military aid to crush the Palestinian uprising. Hundreds of Palestinians have been martyred already, murdered by Israel in retaliation for the uprising. Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant has announced a complete siege of the Gaza Strip, calling its residents “human animals.” We reject calls to end the conflict without ending its sources — colonization and apartheid, funded by the US.
Israel and the United States rely on the Zionist narrative that any resistance to the occupation — from nonviolent movements like BDS to armed self-defense — amounts to terrorism. This shifts the blame to Palestine, forcing anti-Zionists to defend against accusations that they hold antisemitic views or condone violence against civilians while Israel commits genocide against the people of Palestine and marginalizes Jewish anti-Zionists.
In the past few days, we have seen leaders within the Democratic Party crawl out of the woodwork to denounce anti-Zionist activists, including DSA, as supporters of terrorism. This echoes the repression of the Stop Cop City movement in Atlanta, where activists fighting police occupation and environmental destruction now face charges of domestic terrorism. There is a clear possibility on the horizon that the state will level terrorism charges against the Palestinian solidarity movement for nonviolent mobilization and we need to stand ready to defend our comrades.
We call on DSA’s nationally-endorsed elected representatives to vote no on any funding to Israel. The responsibility of socialists in office is to agitate for mass action against US imperialism and to do everything in their power to block the war machine. As DSA members, we pledge to join them in this fight, mobilizing in the streets and protecting them from Zionist attacks. Only a mass movement for the end of the US empire can bring peace, and our task is to build it.
### On Internal NPC Deliberation and DSA’s Positioning on Palestine
When making decisions with DSA, both of our caucuses follow two guiding principles: the centrality of fighting imperialism and the necessity of democracy and transparency. As the largest socialist organization in the US, it is DSA’s responsibility to lead the fight against atrocities committed in the name of democracy here and in occupied Palestine—both nations where real democracy is denied to the majority of the population and power is held by the capitalist class.
On Saturday, October 7, [a draft Twitter thread](https://twitter.com/DemSocialists/status/1710857364604412350?s=20&ref=redstarcaucus.org) was brought to the NPC Steering Committee (SC) for consideration. Despite concerns from members of the SC, votes to post the thread were collected informally from multiple platforms and [published in less than an hour](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/the-dsa-statement-on-the-situation-in-palestine/27683/32?u=victoria-b&ref=redstarcaucus.org). In practice, the thread constitutes a statement from leadership that neither satisfied many of our allies in the Palestinian solidarity movement nor prevented Zionists from smearing us as supporters of terrorism. This is not a surprise—the Zionist lobby’s aim is to discipline DSA for supporting Palestinian liberation. We will not back down under pressure.
The process to approve the statement reflects a failure to learn from the mistakes of the prior NPC, which made major decisions on Palestinian liberation in closed spaces and without political debate rather than in open session with the involvement of membership. We have failed to build the pace and quality of decision-making needed to adequately handle business, marring this term with procedural inertia. We are grateful that the NPC passed a motion to hold an open political discussion on the thread during its last meeting, but it was an inadequate substitute for a process that puts the full political leadership of the organization in charge of the decisions we make, within view of the membership.
It is imperative that DSA take this opportunity to chart a new path forward and correct our previous missteps, demonstrating our unwavering solidarity with the Palestinian liberation struggle. We must be proactive in supporting and guiding our elected officials to hold firm stances against backing the Zionist occupation in any form, and in particular against sending military aid to Israel. To this end, the NPC members from our caucuses introduced [a resolution](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vRdnbYrFcWK5c-gar1mzka8ApueCJf4Z0vZPnnA8jziNhbV7kKRvsV99rx-Tc2LIQgUuGQB0GmZcCv6/pub?ref=redstarcaucus.org) to do the following:
- Issue a longer-form NPC statement on the current situation that demonstrates unwavering support for Palestine and calls on DSA members to fight for the Palestinian right to resistance and against the Israeli settler-colonial occupation.
- Brief DSA elected officials at all levels on the context and history of the occupation, DSA's democratically-decided positions, and how they can effectively lead the fight for Palestinian liberation
- Call upon our Congressional elected officials to vote against all military aid to Israel and reassert that voting for military aid violates the organization's democratically-decided principles and is grounds for disciplinary measures.
In the interim Steering Committee special meeting on Tuesday, October 10, our resolution was considered and [substantially edited](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1zg3xPPew3CUjhBXCvlQaL4g4bf5up-uXHXQlT%5FKXoqc/edit?usp=sharing&ref=redstarcaucus.org), and the SC passed a motion for it to be referred to the NPC for Loomio vote within 24 hours after non-political edits for clarity. While we disagreed with some of the edits put forward by our comrades, and believe the task of editing should have gone to the full NPC, we were refreshed to see the SC work through a positive and productive process aligning the statement. Unfortunately, after referring the amended resolution to the full NPC, several comrades switched their apparent positions to a no vote, blocking the passage of the resolution.
While we were disheartened that the collaboratively-amended statement would not be put forward as an official position, the most urgent issue now facing us is that our resolution represented the only plan of action for supporting our socialists in office in their fight to block funding to the Israeli war machine. This applies particularly to Cori Bush and Rashida Tlaib, who have come under fire for their immensely brave stances against Zionist apartheid. Our task remains to take up the fight against genocide, either by reintroducing the organizing tasks of the previous resolution minus the attached statement, or by developing a new plan in collaboration with the rest of the NPC.
We look forward to working with the full NPC and the mass membership of DSA to fight for Palestinian liberation, which we believe starts with a concrete electoral strategy to block US funding for the war. Our caucuses view this as the basic first step the organization can take to ensure that Palestine is free, in our lifetimes, from the river to the sea.
**Join the DSA Discussion Board to** [**discuss**](https://discussion.dsausa.org/t/red-star-marxist-unity-group-joint-statement-on-the-palestinian-uprising/27893?u=victoria-b&ref=redstarcaucus.org)**.**
### MUG on the NPC Vol. 1
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/mug-on-the-npc-vol-1/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:45:12.000Z
Welcome to Volume 1 of MUG on the NPC! We’re excited to join the post-NPC report-back party started by Bread & Roses, followed by Red Star, and then Socialist Majority Caucus.
### What to expect from MUG on the NPC
- We will put politics in command by framing reports around our slate platform: ensuring DSA is leading the battle for democracy, transforming into an independent mass party, and following its anti-imperialist platform.
- We will produce a concise report in 1,000 words (\~3 minutes read) or less because a) we know you have limited time, b) we have limited time, and c) we want to leave space for rank-and-file members to write recaps and opinions through our soon-to-be expanded publications.
- We will publish within a week of each full NPC meeting, covering highlights from the period, including Loomio, steering committee, and full NPC meeting votes. We will also share what’s ahead for us on the NPC.
### How are we positioning DSA to lead the fight for democracy?
- Highlight from this period: Rashad took the lead on drafting the political strategy components of the[ resolution to implement MSR21: A Fighting Campaign for Trans Liberation and Reproductive Justice ](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1bhNYyn%5FFcw62HPJTfaW22-F4RYWa3cgO07A4h5Vottw/edit?usp=sharing&ref=marxistunity.com)that passed at Convention. The underlying strategy helps us lead the battle for democracy in three ways:
1. An inclusive strategy that goes beyond short-term legislative reforms, allowing more chapters to participate despite our uneven political terrain.
2. Prioritizing membership recruitment and development of socialist organizers, which will increase our capacity across the organization.
3. Calling on our elected officials to champion the campaign.
- Looking ahead to the next period: While Rashad joins the Steering Committee of the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign Commission (TRBACC) to implement MSR21 using the strategy above, Amy will be one of the co-chairs of the [For Our Rights Committee to implement MSR2: Defending Democracy Through Political Independence](https://bit.ly/FORC-Final-Amended-Resolution?ref=marxistunity.com). Our goals include:
1. Continuing the shift away from the defending democracy slogan that contradicts the DSA platform’s declaration that the US is no democracy.
2. Introducing the political and practical opportunities provided by pursuing a minimum-maximum program, which outlines what it means for the working class to govern through a democratic republic and to struggle toward a socialist horizon, rather than reducing our goals to a list of policy reforms.
3. Ensuring the committee unites independent working-class organizations around our program, including tenant and labor unions.
### How are we transforming DSA into an independent mass party?
- Highlight from this period: We voted against a resolution that would have made maintaining current staffing arrangements the primary budgetary priority as we navigate the serious financial deficit we inherited. Here’s why:
1. The NPC does not currently have access to all the information we need to make decisions with a future deficit in mind, including the current budget and the 2021-2023 NPC’s Google Drive.
2. When making decisions, our primary consideration will always be what will help advance the socialist movement towards taking political power to begin a socialist transition. While this includes staff, the NPC has yet to deliberate thoroughly on other budgetary factors, including dues share for chapters.
- Looking ahead: We will continue to be on the front lines fighting another NGO influence DSA needs to shed: information asymmetry, including pushing for access to the previous NPC term’s data drive and for NPC meeting recordings to be published to the membership.
### How are we ensuring DSA follows our anti-imperialist platform?
- Highlight from this period: We voted against endorsing a candidate who did not demonstrate a solid commitment to the abolitionist planks on our platform, including open opposition to police budget increases. Since the endorsement vote passed, we look forward to working with the candidate in question to fight police occupation of working-class and oppressed neighborhoods.
- Looking ahead: Los Angeles DSA has voted to endorse Nithya Raman, who, among several other conflicts with DSA’s political positions, voted for the city to adopt the International Holocaust Remembrance Alliance definition of antisemitism, which actively restricts the civil rights of millions of citizens by classing criticism of Israel as antisemitic and instructing city departments, staff, elected and appointed officials, and contract agencies to “familiarize themselves with the IHRA definition of antisemitism…and incorporate their use when appropriate,” by extension limiting DSA and our movement allies’ ability to fight for Palestinian liberation free of legal repression.
At a minimum, we will be voting no on national endorsement for Raman if she were to seek it, following our Convention mandate from NPC Recommendation #8, which calls on the National Political Committee and National Electoral Commission to consider a series of expectations for nationally endorsed electeds, based on our platform commitment to Palestinian liberation, when making “national endorsement and re-endorsement decisions,” including support for the IHRA definition of antisemitism.
### What’s going on in the caucus?
- To end every volume, we’ll shed some light on what’s happening in Marxist Unity Group. In this volume, we’re excited to share that the caucus passed a proposal to create an NPC Kitchen Cabinet, which will support us on the NPC and develop more national political leaders. We are thankful for our Red Star comrades, whose NPC support model inspired ours.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### How Marxists Fight the Right
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/how-marxists-fight-the-right/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:46:02.000Z
*This article by Parker McQueeney originally appeared in Socialist Forum at https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/2023-dsa-national-convention-discussion/how-marxists-fight-the-right/*
Comrades in the North Star caucus have put forward a resolution “[Uniting Against the Ultra-Right](https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/2023-dsa-national-convention-discussion/lets-get-real-vs-lets-get-small/?ref=marxistunity.com)” that calls for building a broad front that is both multi-racial and cross-class. The resolution correctly identifies the existential threat that the “ultra-right” represents to the working class, oppressed people, and the habitability of the planet itself. But is forming a broad front aimed at a majority against Trump and his ilk the best way to fight the right?
Marxists say no. We understand that to fight fascism, we have to not only defeat them in the short-term, but undermine the roots of the issue as well. White supremacy is an old staple of US society, but contemporary fascism has been exacerbated by the neoliberalism that the Democrats have championed for decades. They have systematically hollowed out civil society, class institutions, and the ability to provide a dignified life for oneself and one’s family. Socialists understood that when Bernie Sanders lost the primary in 2016, the alternative was a return to the conditions that created Trump in the first place. A broad front, in North Star’s view, would include everyone from democratic socialists and progressive liberals to the Biden administration, “Lincoln Project” Republicans, and the Bush family and their neo-conservative hangers-on that orchestrated and executed the Iraq War.
Why is this a problem? Because the creation of a political coalition means the suspension of our criticism and independent point of view in key moments. Take for example the infamous [votes on the rail strike](https://jacobin.com/2023/04/railroad-workers-united-aoc-strike-vote-rank-and-file?ref=marxistunity.com). In their explanation of their vote, DSA members in Congress, with the notable exception of Rashida Tlaib, played into the Democrat Big Lie that it was 42 Republican Senators, rather than 79 Senators of both parties representing the bosses, who imposed the contract. An independent socialist strategy would have stood together on the right side of the class line and, for example, held a press-conference to indict both capitalist parties for their authoritarian and oligarchic stand against workers. Mass agitation against the plutocrats rather than adaptation to one wing of them would have planted a flag in which to rally the most advanced and militant sections of the class.
Standing in opposition to the capitalist class and their political representatives as a whole doesn’t mean giving up the fight against the right. Socialists should be the “vanguard fighters for democracy” and stand for the oppressed no matter what class they belong to. It doesn’t mean we shouldn’t participate in ballot measure campaigns to legalize abortion just because Democrats are working on them too.
Socialists are not merely “super-liberals,” we have qualitatively different approaches to freedom and democracy than even the most militant liberal. In fact, if we are to be the “vanguard fighters for democracy,” socialists need to grow to become hegemonic in the fight for issues like abortion rights. As more working people come to realize the Supreme Court itself institutionally empowers reaction, socialists are understood as the most consistent fighters for democracy if we consistently put forward our critique of the political system as a whole.
On January 6th 2020, MAGA fascists stormed the Capitol in a (rather disorganized) attempt to threaten Mike Pence into overturning the election results. In no way does it violate the principle of class independence to stand against reactionary coup attempts, even when they are aimed against a plutocratic constitutional regime. The Bolsheviks provide a good example. Throughout 1917, they remained in opposition to the bourgeois-socialist coalition government of Alexander Kerensky. They consistently called for the sacking of the bourgeois ministers and for an all-socialist coalition government, and were the strongest advocates of convening the constituent assembly as the provisional government kicked the can down the road, became increasingly authoritarian, and continued Russia’s involvement in the pointless slaughter of World War I.
By September 1917, it was clear that the Kerensky regime was not only going to remain in the war with the excuse of keeping the tsar’s commitment to his allies, but it had in fact even gone on the offensive. Bolshevik leaders who rallied against the war like Trotsky had been imprisoned and Lenin was a wanted man, hiding out in the Finnish wilderness where he penned State and Revolution.
When the head of the Russian military, general [Lavr Kornilov](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lavr%5FKornilov?ref=marxistunity.com) came to Petrograd and seemingly threatened to take power, Bolsheviks in the Petrograd soviet became the hegemonic force in [preventing a right wing coup](https://johnriddell.com/2021/01/07/how-socialists-resist-rightist-coups/?ref=marxistunity.com). They were able to do this without lending an ounce of political support to the pro-war capitalist coalition government of Kerensky, and in doing so raised their profile to the millions of workers and peasants whose support was evaporating from the February regime.
In fighting the right today, democratic socialists must be consistent champions of democracy, which means not liquidating our criticism of the political order itself and the political representatives of the capitalist class in both the Republican and Democratic parties. We must remember it is a Democratic supermajority on the Atlanta city council representing the interests of developers and police (the social base of fascism!) to construct Cop City against the will of the people of Atlanta. Failing to build an independent working-class force able to stand against the capitalist class as a whole threatens to entrench the power of the ultra-right even more. In the fight against the right, the North Star viewpoint assigns the role of generals to the capitalist class and enlists socialists as loyal privates. The Marxist strategy instead aims to organize the working class as its own army—able to wage its own fight against reaction and under its own leadership and discipline—even when coordinating against one of the armies of the capitalist class that represents the more immediate threat. I urge comrades to vote against North Star’s “Uniting Against the Ultra-Right” resolution and pursue a strategy of consistent fighting for democracy.
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### Socialists Don’t Vote for Cop Budgets
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/socialists-dont-vote-for-cop-budgets/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:46:59.000Z
*This article by Jack Lundquist originally appeared in Socialist Forum at https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/2023-dsa-national-convention-discussion/socialists-dont-vote-for-cop-budgets/*
This year, two of three city council members endorsed by DSA-Los Angeles, Nithya Raman and Hugo Soto-Martínez, voted YES on two [separate](https://twitter.com/pplscitycouncil/status/1659276524309172224?ref=marxistunity.com) [occasions](https://twitter.com/JonnyPeltz/status/1674137250165297152?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com) to increase the amount of public money going to the Los Angeles Police Department. Our [DSA platform](https://www.dsausa.org/dsa-political-platform-from-2021-convention/?ref=marxistunity.com) classifies the police as a “white supremacist organization” that “disorganize\[s\] working class communities through the routine application of violence, intimidation, and coercion.” Beyond the more routine disorganizing acts like evictions and protest/strike-breaking, the LAPD is notorious even among police departments for its track record of state-sanctioned theft and murder targeting Black and brown Los Angelenos. So why did DSA-LA electeds vote to support more racist policing?
Socialist representatives currently have little leverage in the fight for control of state policy, which is monopolized by ruling-class representatives of the Democratic and Republican parties. Today, with both Democrat- and Republican-controlled governments pushing for cuts to public services and heightening state repression, the working class struggle for reforms can be lonely in the halls of power. Socialist electeds are under enormous pressure to compromise their principles in exchange for table scraps: in the LA case, it seems that a YES vote was cast to ensure the city provided their district with a small discretionary budget. In this context, it can begin to feel that socialists in office are powerless to enact the transformative platforms on which they were elected.
But there is incredible power to be harnessed in the mass movement for democracy and human liberation. This is especially true of the mass movement against the cops that re-emerged in 2020 and quickly became the largest protest movement in American history. DSA is active in this movement. We have a National Abolition Working Group; in NYC, the chapter’s [#DefundNYPD](https://www.defundnypd.com/?ref=marxistunity.com) campaign mobilized community members and over 40 city council candidates in support of their program; next week, DSA-LA will rally with Black Lives Matter Los Angeles for a [Defund LAPD](https://www.meetup.com/dsa-la/events/295081958/?ref=marxistunity.com) action. Socialist electeds at their best are champions for these mass movements of the working class, uplifting the work of DSA and the worker’s movement while exposing the odious machinations of bourgeois government and standing firmly against all forms of oppression.
Who can forget DSA-endorsed U.S. Representative Cori Bush’s [five-day sit-in](https://www.politico.com/news/2021/08/03/cori-bush-eviction-crisis-502313?ref=marxistunity.com) on the Capitol steps, which resulted in an extension to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s eviction moratorium. Bush is a socialist who came out of the Ferguson movement and understands the value of fighting alongside working people in our struggle for a better world. “This is why this happened,” she declared when the extension was announced, “Being unapologetic. Being unafraid to stand up.”
Who can forget [the words](https://www.reuters.com/world/us/montana-transgender-legislator-censured-after-blood-your-hands-comment-2023-04-26/?ref=marxistunity.com) of Montana legislator and self-described democratic socialist Zooey Zephyr against her state’s anti-trans legislation, words so powerful they got her barred from the House floor? “The only thing I will say is if you vote ‘YES’ on this bill and ‘YES’ on these amendments, I hope the next time there’s an invocation when you bow your heads in prayer, you see the blood on your hands.” Who can forget New York’s DSA Representative Zohran Mamdani joining taxi drivers in a [successful 15-day hunger strike](https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2021/11/activist-lawmakers-share-taxi-drivers-victory/186641/?ref=marxistunity.com) for debt relief? This alignment between our socialist legislative power and people power is what builds the socialist movement.
So why did DSA-endorsed council members go against the grain of DSA’s platform and vote to increase funding to the LAPD? A Soto-Martínez staffer [reportedly](https://twitter.com/AlmostKelvin/status/1674158541857497091?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com) stated that the vote was about tactics, not principles. This logic only works if one believes that defunding the arm of the state that violently represses our political project is not a tactical gain for socialists and the working class, or that chipping away at the criminalization of poverty (materially and ideologically) is less of a material gain than a small discretionary budget.
Some might still argue that voting against the budget would be merely symbolic without a deeper bench of socialist electeds. But what would it take to move beyond the symbolic? Adherence to the platform’s anti-cop position. Any leverage gained in the halls of power is not worth the [trust](https://twitter.com/PplsCityCouncil/status/1659276524309172224?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com) [lost](https://twitter.com/PplsCityCouncil/status/1659278690595880961?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com) from activist and working class Los Angelenos. Standing by our anti-cop position has more strategic value for DSA: in materially enacting our anti-carceral agenda, in building future constituencies for even more socialist electeds, and in building consciousness and organization for a socialist future.
If anyone tells you this can’t be done, just point them to New York City. This year, DSA electeds at the state and city level in New York put this strategy to the test and voted NO on terrible budgets. And these socialists didn’t just vote NO; they managed to increase their power. At the state level, they managed to [pass the ecosocialist Build Public Renewables Act](https://twitter.com/HondaWang/status/1653786586490781696?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com), and at the local level, they managed to [bring more progressives into their no-voting bloc](https://hellgatenyc.com/city-council-please-stand-up?ref=marxistunity.com).
To grow DSA into a better structured party surrogate, we must develop clearer standards for our electeds, and create more open, democratic processes to hold electeds to those standards. In our [amendment to the NEC resolution](https://s3.amazonaws.com/actionkit-dsausa/dsa/2023%5FDSA%5FConvention%5FCompendium%5FUpdated.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) (“Towards a Party-Like Electoral Strategy”), comrades in Marxist Unity Group and Reform & Revolution put forward some red lines for socialist electeds:
- Socialists don’t vote to increase cop budgets
- Socialists don’t vote for the war machine
- Socialists don’t vote to break strikes
- Socialists stand against ALL forms of oppression
If these standards are violated, the amendment calls for an open discussion between members and electeds: as it stands, too much is decided by electeds and their staff behind closed doors, out of sight from the general membership.
Of course, like with any rule, there will be exceptions. But these kinds of rules are still crucial to establish. How can we expect DSA electeds to meet our standards without first letting them know what those standards are? Raman and Soto-Martínez’s votes aren’t the first for DSA, and they won’t be the last: just the other week a DSA elected in DC [expressed support](https://twitter.com/tomsherwood/status/1678451020337225751?s=20&ref=marxistunity.com) for pro-cop legislation, and since 2021 DSA has been rocked with a [demobilizing controversy](https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/dsa-palestine-bds-conflict/?ref=marxistunity.com) surrounding DSA electeds’ material and symbolic support for Israeli oppression. To respond better in the future, DSA needs clear expectations and strong democratic mechanisms to uphold them. Help us ensure that DSA electeds never vote for cop budgets again – vote YES on “[Towards a Party-Like Electoral Strategy](https://s3.amazonaws.com/actionkit-dsausa/dsa/2023%5FDSA%5FConvention%5FCompendium%5FUpdated.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com)” if it makes it onto the national convention agenda, use the language of this amendment as a framework for your local chapters’ relationship to endorsed electeds, and get DSA involved in the mass movement by working with abolitionists doing the work in your community!
*For a response to this article, see “*[*Coalition and Antagonism in Los Angeles: The Realities of Having Socialists in Office*](https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/2023-dsa-national-convention-discussion/coalition-and-antagonism-in-los-angeles-the-realities-of-having-socialists-in-office/?ref=marxistunity.com)*.” – Socialist Forum eds.*
Light & Air / Marxist Unity Group
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### The NPC Needs Improvements. But “Democratize DSA” Isn’t It.
URL: https://www.marxistunity.com/democratize-dsa-doesnt/
Last updated: 2026-06-14T18:23:25.000Z
*This article by Connell Heady originally appeared in Socialist Forum at https://socialistforum.dsausa.org/issues/2023-dsa-national-convention-discussion/the-npc-needs-improvements-but-democratize-dsa-isnt-it/*
Democratize DSA (CB1), a proposal at this year’s national convention, is a bylaws change that would dramatically reshape the National Political Committee (NPC). Marxist Unity Group urges delegates to vote no.
**What is the National Political Committee?**
The NPC is DSA’s highest decision-making body between conventions. It consists of 16 members elected at DSA’s national convention and two YDSA co-chairs who each have half a vote.
Once elected, the NPC elects a five person Steering Committee (SC), which is required to meet at least bimonthly. The SC is responsible for decision-making between NPC meetings, planning meetings and agendas for the NPC, and coordinating the work of the committees of the NPC.
The remaining 11 NPC members are the At-Large NPC members. DSA bylaws require them to act as liaisons to national commissions, as well as to regional and state bodies and chapters. The full NPC is responsible for staff, finances, publications, and education. The NPC is responsible for hiring and discharging staff as necessary, and hears expulsion cases.
**What happens in practice?**
Many of the NPC’s decisions are made outside of meetings of the full NPC and with little deliberation through Loomio, an asynchronous online voting tool. The procedures for online voting by the NPC have been criticized and [reforms have been made](https://docs.google.com/document/d/1oClAm2Hiyn3QVCMOST7XzPdDIgWD2n6ngOC5dGG6Sn8/edit?ref=marxistunity.com), but frustrations persist. There are complaints of overwork and burnout, but participation is extremely uneven (some NPC members serve on multiple committees while others serve on none). Despite recent efforts by NPC members to attend the district calls held by staff Field Organizers, the required liaising with chapter leaders has historically not happened.
**What changes does CB1 make?**
CB1 triples the size of the NPC to 51 members. 48 members would now be elected at the national convention, a major increase from the current 16\. YDSA representatives expand from 2 members sharing a vote to 3 with their own individual votes. Once elected, the NPC would choose a 13 member SC and have the ability to recall any SC member.
Several powers of the NPC or other committees would be given to the SC. Steering would now be in charge of taking applications for the National Director position and recommending candidates for hire. The power to hire and fire regular staff would be taken from the NPC and given to the SC. Expulsion decisions would be made by the SC, instead of the full NPC.
CB1 could be summarized as adding many more people in the interest of adding capacity, and changes that mean the At-Large members need to vote less between quarterly meetings of the full NPC.
**What does CB1 do?**
The rationale for CB1 [in the convention compendium](https://s3.amazonaws.com/actionkit-dsausa/dsa/2023%5FDSA%5FConvention%5FCompendium%5FUpdated.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) states that the NPC is too small for an organization that exploded in size over the past few years. In their own words, “the “NPC” would become an entirely new body; being on the NPC would no longer require a taxing full-time commitment, but could instead be as simple as attending quarterly NPC meetings, liaising with DSA chapters, and serving on a national committee, working group or commission. The NPC would retain its role as the highest decision making body in the organization between conventions, and would have deliberative, voting meetings in which it made binding political decisions, but would no longer serve as the executive body running the day to day operations of the organization.”
The authors write that their efforts to change leadership structures have failed at the past conventions, and describe CB1 as the simplest way to expand DSA’s leadership. However, the simplest way to expand DSA’s leadership is found in [the recommendation unanimously put forward by the 2019-2021 NPC](https://convention2021.dsausa.org/files/sites/23/2021/07/NPC-Recommendations-to-the-2021-Convention-Updated.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) to expand the committee from 16 people to 25 without other changes. It is unclear why a massive expansion that shifts the balance of power on the committee must be done before attempting this much smaller change.
The rationale of CB1 primarily talks about increasing the capacity of our leadership. Adding more people to solve a capacity problem does not always have the intended result. If the NPC cannot ensure even distribution of work and adequate participation while there are 11 At-Large members, the drastic expansion in CB1 provides no solutions. Putting more people into a disorganized body will make it even more chaotic. The NPC must agree on who is responsible for making sure all NPC duties are fulfilled, which will be even more difficult with 51 people.
CB1 uses the familiar name of NPC but dismantles the committee as we know it. The sheer number of SC meetings between voting opportunities for At-Large members ensures that almost all decisions will be made by the SC. The authors describe the At-Large members as empowered to make “binding political decisions” while the SC handles day-to-day operations. The SC’s duties should not be overlooked: all of these daily decisions impact DSA resources and functioning, and they are political choices. The primary decision-making function of At-Large members will be to occasionally confirm or overturn SC decisions. This may seem like a minor distinction, but there are [already problems with NPC members being denied information on decisions they are responsible for](https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/2PACX-1vT54IKLKUjTSZct247v5GmzrYpXUh7YS6%5F71U-KfhAnuxZKXteD34RdC1idOPcYncvtemKxlJztJvo1/pub?ref=marxistunity.com). If At-Large members are demoted from making decisions to reviewing SC votes, this problem is almost certain to increase.
CB1 transforms At-large members from equal members of top leadership into a new intermediate body that (supposedly) provides accountability to the SC and connects membership to them. However, CB1 does not provide any of the democratic structure necessary for a successful intermediary body. Increased time for chapter leader liaising is presented as a hollow stand-in for accountability and connection with DSA membership. Increased liaising with chapter leaders would be a good thing, but it is not the same as a clearly defined duty to engage with membership. Nor is increased liaising a mandate to represent membership as an intentionally designed middle layer would. Telling members there is now an accountable oversight method for our top leadership without actually having one is a recipe for dissatisfaction.
**What about the elections and amendments?**
If CB1 passes, convention would not select the people who make most of the important national decisions. Factions could coordinate to choose voting methods that would allow them to turn a slim majority on the NPC into a controlling super-majority on the SC. An alternative amendment for consideration would implement a direct election for the SC by convention delegates. While this amendment is an improvement over CB1, it does not fix how the body would function in office.
An amendment to the procedures for the special election states that the Convention Committee may use regions for the candidate elections. This amendment is intended to avoid [incomprehensible rankings on an endless ballot in an election for 48 positions](https://redstarcaucus.org/against-meganpc/?ref=marxistunity.com). Election by regions is not inherently problematic, but we all know the importance of maps to election results. The way in which these regions are created has a huge role in determining the winners. If members object to how the regions are set and lack avenues to appeal, the lack of advance approval by convention or membership could lead to a legitimacy crisis.
Small changes in how an election is run can have enormous effects on the results. We should not rush a bylaws change that requires many leaps of faith to (hopefully) have coherent elections. Changes of this magnitude should go through the [Democracy Commission (Member-Submitted Resolution #10: Launch a Democracy Commission for DSA)](https://s3.amazonaws.com/actionkit-dsausa/dsa/2023%5FDSA%5FConvention%5FCompendium%5FUpdated.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) to allow delegates to evaluate whether these new methods of electing our leadership are acceptable.
**What should be done?**
There are many possible improvements to our national leadership that do not create a lower tier of NPC members. The NPC could be [expanded to 25 people](https://convention2021.dsausa.org/files/sites/23/2021/07/NPC-Recommendations-to-the-2021-Convention-Updated.pdf?ref=marxistunity.com) as stated in the 2019-2021 NPC’s unanimous recommendation. The NPC should use the quorum requirements set in the bylaws to meet more frequently to reduce decisions deferred to the SC or made without debate. The NPC should adopt and enforce standards for the quality and quantity of liaising work for each NPC member. An intermediate body connecting DSA members to our top decision-makers between conventions must give members a democratic structure to engage with, not an arbitrarily assigned leadership liaison who can ignore membership.
Marxist Unity Group recommends voting no on CB1, with or without amendments.