There is a problem amongst the left-wing of socialism. Admirably, these comrades fight against opportunism, and their intended program is, broadly:

• A clean break to form an independent party from the Democrats
• Militant trade unions and strikes that can bring capital to heel
• International solidarity that does not haggle over ridiculous questions like whether Hamas are the good guys or not

However, there are issues with this program, one of which is that it has been obsolete for over a century. Its historical origin is in Social Democratic politics, and if we don’t learn from this precedent, we are doomed to repeat its failures, including the victory of fascism. Let’s see why.

Pre-Social Democratic Politics

Marx and Engels formed the basis for Social Democratic politics. To them, “progressive” did not mean “better relative to current conditions,” but historical progress towards communism. The strategy they believed should be employed changed over time.

In the revolutions of 1848, the Communist League led the proletariat in armed conflict, often street battles. Its goal was cohering the proletariat as a class and refusing any developments by the then-revolutionary bourgeoisie that would weaken the emerging working class’s independent political power. But in his 1895 introduction to The Class Struggles in France, Engels reflects on the obsolescence of this revolutionary strategy. The socialist parties of Europe had largely won the right to operate legally, and Germans had recently won universal suffrage for working men. Connecting this obsolescence to improvements in the state’s military technology and organization, he says:

“The time of surprise attacks, of revolutions carried through by small conscious minorities at the head of masses lacking consciousness is past. Where it is a question of a complete transformation of the social organisation, the masses themselves must also be in on it . . . And if universal suffrage had offered no other advantage than that it allowed us to count our numbers every three years; that by the regularly established, unexpectedly rapid rise in our vote it increased in equal measure the workers’ certainty of victory and the dismay of their opponents, and so became our best means of propaganda; . . . To keep this growth going without interruption until it gets beyond the control of the prevailing governmental system of itself, [...] but to keep it intact until the decisive day, that is our main task . . . And if we are not so crazy as to let ourselves be driven to street fighting in order to please them, then in the end there is nothing left for them to do but themselves break through this dire legality . . . If, therefore, you break the constitution of the Reich, [the Social-Democratic Party of Germany] is free, and can do as it pleases with regard to you. But it will hardly blurt out to you today what it is going to do then.”

There are three important things to note here:

1. Revolution must involve the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat and the proletariat is not conceived separately from the party.
2. Elections are tools to measure your strength via popularity and propaganda meant to raise revolutionary consciousness.
3. While street-fighting is obsolete, revolution is not abandoned — and revolution is not achieved through elections.

The first instance of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat was another turning point that made previous forms of struggle obsolete. In 1871, France and Prussia fought a war which France handedly lost, ending with a siege on Paris. After Paris surrendered, the National Guard stationed there – composed of much of the city’s able-bodied proletariat – and the rest of Paris, angry after decades of poverty and now a war, rose up when the new French democratic government tried to disarm them. The city became the Paris Commune, founded on common property and an end to class society. They organized co-operatives, aiming to bring them under “one great union,” and largely disenfranchised the Parisian bourgeoisie.

The Commune was crushed by the forces of Versailles after only a few months, and while Marx and Engels criticized many of the specific measures taken by the Commune — especially how they didn’t march on Versailles — they recognized that the class struggle had fundamentally changed. No longer was the working class stuck in the realm of unions and mere reforms post-1848. The working class could establish a world where it was in charge, dismantling class society under a new, proletarian state that had smashed the bourgeois state. This is what Engels is referring to above when he says “then Social-Democracy is free, and can do as it pleases with regard to you.” The proletarian state would then wither away as its functions as a mediator of class antagonisms become irrelevant with the disappearance of those antagonisms.

This is a much different goal than the daily struggles of trade union activity and electoral reforms that were arising at the same time. Marx, in Value, Price, & Profit, critiques unions for being stuck in the daily changes of the market, and in the 1891 Critique of the Erfurt Program, Engels defines opportunism as tied to these daily struggles:

“This forgetting of the great, the principal considerations for the momentary interests of the day, this struggling and striving for the success of the moment regardless of later consequences, this sacrifice of the future of the movement for its present, may be ‘honestly’ meant, but it is and remains opportunism, and ‘honest’ opportunism is perhaps the most dangerous of all!”

Opportunism is, then, seizing upon immediate opportunities for momentary “progress” that does not progress us towards socialism at all and dedicates time and resources away from the overarching goal. Good intentions are irrelevant.

Altogether, what we see from both Marx and Engels are:

1. A commitment to an independent proletarian party composed of revolutionary masses and not just a group of dedicated revolutionaries on the outside, capable of leading a revolution.
2. A commitment to a historically progressive vision of revolution that guides how they engage in any activity, rather than directing activity towards the constant changes in markets and government.
3. An ability to change their tactics with developments in the class struggle – organizing is not based on eternal validity of this or that strategy, but if it is useful and not obsolete.

Nearly all of this was completely lost on the Second International, a group of socialist parties across Europe that collapsed when most of the parties supported their governments’ entries into World War I, effectively supporting war on their comrades. The parallels to today are enormous.

The Failure of Social Democracy

The Social-Democratic Party of Germany was the most advanced socialist party in the world before WWI. Like us, it advanced its own electoral candidates, swore up and down against capitalism and bourgeois parties, worked with trade unions, and even had party-led schools for cadres. It then became an opportunistic party that abandoned the class struggle and supported Germany’s entry into WWI. Why?

The answer largely lies in class consciousness. In her pamphlet Social Reform or Revolution?, SPD-member Rosa Luxemburg rejects fellow member Eduard Bernstein’s lack of belief in revolution. She argues that union and electoral work are only means of raising class consciousness so that when revolution occurs, the working class knows how to lead. She aligns with SPD theoretical-leader Kautsky’s phrase that the SPD “is a revolutionary party, not a revolution-making party,” i.e., a revolution must be a spontaneous uprising of the masses, brought about by a crisis. After the 1905 Russian Revolution, she advocated for the mass strike as the way for the working class to start this spontaneous revolution: mass economic action to make revolutionary political demands.

It is easy to see where she got this from Marx and Engels. In multiple works, they say that the burgeoning contradictions of capitalist society will lead to a crisis that the proletariat will then exploit to make revolution. The earlier quote from The Class Struggle in France (originally edited by Kautsky) says that there will be a “decisive day” when revolution occurs, spontaneously ending capitalism. There are two major problems here.

First, when is this decisive day? Luxemburg would answer “when a crisis occurs.” But why hadn’t previous crises outside of the Commune led to socialist revolutions, even when socialist parties were present? Luxemburg has no answer for this, leaving the revolution to chance. She and many others said that this spontaneity could become revolutionary without fully explaining how, only saying that a revolutionary party would lead it.

Today, every spontaneous uprising demonstrates this does not happen. You could point to the October Revolution or others that arose from crises, but this misses what turned these from protests or bourgeois movements into socialist revolutions – revolutionary consciousness in the working class built by a revolution-making party, contrary to Kautsky and Luxemburg. It is not sufficient to have an independent party with some revolutionary horizon; this party must also start a revolution, not wait around to lead one.

This leads to the second point: your consciousness is determined by your social environment and activity. Spontaneous activity will not build revolutionary consciousness. You need revolutionary activity to build that. This should seem obvious, but the fact that Rosa says, “trade unions and elections are not revolutionary activity” and then implies that they are somehow capable of building broad, revolutionary consciousness amongst workers should stand out as contradictory.

Consider what would happen in a spontaneous uprising where there is a “revolutionary party” but not a revolution-making party. Why would workers gain revolutionary consciousness? They have myriad beliefs in any spontaneous situation, and almost none of them understand what socialism really is, assuming that is the preference of even some workers. You need revolutionary activity for the majority to believe in revolution. But if you’re waiting for revolution, all you can do is spontaneous activity that workers are already doing themselves – workers don’t need a socialist party to unionize or protest and, as we see today, are active in electoral politics with or without us.

Opportunists also win them over in these areas, meaning we’re competing for workers’ trust without presenting anything new. This leaves us stuck in the daily struggle, i.e., opportunistic work, running around in circles in the midst of capital’s relentless onslaught of basic rights and compromising with cynical opportunists to get anywhere. The majority of workers will have no way to assimilate a revolutionary horizon since their activity is directed towards issues that frequently come and go.

Even a mass strike cannot teach this horizon. The sporadic work in the vague “lead-up” leaves most activity to party members, giving the masses hardly any activity themselves, revolutionary or not, between disconnected pushes. Millions of people rising up at the same time cannot possibly assimilate a revolutionary horizon here. Engels said “the masses themselves must also be in on it” for a reason, and he did not mean “only on the ‘decisive day.’” This is a major issue the SPD had, breaking with its own principles by catering to conservative trade unions and making reforms in a bourgeois government, which created an environment where more and more party cadres were openly reformist or only Marxist in words, not deeds.

Here lies the rub. Spontaneous activity in the 1800s had a historical purpose. It was not for revolution itself, but for workers to realize that they had different interests from the bourgeoisie and could take action over it. This work was essential because for people to realize they can free themselves by ending class society, they must first recognize that class society exists and that they are the oppressed class. But once most of them have this initial consciousness – as they did in Germany by the 20th century, and as they do today – dwelling here is a road to nowhere.

Luxemburg and others across the Second International understood that the dictatorship of the proletariat was a necessary step and that the right wing of their movement would hold workers back from revolution, but they didn’t have a good alternative to get there. It wasn’t for a lack of trying, but they had not broken fully with a form of consciousness that lends itself to opportunism – spontaneous consciousness, rooted in the daily struggle. Because of this, they could not move beyond being a “revolutionary” party, whose “strategy” could only be the daily struggle and waiting for spontaneous uprisings. This is the limiting contradiction that blew up once WWI erupted as the conditions of class consciousness had changed and were not properly dealt with. Today, it is a mistake on our end precisely because we should be aware of where this inflexibility led.

Every issue here arises from the type of class consciousness workers and the party have, but there is an alternative. Bourgeois revolutions were by-and-large spontaneous in the 19th century, and successful. However, the bourgeoisie had built up their political and productive capacities for centuries, so that when they spontaneously rose up, it was feasible to take power as generalized commodity production was already widespread. Their economic power translated to political power. We have no such assurances: you cannot build an economy based on socialized production, i.e., sans commodities, within a global economy that is entirely premised on commodity production.

Instead, you build this in parallel, through dual power. The Paris Commune was the first version of this, a scenario where a genuine proletarian power exists parallel to the bourgeois state. It lets workers manage their own affairs, disenfranchising the bourgeoisie and struggling to expand this power against them, which is revolutionary precisely because it is expanding a sharp break with capitalism. Revolution becomes the proletariat’s life, a “complete transformation of the social organization” that “the masses are in on,” like Engels said earlier. That is how you build revolutionary consciousness. That is how you make revolution and end capitalism. Mass strikes could never do this because they are too short in duration and do not lay the prior groundwork.

This is historically successful, but it took great effort on Lenin’s part to convince the Bolsheviks that the 1917 soviets were an embryonic form of the dictatorship of the proletariat. These workers councils saw the proletariat making their own legislation that the bourgeois provisional government could not ignore because it was backed by Russian enlisted soldiers who had just overthrown the autocracy. Winning them over was largely improvised because it was a new strategy and the soviets were not made by the Bolsheviks, but by opportunists who sought to use them merely to mitigate the bourgeois government’s power, not end it.

Mao built on this experience in China, positing that these new proletarian powers had to be birthed by the Communist Party. It requires that the vanguard as a whole (i.e., everyone who is actually fighting towards socialism, not limited to one organization) has struggled, ideologically, towards a new Marxism capable of launching revolution. The vanguard, once cohered this way (and please permit a leap across the chains that connect these two stages of revolution, as it would take a much longer conversation than can occur here), can establish regions of dual power and expand them. This strategy and its underlying basis make unions, elections, and protests obsolete unless you can properly place them as supports to dual power, but they are only a possible tactic and not a priori included.

Communists in Germany that still believed in the dictatorship of the proletariat either refused to accept the non-spontaneous strategy the Bolsheviks demonstrated or tried to apply it without the necessary ideological groundwork after they were caught on the back foot when soviet power grew in Germany. This is not to say that they should have waited around until this development was completed in the midst of an actively-occurring revolution, but that they were fundamentally limited in what they could achieve. Despite their commitment to revolution, spontaneity was their downfall. The 1918 German Revolution was led by the SPD opportunists, and the 1919 German revolution led by the Spartacists was a complete failure. Luxemburg was summarily executed after being tortured by mercenaries employed by the leader of the SPD, Friedrich Ebert, a “socialist” who cared about the day-to-day struggle. The SPD’s Weimar Republic did nothing to end capitalism, which opened the door for Nazism to arise. Revolutionary party, indeed.

Marx said that “men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please” due to circumstances handed down to them — even so, we still make our own history. History does not spontaneously make itself.

Clean vs. Dirty Break

Like the Second International, we have not learned these lessons, but now with even less justification — they did not have the past century to learn from like we do. We are still spontaneous, waiting for revolution, persisting in obsolete strategies, and orienting our activity around relative progressivism instead of historic progressivism.

Take the Clean vs. Dirty Break debate. Cleanly breaking is better, but what is our activity as a party after “breaking”? Progressive candidates for “non-reformist reforms,” as if these will do anything meaningful, and to engage in union work that might lead to a mass strike that has no revolutionary horizon, only reforms that will shuffle the status quo around: M4A under capitalism or a likely return to the slower Palestinian genocide. When this moment isn’t what we hoped for, we will keep meeting workers in the daily struggle because we lack connection with the working class and a point on the horizon to orient ourselves towards. We are one more party that claims to be a mass party, but our work is outside the masses, only intersecting instead of fusing, only building consciousness as a class with separate interests from the bourgeoisie instead of permanently ending class society, just like the SPD.

The “clean” break as envisioned now is not really a clean break – it might be an organizational break, but it is not a break in ideology or practice. We are merely providing different answers to the same opportunist questions. Instead of breaking with people and organizations from the start, we need to break with the obsolete mode of class struggle inside ourselves. This is why I went from being active in so many things across our chapter to focusing on political education, especially my own. Once you have laid foundations, you can support others in doing the same and bring this to the working class as a whole. It’s slow, but successful dual power is otherwise impossible.

This is organizing, not reading books for the sake of reading books – this knowledge is a necessary prerequisite to form a party capable of starting a revolution, and you will have to work with other like-minded comrades to conduct a two-line struggle against opportunism across the global left, instead of one organization in one country. Without a hegemonic Marxist revolutionary political line, opportunism will reign.

For many queer people, sexual liberation consists of embracing sexual desire and pursuing sexual gratification without the shame imposed on them through cisheteronormativity and compulsory heterosexuality. But many others who claim an asexual identity experience sexual liberation as a liberation from sex.

As a trans fem, my understanding of the varieties of asexual experience comes mainly from conversations with other trans fems who have claimed an ace identity. These conversations sometimes include raw and harrowing discussions of past trauma, but are, overall, wonderfully intimate experiences of shared joy. For us, asexuality is a revelatory discovery, and for many of us, this discovery allows us to experience, for the first time, an entire world of beautiful intimacy that feels safe, satisfying, and natural. Unfortunately, when we try to share our joy with our allosexual friends (those whose sexuality is more in line with normative expectations), we are often met with confusion, hostility, and, worst of all, a patronizing disbelief that we could happily remove ourselves in any way from the pool of available and enthusiastic sexual resources.

Perhaps the first thing I would like my allosexual friends to understand is that when I tell them I'm ace they can't leap to any conclusions about my sex life. The only conclusion they can reasonably come to is that sex and sexuality are decentered in my day-to-day experiences and in particular in my relationships with others. And I won't reveal anything personal beyond that here!

The second thing I would like my friends to understand is that, just as transgender people often have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of gender than cisgender people because we have struggled long with our own genders, ace people often have a deeper and more nuanced understanding of sexuality than allosexual people because we have struggled with our own sexualities, made fine distinctions, and compared notes with each other. We have identified many axes of sexuality that are supposedly identical in normative sexuality, but are in fact merely correlated in allosexual experience, such as sexual desire, sexual attraction, and libido.

Allosexual people assume all ace people are sex- or even touch-averse, and I want to stress that many of us are. For some of us, though, our asexuality is defined as much or more by a positive orientation toward nonsexual forms of intimacy than by a negative orientation toward sex. We may experience great pleasure and intimacy from non-sexual physical touch, or we may experience it from different kinds of stimulation, like music and dance (I suppose I don't mind revealing that I fall in these categories: the most purely pleasurable and intimate experiences I've had with others come from touch without sex and from ecstatic shared experiences of dancing, listening to music, and making music). Some of us have neutral or positive attitudes toward sex, but our positive sexual experiences are not, for us, notably sexual, and may stem from simply an intellectual interest in sex stemming from our struggles to understand ourselves and others, or in aspects of the experiences that are not inherently sexual. Allosexual people are often surprised when I tell them that ace people are overrepresented in sex education and even kink. Indeed a few ace people I have talked to who are completely sex-neutral have more experiences that normative sexuality considers sexual, with more partners than most allosexual people.

While aromanticism, the experience of living a life where romantic feelings and connections are decentered compared to what is normative in society, is a different spectrum, or set of axes, than asexuality, it bears some consideration here. Aromantic people engage in the same kind of careful and nuanced consideration of something that cisheteronormativity and compulsory sexuality takes for granted that asexual people do. Not all asexual people are aromantic. Some of us cherish romantic relationships and experience profound desire and yearning for others without desiring to have sex with them, while others find the concept of romantic desire profoundly alien to our experience.

Many people who consider themselves allosexual would benefit from learning more about asexuality and aromanticity, and would find the exercise challenging to and informing of their own ideas about themselves. I have had more than one person react to my description of my sexuality with something like, "that's not ace, that's just normal," even as others hear the same description and do not question my ace identity in the slightest.

The third, and perhaps the most important, thing I would like my friends to understand is that struggles with sexual trauma in no way invalidate someone's ace identity. Allosexuality is really just another imposed social construct, like gender, and all forms of social compulsion are achieved through means of force that leave trauma scars. This is the only way that compulsion to behave against one's nature and desires can function. It is perfectly valid for someone to claim an ace identity as a result of trauma, and though some of us, after working through our trauma, eventually claim a different relationship to sexuality, many do not. Whether we do or do not is nobody else's business but ours.

The worst impulse someone can have is to treat an ace person's trauma as a problem to be solved. When people attempt to "fix" us they most often reinforce our traumatic relationship to sex. This attitude is dehumanizing and treats us more as resources than as people. Instead, naive allosexuals (those who have not thought deeply about their own sexuality) would benefit from listening to us and considering how much of their own sexuality is natural to them and how much is learned behavior. 

As a boy, I was told by other boys, and many men behind the backs of the women in their lives, that girls should be pursued, that the goal of such pursuit was my own sexual gratification, and that my allegiances should be to my male friends and not to the girls and women in my life. This attitude was pervasive and dominant in my social interactions with other boys and men. Some of the filthiest jokes I've heard are told among trans fems, and they are variations on the degrading jokes and scenarios we endured from cis boys and men or viewed in pornography growing up, but often inverted, with ourselves as the humiliated objects. Children of all genders are given a brutal and brutalizing education in sexuality from an early age in a system of cisheteronormative grooming that is discussed with genuine discomfort and regret by many adults, but which is culturally tolerated because it is a primary mechanism by which patriarchy is communicated and reinforced. And it's not just patriarchy.

In Caliban and the Witch, Silvia Federici discusses how during the medieval and renaissance eras of primitive accumulation in Europe, through the mechanism of witch hunts and persecution of heresy, reproductively female bodies were dehumanized, stripped of their economic autonomy, and made reproductive slaves en masse to enable biologically male bodies to become the wage-laboring proletariat class. In some times and places, proletarian women were forced into public brothels, making the rape of proletarian women functionally legal.

Asexual people exemplify, on the other hand, the ideas that we are not entitled to each other's bodies or affections, that we are autonomous beings who may freely choose the number, frequency, and kinds of intimate relationships that we engage in according to our own natures and desires. Asexuality is a direct threat to the capitalist treatment of sexuality and fertility as a problem of resource allocation and labor exploitation. In fact, it is a far bigger threat to capitalism and patriarchy than that posed by the choices that transgender people make about how and whether we wish to alter our bodies in ways that affect our fertility, given there are far more people poised to discover they are on the ace spectrum than there are trans people. With the rise of global fascism, I expect panic over asexuality to become a successor moral panic to the current one over transgender people, and, as an ace trans fem, I look forward to continuing to be a reviled outlaw in the coming years, should I survive to see them.

The project of liberation is always both personal and political. The more we uncover and understand the parts of natural human variation and experience that have been denied to us, hidden from us, and traumatically beaten out of us, within ourselves and each other, the more we liberate ourselves and each other, the more we respect each other and our choices, the more we are able to form honest, authentic, non-carceral, celebratory bonds and connections with each other, the more we quietly degrade the hold that violent systems of capitalist oppression have over us and create a more just, loving, and equitable future.

"Every empire needs a story that makes its actions sound necessary, even noble. For the United States, one of the most persistent tools in building a narrative is what historians call the “Great Man Theory of History.”

In simple terms, the Great Man Theory claims that history is driven mainly by powerful and/or unique individuals. Kings, presidents, generals, and dictators are presented as the people who shape the fate of nations. According to this way of thinking, if you want to understand a country, you don’t need to look at its workers, its institutions, its economy, or its political movements; you just need to look at the person at the top.

This idea might seem harmless, even intuitive,but it has played a powerful role in how Americans are taught to see the rest of the world. In U.S. foreign policy, it has become one of the most effective tools for selling intervention and regime change. When Washington wants public support for economic sanctions, covert operations, or military action, the story is almost always the same: identify a villain, make him the face of an entire country, and convince the American public that removing that individual will solve everything. Reduce a society to a single “bad man,” and suddenly intervention looks like liberation.

Turning Countries Into Villains

The Great Man narrative works because it simplifies complex political tensions into something that fits neatly into a headline. Countries are complicated places. Socialists with a dialectical mindset know they are shaped by decades of political conflict, economic pressures, class struggles, and historic experiences. Explaining those dynamics requires time, context, and nuance. Blaming everything on a single leader is much easier.

Instead of asking why a country developed the way it did, Americans are told that the entire political system is simply the result of one tyrant’s personality. If that leader disappears, the story goes, democracy and stability will naturally take his place. This makes intervention easier to justify, and also turns foreign policy into a moral drama. After all, if history is shaped by heroes and villains, then removing villains becomes a moral obligation. Removing the villains allows us, the morally righteous, to shape history.

Venezuela and the “Maduro Problem”

Take Venezuela. For years, American political discourse has framed Venezuela’s crisis almost entirely around President Nicolás Maduro. Economic collapse, inflation, migration, and political unrest are presented as the result of one man’s inept rule. If only he had international, American led corporations to guide their economy. But Venezuela’s situation is far more complex than that narrative suggests.

The country’s economy has long been dependent on oil exports, making it vulnerable to global price swings. Internal political conflict between socialist movements and economic elites has shaped Venezuelan politics for decades. U.S. sanctions have dramatically worsened the country’s economic crisis. But  nuance rarely fits easily into a soundbite.

Instead, Americans are told a much simpler story: Venezuela has a dictator. Remove him and the problem disappears. This framing turns a complicated geopolitical situation into a morality play. It makes regime change sound less like foreign interference and more like humanitarian rescue.

Iran and the Personalization of Politics

The same narrative is used when Washington talks about Iran. Listen to the way Iran is discussed in American political rhetoric and media coverage. The country’s entire political system is often reduced to the figure of its supreme leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei. Iran becomes less a society (or more accurately: multiple societies) and more a personality. Iran is not a monarchy ruled by a single man’s whims. It has a complex political structure with multiple power centers, elected institutions, internal factions, and a long history shaped by  internal political movements and foreign intervention. The existing regime has support, but that support is never acknowledged in the western narrative.

One of the most important events shaping modern Iranian politics was the U.S.-backed coup in 1953 that overthrew the country’s elected government. That history still influences how Iranians view American power today. Yet that context rarely appears in mainstream discussions. Instead, Americans are told that tensions with Iran exist primarily because of the decisions of one leader. The implication is clear: remove that leader, and relations would improve overnight. Once again, the Great Man myth replaces historical reality.

The Next Target: Cuba

Now we see the same narrative beginning to take shape around Cuba. For decades, American political rhetoric treated Fidel Castro as the embodiment of the Cuban political system. Even after Castro’s death, the story continues to revolve around a handful of leaders rather than the broader forces shaping Cuban society. Cuba is portrayed as a country held hostage by its rulers rather than a nation shaped by its own history, political institutions, and popular movements.

This framing conveniently ignores one key factor: more than sixty years of U.S. economic sanctions. Those sanctions have had enormous effects on the Cuban economy and everyday life on the island. But in the Great Man narrative, structural pressures like sanctions fade into the background. The blame rests on the leadership alone. The message is familiar: change the leaders, and the system collapses.

History Is Made by People

Socialists have long rejected the Great Man theory for a simple reason: it misunderstands how societies actually work. History is not driven by a few powerful individuals. It is shaped by millions of workers, activists, communities, and social movements struggling over the direction of their societies. Leaders matter, but they do not exist in a vacuum. They rise from political systems, economic conditions, and historical struggles that cannot be erased simply by removing a single person. We call this framing a ""people's history.""

Understanding that reality forces us to ask harder questions about U.S. foreign policy. It forces us to examine the structures of power: economic pressure, sanctions, military alliances, and global inequality. Those questions are uncomfortable. They challenge the comforting idea that America is simply rescuing the world from a series of bad leaders. But if we want an honest conversation about empire, we have to stop telling ourselves fairy tales about great men."

Yeah, I know, 

gas has gone up lately. 

Well, I can't afford to 

not go to school because 

I need the loans. 

I know you need the loans too. 

I know, three bankruptcies. 

That must be hard. 

You won't talk to the union rep. 

No, yeah, I'm sure he's incompetent. 

So you quit? 

And your car got repossessed? 

And you need mine? 

And your wife's parents got deported, so they can't help either? 

Yeah, I know. 

Well, you know if you...

Have you eaten? No? 

We can stop at McDonalds. 

No, I know I said we're boycotting them

but I'm too tired to think of

anything else. 

I'm okay. 

Yeah, you're right, if we had communism in America, we wouldn't have Subway anymore. 

Yeah, I see the stuff in Iran. 

Yeah, he's doing okay. Medical care is just expensive. 

You paid for your wife's out of pocket and now you can't afford groceries and she won't get on government sponsored care because she's not sick enough, even though everything is chronic? 

Yeah, I know.

I know. 

I love you too.

The Colorado Democratic Party caucus and assembly process just wrapped, culminating in the state assembly on Saturday, March 28th in Pueblo. Thank you to the hundred-plus comrades who participated. Your presence made a palpable difference.

We learned in Pueblo that Democrats are hungry for material change. Some of the loudest cheers from delegates came when candidates named wealth discrepancies and the purchase that the billionaire class has on Colorado politics. Concrete demands landed with far more force than the vague platitudes so common in stump speeches.

That energy translated into results. DDSA-endorsed Melat Kiros beat Diana DeGette 158-77, nearly locking the fifteen-term incumbent out of the primary ballot entirely. Julie Gonzales won roughly 75% of delegates, not only securing ballot access but preventing Karen Breslin from clearing the 30% threshold. David Seligman closed the gap to within a percentage point of Jena Griswold for Attorney General. Amanda Gonzalez beat out Jessie Danielson for Secretary of State by a nearly two-to-one margin.

It is notable that establishment figures of the Colorado Democratic Party, Senators Bennet and Hickenlooper, were absent from the assembly. They chose to bypass the democratic process rather than face a base that has moved well past them. That choice concedes that the progressive and socialist base now sets the terms of engagement, and it may cost them more in credibility than an expensive signature-gathering campaign ever could.

The platform told the same story. DSA members had fought to defend progressive language against establishment attempts to water it down in the lead-up to the assembly. When that language came before delegates on Saturday, they reinstated it by an overwhelming margin. The platform now includes opposition to the genocide of Palestinians, support for their right to statehood, a call to cut off aid to Israel, and support for 340B drug pricing. The Abolish ICE minority report won 92.4% support. While the platform is both imperfect and non-binding, it represents a clear demand by Democrats to move away from establishment politics, and a real opportunity for DDSA to capitalize on.

Despite these wins, there were hard lessons. In the state treasurer race, two progressive candidates, Brianna Titone and John Mikos, both ran on a public bank of Colorado as part of their platform. They split the vote, each missing the 30% threshold. This allowed Opportunity Caucus-adjacent Jeff Bridges to easily make the ballot and run unopposed in the primary. Mobilizing just fourteen more delegates could have swung that race. When aligned campaigns falter like this, we should study them as organizing blueprints and as the clearest argument yet for Ranked Choice Voting in the caucus and assembly process.

Electoralism is simultaneously a point-in-time checkpoint where we get to see what people are responding to and an opportunity to build a movement that extends beyond any one campaign. This cycle's wins show that progressives are ascending, and we socialists are the clarion call for that work. We should not turn away from the hard work of electoral campaigns and the piecemeal gains that come with it. Nor should we let our vision of a mass movement prepared for a true rupture atrophy. Instead, we double down and use these results to organize harder between elections so that our skills and influence grow while others wait for the next cult of personality to seize them.

This is not the end but the beginning. Now that ballot access has been secured for Melat, the work is just starting. Will you join us in ensuring she wins the June 30th primary and is the Democratic nominee for CO-1? Will you help us build lasting power across the metro area to advance socialist values? There are many ways to get plugged in: join our electoral meetings or the electoral Slack channel to learn more.

how many weapons of mass destruction will our country find –

searching in the burned-out craters where once stood a family’s home

symbols of resistance cooked into the flesh of civilians.

or are they victims or human shields or casualties or puppets of the regime or terrorists?

draw a peace sign on our hellcats so they know it comes with good intentions,

pray they sought the white Christian religion out before meeting an unavoidable death.

we were just following orders from America’s rich and powerful–

please don’t take it personally.

how many war crimes will our country commit

so the girls we killed can go to school,

the people elect a president, one of America’s choosing, 

give their oil rights to the rich?

& how many Iraqis will be denied a funeral–

no bodies for their family to find.

less than a hundred is an accident, more than a million is a statistic

if you’re brown – labelled collateral. 

how many Americans will be sent home in coffins?

their parents bury their kin, 

draped in the flag that sent them to die.

politicians crocodile teary-eyed speeches, lay medals drenched in blood.

called a hero, a martyr, or a symbol of a cause– 

ask not what your country won’t do for you

but what you’ll give for them.

how much of your humanity are you willing to sacrifice 

for a government that doesn’t love you back

“You can just do stuff, you know?” I’m told by Gillian Pasley, one of the organizers of the upcoming Blucifer’s First Rodeo, an artist-run music festival set to take over South Broadway this July 23rd-26th.

“It started with group texts and telling jokes and kind of spiraled into this really big thing.”

This post-ironic approach to making social change seems to be everywhere right now. It perfectly fits our strange moment in time: so much that we once sought feels just out-of-reach and yet so much possibility hangs densely in the air. It’s at once cynical and liberatory; belief in an expert-class whose gatekeeping was a rational expression of their abilities is gone, wholly replaced by a kind of faithless hope that we must – and ultimately can - get it done ourselves.

Gillian and her fellow organizers didn’t set out to start a new music festival, but when the opportunity appeared, they’d already started to lay the groundwork. “It goes back for a long time and being a part of this local music scene, but I would say the big sort of catalyzing event was perhaps our Last-Minute Last Waltz at the Hi-Dive in November.” Gillian explained. “That was like 40 or so musicians from 25 or so local bands kind of banding together over the course of three weeks to do this big show. We ended up raising about $3,000 for Kaizen Food Share. From that I think everyone was sort of feeling like we can do more big things that we want to and just sort of waiting for an opportunity for something else big to come along and feeling like we had the capacity to do something at a larger scale.”

Watching beloved cultural institutions move away from South Broadway has become an all too regular affair of late, so it wasn’t too surprising when Underground Music Showcase decided that last year’s music festival would be the last one, at least “in that form” they coyly added.

The organizers Youth on Record had been signaling for years that it was becoming increasingly untenable, taking too much time away from their non-profit arts outreach, and not long ago they’d partnered with experiential creative agency Two Parts to share the load. When they said it was over, many felt optimistic (or suspicious) that YoR just needed to get out from under its administrative burden and that we’d see UMS again. But when the buyer was announced as the RiNo Business Improvement District, that said more than enough.

The unsung heart of the festival had been cut out of the deal: South Broadway and its vibrant community of artists, venues, and fans. The once warm and airy atmosphere of the late July event had coldly blown across town and the vacuum was palpable.

“I started talking this winter about how there wasn't going to be a local music festival on South Broadway this summer and the vacancy that that created for something that could really be artist run and artist centric felt like a natural move in a lot of ways.”

It's fitting that it was the musicians themselves who stepped up. These local artists are what make South Broadway the kind of stretch you can walk down any random weekday and have a half dozen shows to choose from.

“It's affordable to go to these shows and it happens all year round. I think for a lot of people, you know, they have the idea that every July they might come down to South Broadway and see some local music, but those bands are playing all the time.”

And the dive-bars and lounges of the neighborhood know it. So when this small group of musicians who already knew these venues’ staff and ownership sought a meeting to discuss their bookings for the end of July, the response was supportive and excited. Swiftly, Blucifer’s First Rodeo was putting up a polished website, announcing lineups, and accepting hundreds of applications to perform and to volunteer from across the community.

“This is something that people really, really wanted to see happen. And so somebody just had to move really fast to make it happen.”

However, it’s one thing to be first, but it’s quite another to keep that goodwill through the festival. The organizers knew that to support a community of musicians that they would have to meet the material needs of working artists.

“We have a very equitable floor for bands and solo acts and DJs who are playing the official festival. And yeah, it's just all coming from the idea that we as working musicians should learn to value the work that we do in the community as truly valuable.”

Looking to your friends, saying to each other “why not?”, and then just putting in maximum effort is perhaps the only current strategy we can rely on. The spiritual clarion call of the down-but-not-out, looking to each other because the cost of doing nothing is just too high.

“Someone just needed to step up to the plate to organize something that now we're all going to do together.”

Hard to believe that this is the sentiment behind the first great Denver cultural victory of 2026 - but would you really believe it could happen any other way? 

If you still want there to be an organic artist-supporting musical culture in your city, visit bluciferfest.com to get tickets and get involved. Blucifer rides for you and me.

Introduction: A Mass Orientation

This article will attempt to address some ongoing debates within DSA on how best to carry out electoral work and build a socialist working-class party. The first section will lay out what we mean by mass movement electoralism, followed by a sum-up of some of the practical electoral organizing done in Chicago. The next section gives voice to many of the tactical considerations in building campaigns, working in coalitions, and how DSA can gain experience and sharpen our socialist politics. Lastly, we address the strategic question of how to build a broadbase socialist party that can contend for power. Two key questions run through our analysis: how to become a more multi-racial working-class organization, and the need to support class-struggle candidates as well as DSA cadre.

There have always been debates, inside and outside of DSA, as to what constitutes “socialist politics.” There are those who argue explicit socialism must always take priority: fly the red flag proudly and wave it for all to see. This argument posits that anything less reduces our appeal as an alternative to the Democratic Party. Electoral campaigns like those organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and various small communist groups are rarely serious about winning. Their purpose is making political points to educate the working class, who nevertheless give miniscule support to such candidates. Perhaps the working class is to blame for failing to support these radical candidates. Or maybe the working class is looking for more than pure ideology.

Unfortunately, ideological purity cannot protect us from the dangers of our time. We are now at a conjuncture where fascism is the main threat to all the advances won over the past century by mass popular movements. These include victories by labor, people of color, women, the LBGTQ+ community, and the environmental movement. We believe there is a strong anti-fascist majority in our country, and that is where we need to be rooted. We need to be working with all our friends and allies to fight fascism, and we have many to call on. That means socialists must be everywhere, developing relationships, creating issue-based coalitions, and building alliances for defeating authoritarianism. In other words, cohering a broad progressive front, or what might be called an anti-fascist united front.

DSA can play a central role in this. As the largest socialist organization in the U.S., we can help unite a broad array of forces, gaining respect through building unity and solidarity with others. Through mass work we can also best popularize our socialist political vision. This means rejecting a siloed or sectarian style. The 2025 campaign of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was an excellent example of such a broad and principled outreach.

But should we only support cadre candidates who can boast long-term allegiance to DSA? Or do class struggle candidates, those with loose ties to DSA but committed to the same ideas and issues that DSA holds dear, also deserve support? We believe both types of candidates are needed to build a multi-racial, working-class socialist movement, and that mass-movement electoralism plays a key role in this effort.

Whether supporting cadre or class struggle candidates, we need to ask the following questions: How will the campaign build the fighting capacity of the working class and push back against MAGA and corporate Democrats? How do we create an ongoing coalition and broaden our relationship? Can the campaign change the balance of forces in Chicago? Will it increase our organizational capacity and knowledge? Will it expand our membership, and help transform the class and multi-racial membership of DSA? Answering these questions and others will help us map out a strategy for mass movement electoralism. Canvassing for that perfect candidate who started as a DSA comrade and promotes every policy that seems socialist. But if we want to really contest power, we must organize with all friends and allies, many of whom are not, or not yet, socialists. These allies only need to agree with our program that “workers deserve more” and be willing to fight to break the power of corporations and the far right.

I. Mass Movement Electoralism

Our starting point is the key link between mass movements and elections. Mass movements are instrumentally valuable for winning elections. But elections are also instrumentally valuable for growing a movement. Call this mass movement electoralism.

Starting With Sanders

The development of mass movement electoralism is largely a by-product of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. Starting in 2016, Sanders framed his campaign as a political revolution from the bottom up. The messaging of “Our Revolution” reflected the campaign’s movement orientation: it aspired to transform the U.S. government through collective action. The movement orientation of the campaign was further reflected by its small-dollar grassroots funding model and its volunteer-driven field operation. The Sanders campaign was mass movement-oriented in both messaging and structure.

Fast forward to 2020, the campaign went even further. Building on the success of 2016, its leaders leaned deeper into a movement identity. Through messaging, the campaign created a new slogan: “Not Me, Us.” As the slogan explicitly suggests, the campaign was not about Sanders, but the movement. Meanwhile, the campaign aspired to scale up its operations by fundraising more small-dollar donations from more people, while knocking on more doors with more volunteers. Sanders’ campaigns reflected a new model of electoral organizing: mass movement electoralism—using a mass movement to win elections, while using elections to grow the movement. The largest organizational gain was a tremendous growth in DSA. Much more so than the organization Our Revolution, which grew out of Sanders’ 2016 campaign. It never expanded much outside of its identity with Sanders and has failed to sustain enough enthusiasm to lead a mass movement.

Meanwhile, in 2017, an unknown organizer named Zohran Mamdani joined the New York City chapter of the DSA. As an unknown organizer who rose to become the Mayor of New York City, Zohran has repeatedly cited Sanders as one of his biggest inspirations—like so many others in DSA. And from a small organization to the largest socialist organization in the country, DSA has experienced unprecedented membership growth, in large part due to Sanders, Mamdani, and Trump.

Democratic Socialism and Mass Movement Electoralism

It is one thing to practice mass movement electoralism. It is another thing to practice it as democratic socialists. Democratic socialist mass movement electoralism is anchored by a distinctive political identity with a principled aspiration to build a society that is democratically owned. 

If you look back at U.S. history, the foundation of socialist organizing has almost always been labor, not elections, and for good reason. The foundation of socialism is anchored in a distinction between workers and owners. Because workers do not have ownership, they are powerless. Unless, of course, they form a labor union: an organized group with other workers that can act as a source of power that counters that of the owner. Organizing workers at their jobs is thus, and always has been, a core aim of socialists. So why has DSA embraced mass movement electoralism?

First, elections speak to the masses—particularly in the U.S. While socialists aspire for a class-conscious movement that sees the economy as its terrain of political struggle, the reality is that most Americans do not think of politics in that way. Rather, the popular way of thinking about politics is a narrow one: politics is about elections. To communicate socialist politics and win the hearts and minds of a mass audience requires socialists to engage electorally. This can also be quite effective. As Sanders indisputably proved, an effective movement-oriented campaign has the capacity to transform popular political discourse and put a socialist political movement into motion. Finally, there is an urgent need to stop fascists from consolidating power, through elections or otherwise. Whether it is speaking to the masses to put in motion a working-class movement, winning governing power to transform society, or taking electoral power away from fascists, there are deep justifications for socialist mass movement electoralism.

Problems of Race and Class for Mass Electoralism

Yet there are different problems for electoral organizing, and the first practical question will always be our capacity. In the current political climate, there are simply not enough socialists to do all the organizing work that needs to be done. By contrast, the second problem is a matter of values: what is the most valuable use of our capacity in which some commitments are ranked higher than others? Linked to values is political strategy. What are our goals and how should we organize to achieve them? This problem generates some of the most heated debates.

For example, the debate over only supporting cadre candidates, or additionally class struggle candidates. Cadre candidates are those who have shown long-term commitment to DSA, are accountable to the organization, and proclaim allegiance to socialism. Such candidates should certainly be a key effort in DSA electoral work. A class-struggle candidate may have looser ties to DSA, but a long history of fighting for working-class issues and solid roots in her community. This is particularly relevant when a candidate seeking DSA endorsement is a person of color with a proven track record as an organizer. After all, building multi-racial class unity is a core principle of socialism. This speaks to underlining strategic conceptions of how to build DSA, the importance of cohering a broad socialist movement through coalitions and alliances, and how to lay the foundation for a socialist party that can contend for political power.

In the context of multi-racial organizing, it is imperative to respect a group’s right to self-determination—especially as it relates to lived experience. This is also an important principle in how we relate to potential electeds. The ideal of cadre candidates can sometimes downgrade the importance of lived experience. People come to politics and demonstrate their commitments in many ways. Yet we often issue judgments against people who have demonstrated their commitments outside of DSA.

Imagine, for example, someone who comes to socialist politics through their experience of racial domination in our society. They demonstrate their commitment by dedicating themselves to organizing to solve problems affecting their community. They organize tenants to fight for better housing. They organize parents to fight for better education, for better healthcare, or against police brutality. Now imagine they come up for endorsement in the chapter. Yet, they are rejected for having an insufficient relationship to DSA. In doing so, DSA fails to take into consideration their lived experience. The candidate chooses to organize their communities through the lived experience of racial domination. Yet they are rejected for endorsement for committing themselves to their community rather than to DSA.

That is not to say running a cadre candidate is not a key organizing goal, nor is it to say that one’s relationship to the organization is not an important consideration, but rather that it cannot be treated as a disqualifying condition. This is particularly true for the purpose of multi-racial organizing because DSA is weakly rooted in minority communities, which is reflected in the makeup of our membership. The basic reality is that individuals within marginalized communities come to politics through distinct lived experiences that motivate distinct commitments. What matters, substantively, is whether those demonstrated commitments are aligned with DSA politics. Organizing across differences requires respecting demonstrated commitments anchored in lived experiences, not just DSA membership.

What are some of the most important shared lived experiences that can unite us? The first source of unity is fighting for the material well-being of society. A universal point of agreement within DSA is that our economy does not meet the needs of the working class. Mamdani’s “Make New York Affordable” taps into what is becoming a near universal demand. That experience has the potential to command unity when an electoral strategy is tied to specific, concrete policies that can improve lives. However, economic demands should never be our sole campaign issue. The U.S. faces an intersectional crisis that includes racism, sexism, discrimination against non-citizens, environmental disasters, and imperialism. Here we can turn to the Mamdani campaign to study how a focus on affordability can co-exist while also addressing these issues.

Our other issue is at the level of systemic reform of the electoral system itself. The entire left shares a common anger towards the ruling elites and their political control inside the Democratic and Republican parties, propped up by a privately financed two-party system. Killing the two-party monopoly and creating publicly financed multi-party democracy is a strategic demand that can help guide the movement’s electoral organizing.

II. The Chicago Experience: Using Electoral Work to Build Alliances and Grow DSA

So what has been the experience of mass movement electoralism in Chicago? How have we used electoral work not just to make a point, but to build a base of active socialist organizers and civically minded voters? We believe the “Chicago Model” of coalition-building offers a blueprint for this transition. The path to building a mass socialist party is not found in running educational campaigns that garner one percent of the vote, but in running to win governing power through coalitions.

The 2019 Breakthrough: Bridging Movements to Electoral Power 

Our first breakthrough in Chicago resulted in the election of five to six alders in 2019, mostly people of color, and the formation of a Socialist Caucus in the Chicago City Council. This was not achieved by parachuting candidates into districts waving red flags. It was achieved by running candidates who were already embedded leaders in existing movement struggles; essentially, class-struggle candidates in which DSA linked to pre-existing work and coalitions.

Take the 20th Ward victory of Jeanette Taylor. Her campaign was rooted deeply in her leadership of the hunger strike to save Dyett High School and the NoCopAcademy movement. The proximity of the Obama Presidential Center to her ward also highlighted concerns around gentrification. Her track record was able to demonstrate a community-centered approach to the processes involved. Similarly, Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez in the 33rd Ward didn’t just run on ideology; she ran on her track record of neighborhood organizing against gentrification and for expanded community services having been involved with the Immigrant Youth Justice League. These victories helped DSA gain a foothold in the larger gentrification and police politics of Chicago, and with residents who had been fighting on these issues. 

Similarly, the victories of Byron Sigcho-Lopez demonstrated DSA played a vital role in beating entrenched power structures. The corruption of incumbent Danny Solis, forced to vacate his seat due to an FBI sting operation, validated much of the 25th Ward IPO narrative that propelled Sigcho-Lopez to his second run in 2019. In the 40th Ward, DSA’s large presence prevented the almost four-decade entrenched alderman from being re-elected by working alongside a formidable progressive coalition supporting Andre Vazquez who was chair of the North Side chapter of Reclaim Chicago. In the 1st Ward, community organizer Daniel LaSpata was a ten-year member and vice-president of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association and an organizer with the Jane Addams Seniors Caucus. He faced off and won against the entrenched political machine of Proco Joe Moreno. Finally, Carlos Rosa was an organizer with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and was the first CDSA member elected to city council. Rosa’s insurgent politics were validated with his resounding re-election victory, and the addition of all the above socialists joining him at City Hall.

These victories proved a vital lesson: Socialists can lead and partake in multi-tendency coalitions when we fight around concrete, winnable demands that affect the working class and people of color. These candidates were supported by progressive unions like the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and various neighborhood organizations. They demonstrated that we win respect not by running on abstract socialism, but on delivering and respecting the local historical conditions. All these candidates were well-known activists in their communities, supported by an array of progressive forces in their wards. Their primary identities were as class fighters, not DSA cadre. But DSA provided a path outside the corporate lead Democratic Party machine, merging socialist organizational capacity with homegrown organizers—an organic relationship arising out of the lived experience of organizers in working class wards.

2023: The Apex of Mass Organizing and the “Proto-Party” in Action

If 2019 was the breakthrough, the 2023 mayoral victory of Brandon Johnson represents the apex of this mass-based strategy. This victory was not a single candidate’s campaign, but the culmination of a decade-long labor-community-socialist alliance, organized largely through vehicles like the CTU, United Working Families, ward-based Independent Political Organizations (IPOs), and community groups attached to non-profit services. This coalition framework had already been taking shape in tackling issues like affordable housing.

DSA played a critical role in this coalition, helping to re-elect our incumbent aldermen. But DSA did not endorse Johnson even though he was a former Chicago Teachers Union organizer and had their strong backing. Nevertheless, some individual members campaigned for him, believing Johnson aligned with working-class demands even though he did not carry the socialist label. He was, in other words, a class struggle candidate. This stands in stark contrast to the narrow impulse that would reject such a candidate because he is a Democrat or not a declared socialist. The unity behind Johnson delivered a tangible shift in power to a working-class-led alliance. This is the ultimate proof that we run in elections to win governing power. By prioritizing the “proto-party” coalition over purity, we achieve the energy and victories necessary to transform city politics. And once in office, Johnson appointed DSA council members to important committee positions, and Carlos Rosa to head the Department of Parks and Recreation.

A recent resolution titled “Which Side Are You On?” written by Chicago DSA Co-Chair Sean Duffy and veteran member Alan Maas, passed in a close vote at our March 2026 general meeting. The resolution was a reconsideration of the last mayoral election noting that DSA has “been hindered (by) remaining silent on city-wide races, most notably for Mayor.” It went on to state, “An electoral defeat of Mayor Brandon Johnson and the socialists and progressives largely allied with him on the City Council would be a defeat for the left and the progressive wing of the labor movement, with his replacement almost certain to be a major barrier to advancing a democratic socialist agenda in the city for years to come.” This is a recognition of the need to support class struggle candidates, particularly a progressive Black mayor being challenged by the white corporate Democrats who traditionally hold power in Chicago.

But the resolution was also open-eyed about differences DSA had with some of Johnson’s actions in office. The question being, how to extend support to someone who from a working-class perspective is clearly the best choice, while at the same time maintaining the independence to criticize? Here the resolution offers a path forward. “The challenges and failures of the Johnson administration demand an honest and critical analysis, but strategies of uncritical allegiance, open hostility, passive disconnection, or simply ‘ignoring the elephant in the room’ are not realistic or viable in an election that is on track to largely be a referendum on Mayor Johnson.” The answer is to ask all candidates “which side are you on,” while working to unite left-wing and progressive forces around a common agenda to tax the rich and reject austerity. This puts class politics and racial solidarity at the center of our mass electoral work.

Reclaiming Our Legacy

This “proto-party” approach isn’t a novelty; it’s a return to the most effective traditions of Chicago’s working-class history. We are reconnecting with the era when communists, socialists, and trade unionists worked to organize the packinghouses and steel mills.

In those days, the left didn’t isolate itself. It was the backbone of the union drives led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the early civil rights struggles in the first half of the 20th century. These organizers understood that political power wasn’t just about a ballot line, but about building a “bloc” that could contend for power in the workplace and the neighborhood simultaneously. The current relationship of DSA, the CTU, and community groups should mirror those historic efforts to merge the socialist vision with the muscle of organized labor. A key component to our mass movement electoralism strategy.

However, to sustain this today, we need more than just coalitions that come together for an election and disperse. We need the permanence that our forebears built. We need structures that hold the working class together between elections. This brings us to the necessity of IPOs, building DSA, and creating coalitions linked to mass organizing. It’s what Antonio Gramsci called creating institutional power in civil society. It also affects how we see building a mass socialist party addressed in Section IV.

III. Base Building and Coalitions

Having laid out our approach to mass movement electoralism and providing examples from DSA organizing, we now turn to the details of building institutional power and organizational capacity.

Building and participating in a mass movement is complex and requires balancing competing priorities. To build a mass electoral movement, we must focus on three goals:

1. Building relationships between organizations and groups of people. Only a broad coalition between groups can reliably deliver significant wins on a state and federal level. These bonds are not forged overnight, but require time and resources within any strategic plan.
2. Creating a mass base that will support and mobilize a left agenda. A genuine mass movement must strive to win votes and bring new members in.
3. Emboldening the left flank to play a significant role in defining messaging and policy priorities. A mass movement is one step on the road to Socialism. The form such a constellation takes is not certain, but it is very likely that DSA will be a major voice in defining the explicitly anti-capitalist wing of such a coalition. In this case, we must doggedly pursue a voice in decision-making. This influence will better the odds that a coalition heightens the contradictions between labor and capital and builds a revolutionary working class.

Such influence isn’t acquired by yelling the loudest. Instead, we must build leverage through institutional capacity, build electoral and governing expertise within our organization and gather data and knowledge to deploy in future campaigns.

These goals must be pursued in qualitatively different campaign formations: cadre candidate campaigns, small-scale class struggle coalitions, and large-scale class struggle coalitions.

Cadre Candidate Campaigns

These goals must be pursued in qualitatively different campaign formations. DSA should and will continue to run their own “cadre candidate” campaigns. These are crucial for goal number three, as such campaigns immediately build our capacity because DSA members are guaranteed positions in leadership, coordination, and the data gathered by such campaigns is ours to use.

As we’ve seen with the Zohran campaign, these projects also build a mass base of support. NYC–DSA membership boomed during his campaign, and the campaign mobilized 100,000 volunteers under the Zohran vision for the city. Many of these volunteers would certainly be back to support a broader mass movement.

Perhaps a less championed boon of DSA’s efforts during the campaign was its successful attempt to weave together other organizations into a coalition. Even in cadre candidate campaigns, coalitions should be cultivated.

Small-Scale Class Struggle Coalitions

Small-scale electoral coalitions through Ward IPOs can also contribute to our ends. In these coalitions, DSA is still a major partner. Campaigns under the ward IPO stand to offer our members leadership positions (though fewer than they would enjoy in cadre candidate campaigns). By participating in these campaigns, our organization and allies also have an opportunity to build relationships and gather contact information for potential recruits to our ranks of activists and leaders, and for further support during future campaigns and mobilizations.

More importantly, DSA has significant gaps in support, particularly with working-class people of color. This is a critical failure in an organization that stands for the most marginalized groups in society. This won’t be corrected by merely handing out flyers or wheat-pasting. Diverse working-class neighborhoods already have organizations with deep ties to the community and working knowledge of the needs and aspirations of the population. DSA stands to gain by working closely with these organizations, learning to refine our own messaging and platform and showing genuine dedication to the cause of the multi-racial working class.

These campaigns are crucial for organizations like DSA to grow support in new areas. In any given campaign, win or lose, our goal should be to create a base of working-class support door by door, ward by ward. This requires retaining connections within the community that can be mobilized for further campaigns, ranging between electoral actions, legislative goals, social protest, and labor support.

These small-scale campaigns must be selected through careful strategic analysis. We should not consider the campaign based on the candidate or platform alone, but must think carefully about the coalitions we wish to cultivate and the areas that we most sorely need contact with. We must look beyond the short-term stump speech to how campaigns can directly contribute to our central electoral goals.

Larger campaigns pose far greater risks and rewards. Major runs for federal office, governor, or even mayor require much broader coalitions, but can help spread working class-oriented messaging and make substantial gains for the working class. This is what the resolution “Which Side Are You On” explained above recognizes. Bernie Sanders, who formed a diverse left-progressive coalition in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, played a central role in revitalizing the left, even though he spent very few resources on directly building socialist institutions. These huge campaigns are key opportunities for building a mass base to fight for working class power, even if they are often not explicitly socialist.

Large-Scale Class Struggle Coalitions

Such campaigns also can make incredible material gains. Brandon Johnson, whose progressive coalition won him the mayoralty of Chicago, has notched real wins for working people. His administration oversaw a historically generous contract with the Chicago Teacher’s Union. Johnson vetoed legislation allowing snap curfews. The administration’s investment in community programs and resources along with Community Violence Intervention Programs within policing have contributed to the lowest murder rate Chicago has seen in decades. Johnson’s victory and these policies would not have been possible under a narrower coalition.

Of course, Johnson’s administration is not socialist: what’s good doesn’t go far enough, and it is difficult to assess how much the administration’s harmful stances (poor housing for migrants at the beginning of his tenure and, more recently, a budget proposing significant cuts to crucial city services such as Chicago libraries) is due to the constraints of his office or broader ideological shortcomings within his coalition.

In many cases, the possible benefits of such campaigns will outweigh such risks, but we must be careful to mitigate the greatest dangers. Any endorsement of a broad-based coalition must be put to a democratic vote. Political education also has its part to play, ensuring that members understand the potential risks and benefits of such political actions. This will deepen organizational democracy, but it will also allow an opportunity to inoculate against uncomradely debate.

We must consider a final element related to these broader campaigns: our own institutional capacity. Depending on the nature of the coalition, DSA may stand to enter members into positions of leadership and governance. If we wish to build our campaign capabilities, there is no better place. The sheer scale of such campaigns could offer our members unique opportunities to build expertise. There is no substitute.

What is to Be Done?

We must approach electoral politics seriously. Selecting individual campaigns based on the fleeting merits of purity will only get us so far. Instead, we must develop a deeper electoral strategy that considers organizational goals above the number of buzzwords in a candidate’s speech. Additionally, during these campaigns we must be ever aware of long-term strategic considerations, such as party building and class consciousness. To truly achieve our political goals, we must take calculated risks with campaigns and coalition partners that may not be explicitly socialist. 

This can be applied in government as well. Once a candidate is victorious, how do we use it to further our fight for a mass party? There are some easy answers here: pursue staff positions to build institutional knowledge and use organizational pressure to get candidates on board for specific messaging or policy goals. But there are less immediate goals to consider as well. We hope to form a mass party that has countless candidates in government. Now is the time to experiment with community and coalition partnerships and inside-outside mobilizations. How do we coordinate efforts between the halls of power and mobilizations in our streets and workplaces? How do we deepen democratic ties with the community to build a durable base of support and responsive governance? Answering such questions will take a great deal of trial and error. It will be exciting to see what conclusions our comrades in New York develop while Mamdani is in Gracie Mansion.

IV. Tasks in Building a Socialist Party

Finally, we want to consider the strategic goal of mass movement electoralism, that is building a major socialist party that can contend for state power. The need to build a socialist or labor party has been long discussed on the left. Labor leader Tony Mazzocchi helped found the U.S. Labor Party in 1996, which had the support of nine international unions and hundreds of locals. But the party would educate first and run candidates much later. In fact, the Buffalo chapter of the party was expelled for prematurely running candidates. Meanwhile, labor leaders were still drawn to the Democratic Party, and leftist factional struggles undercut organizing efforts. But the call for an independent working-class party never stopped, particularly among socialists who see the Democratic Party as a dead-end or class enemy. The debate on how to establish an independent socialist party continues among DSA members today. The DSA podcast episode featuring David Dulhalde from the Socialist Majority caucus and Ramsin Canon of Bread & Roses provides good insights into the current discussion.

Here there are several strategic questions we need to consider. Is DSA by itself the heart of the process of establishing such a party? DSA is certainly core to the process. But even as we grow in numbers and elect more officials, does that mean at some undefined but not distant point we can transform ourselves into the long-sought socialist party? We don’t think any single organization can viably claim to be a party representing our large and diverse working class without broader unity built between labor, social movements, and the left. Even if DSA has quantitative growth with more elected members and more membership, how is this a qualitative change from the proto-party we are today?

Let’s start with this picture of reality. The Democratic and Republican parties each pull in 75 to 82 million votes in presidential elections. To be a serious national alternative, we need a base of 15 to 20 million, a significant bloc in Congress, a strong base in city councils, and mayors and state legislators  across the country. Those are the building blocks that make a new national party a competitive reality. There is a wide range of socialists and progressive independents willing to cut ties with the Democrats and found a third party. 

Can we glimpse this reality today? We think so. A strong indicator was the No Kings March of eight million people. The largest march in US history bringing together a huge mass of people deeply dissatisfied with the nation’s political and economic conditions.Take those eight million and double it. All those folks, in all their diversity and concerns, need to see a political future in socialism rather than liberalism, and they must be convinced to vote for socialist candidates. DSA will certainly be a key organization in that process. But constructing the relationships to do so may take an extended period of coalition building, electoral alliances, and growing confidence and respect among coalition partners.

Building Multi-Racial Unity

Here is another topic that we must assess realistically. Let’s look at the racial composition of DSA. In Chicago, 39 percent of the population is white; people of color make up 61 percent of the population. That is far from the composition of our local membership. Building a socialist party can only be done through mass work within the multi-racial working class. The U.S. population is now 40.2% people of color. We don’t have national statistics on the demographics of national DSA membership, but we estimate it’s about 80 to 85 percent white. Of those in the top 10 percent of wealthiest households, 88.5 percent are white, only 2.2 percent are Black, 2.4 percent Hispanic, and 6.9 percent Asian. If we just look at the working and middle classes, people of color constitute 45.6 percent, or about 137 million people.

Any socialist party worthy of representing the multi-racial working class needs to reflect this reality in its membership numbers. That means minority-based social movement organizations and many thousands of minority individuals need to join in the founding of a socialist party. It means major unions need to affiliate, not only because labor is a key component of our strategy, but because the largest percent of society with union households is the Black community. A socialist party that is serious about winning power must be built around that working-class reality. Of course, our voting base will be much larger than our membership. But we need an institutional infrastructure built upon a strong multi-racial grassroots base.

This is easy to say, of course, and much harder to achieve. U.S. society pushes against racially integrated organizations because of its institutional racist history—a history of segregated communities, churches, civil organization, schools, and social events, as well as laws and ideology that privilege white supremacy. During the upsurge in the 1960s, the radical landscape was split into the overwhelmingly white Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), while people of color organized within their communities with groups such as the Black Panthers, Crusade for Justice, the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican Socialist Party, various Asian-American advocacy groups, and so on. These groups worked together through coalitions like the Panther-led Rainbow Coalition in Chicago. Moreover, the war in Vietnam played a unifying role. But the most integrated groups were within communist circles. The traditional Communist Party built on its historic ties and the Angela Davis campaign, as well as some organizations in the new communist movement, which had 30 to 80 percent minority cadres. But overall, these numbers were in the low thousands. Building a multi-racial socialist party will take a dedicated and continual effort, putting an analysis of racialized capitalism at the heart of our understanding, and connecting with minority-lead organizing.

An example of a missed opportunity: In Chicago, there was a militant and long campaign to create a civilian review board to oversee the city’s racist police force. This entailed a lot of community organizing. DSA was largely absent from this movement even though it had widespread support, particularly in black and brown neighborhoods throughout Chicago. Eventually, the movement forced the City Council to create the board, although not in the precise manner the organizers had advocated. When district elections were held for board members, DSA was nowhere to be found. The criticism was the community-based boards would be a sham without enough power. But if socialists are to be “everywhere,” as the recent eponymous DSA initiative calls for, it needs to recognize the struggles that people of color identify as important and be there too. Running for and supporting board candidates would have provided a direct connection with the organic demands of the minority community and strengthened the influence of the boards.

Nevertheless, DSA has done some excellent work electing minority candidates, both in Chicago and nationally. Our most nationally recognized members, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib are people of color, as well as the rest of the Congressional “squad.” And most of Chicago’s DSA city council members come from the Black and Latino/a community. This certainly represents a strong start in building DSA as a fully multi-racial working class organization. 

Conclusion

Mass movement electoralism is an essential tool in building a socialist movement that can challenge capitalism and win governing power. Despite its limitations, electoral work is how most workers identify and live through political struggle. Mass movement electoralism embraces this tendency, meeting the majority of workers where they are, not only to ameliorate some of the most pernicious aspects of our social system but to offer agency and an alternative political vision.

Such a strategy is by necessity open and inclusive. To truly reach workers, who are largely non-socialists, we must promote and collaborate with seasoned activists and organizations embedded within existing communities and struggles. This is especially crucial when considering multi-racial working class communities where DSA seems to struggle to build membership. Rather than merely running recruitment drives, we should work with and learn from existing groups and organizational structures.

Test cases of this strategy abound in Chicago. A number of left alders ran with the support of DSA but also as established members of other communities and organizations. These runs prove the ability of DSA to pursue electoral victory within broader left coalitions. The Brandon Johnson mayoralty itself has been extremely informative, both highlighting the shortcomings of abstention during major left electoral campaigns and illustrating the dangers and contradictions broad coalitions present.

These dangers and contradictions point to a second focus of our proposed mass electoral strategy. To maintain some voice within these broad coalitions, we must build our own organizational capacity. Electoral targets should be selected with the intention of building strategic long-term coalitions, increasing our presence in key communities, and developing our own members and internal capabilities to assert ourselves as a significant partner in larger campaigns.

Lastly, we must consider DSA’s participation in mass movement electoralism within the broader goals of our organization: establishing a socialist party. To build a party capable of national contestation requires a base of support far larger than today’s self-identified socialists. As No Kings has proven, many people are dissatisfied with the state of our current political terrain, but winning these voters over to a truly left-wing, worker-oriented alternative will require a long-term strategy of coalition building and a continuous effort to listen to and support the struggles of workers of color. These priorities are absolutely necessary to build a truly mass organization.

DSA has done some amazing work we all can be proud of. We have much more yet to do.

Acknowledgement

We like to thank Bijan Terani for his thoughts and comments.

The post Mass Movement Electoralism appeared first on Midwest Socialist.

[[{“value”:”

By: Siobhan McDonough

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.

CAMBRIDGE — Last Monday, community members crowded into Cambridge City Hall to voice our support for a proposed resolution calling for an end to the U.S.’s devastating Cuba blockade. Cambridge City Councillors and democratic socialists Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler and Ayah Al-Zubi, along with Councillor Marc McGovern, proposed the resolution.

In opposition to her colleagues, Councillor Patty Nolan cut off discussion using her “charter right” authority, which postpones further debate to the Council’s next meeting on May 11, 2026. Councillor Nolan argued the Council had no business addressing foreign policy:

I do not believe that the City Council should deliberate or use time during regular business meetings on foreign policy issues, which I see this as.

Councillor Nolan is correct that the Cuba blockade, in a very narrow sense, is about foreign policy. Cambridge’s action on this resolution is, by itself, insufficient to force the Trump administration to change its posture toward Cuba. The people of Cambridge, like most people in the United States, have almost no say in our federal government’s aggression toward other countries. The president dictates U.S. foreign policy in practice. Trump, without Congressional approval, kidnapped Venezuelan President Maduro and started a catastrophic war with Iran. Just last week, he unilaterally issued an executive order expanding international sanctions on those participating in the Cuban economy. 

The U.S. awards its globe-spanning military and economic apparatus to the winner of the Electoral College, a system which makes most U.S. citizens’ presidential votes essentially meaningless. Through the anti-democratic Electoral College, both Republican presidents this century first came into office with fewer votes than their opponent. Winning that non-democratic institution also authorizes presidents to pick lifetime appointees to the Supreme Court. The Court gave itself the power of judicial review to strike down acts of Congress, but on foreign policy, courts allow presidents free rein by consistently refusing to enforce laws that limit presidential acts of war.

Nominally, Congress should be able to represent popular will and thwart presidential warmongering. However, both chambers of Congress—the Senate and the House—have their own barriers to popular input. The Senate prioritizes the representation of land over the representation of people and protects its members from voters with six year terms. Thanks in part to the Supreme Court’s rulings in Rucho and Callais, the House is an ever-worsening mess of gerrymandered safe seats designed to entrench the status quo and disenfranchise non-white voters. Corporations and elite interest groups flood the Senate and House with campaign contributions to offset popular pressure. Altogether, it’s no wonder that popular will has almost no impact on federal policy compared to the preferences of economic elites.

But that’s exactly why we must act. When the state of U.S. democracy itself is so woeful, representative governing bodies like the Cambridge City Council must use their democratic legitimacy to serve as a voice for the community’s values on such crucial issues as the lives and freedom of the Cuban people facing the deep violence and social murder of the blockade. The democratic structures of the Cambridge City Council are relatively strong, compared to the non-democratic ones above. Instead of gerrymandered single-member districts, we have a proportional City Council that represents the ideological diversity of Cambridge voters and open, public council meetings that begin with an opportunity for residents to be heard. 

Our democracy in Cambridge is far from perfect. We do not allow non-citizens to vote, we do not have automatic or same-day voter registration, and our unelected City Manager retains far too much power over the budget and city operations. Wealthy donors and corporate interests hold too much sway in the political process. Still, the City Council remains the best institutional voice Cambridge residents collectively have.

Our city’s residents overwhelmingly oppose the oppressive U.S. blockade of Cuba. As Trump ratchets up sanctions while openly threatening that “Cuba is next,” we demand our institutions push back on the violence done in our names. With Congress non-responsive, that duty falls to the representative Cambridge City Council.

Cambridge community members should show up in force at City Hall once again on May 11 at 5:30pm to demand Cambridge City Council affirms our city’s anti-imperialist values.

Siobhan McDonough is the treasurer for Boston Democratic Socialists of America, the trustee chair for the National Organization of Legal Services Workers (UAW 2320), and a civil rights attorney for working-class people.

The post OPINION: Cambridge Can and Must Take Action To Oppose the Cuba Blockade on May 11 appeared first on Working Mass.

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By: W.J.

I found my way to a Metro Detroit DSA meeting through my work with one of the ballot initiatives the chapter endorsed last year. Another volunteer and I were there to give our pitch and try to recruit MDDSA members as petition gatherers. What struck me when I opened the door to Ant Hall was how packed it was — all the seats were full. It was standing room only. I’m a bigger guy, so I had to “ope” and “pardon me” my way from the front door to a tight corner off to the side, navigating around to the counter space where we’d set up our computer to record new volunteers and set out our clipboards and petitions.

As we got ourselves ready before the start of the general meeting, we were approached by one of the many leaders of the chapter, Jess Newman. Jess came to check in with us, made sure we had everything we needed, and gave us a rundown of how the meeting would go and when we’d be beckoned forward to make our pitch.

We were all set. Jess told us that we’d be called up front near the end of the meeting, before members would be released for the post-meeting social. With nothing to do for a bit, I decided to putz around Ant Hall and check out the meeting, not quite sure what to expect. I walked in right after the emcee got done asking new members to stand and ask what got them interested in DSA. The answers I heard were about what I’d expected: Some “recovering” Democrats, others who were unaffiliated with the two parties had just had enough and wanted to be productive, and a few who weren’t quite sure but wanted to come see what the Democratic Socialists of America were all about. Regardless of the passion or certainty in their responses, all received fervent applause and smiles from their new comrades.

I went back to the main hall after a few minutes and noticed that they’d started a panel to discuss the humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Their discussion sat with me for a good long while. I’d paid some attention to what was going on over there, passively looking at the news and reading the occasional article that made it into my feed. Listening to the panelists describe the history of the occupation and the atrocities committed after the October 7th attack left me angry. Angry at my country for enabling it and angry with myself for being powerless to do anything about it.

Then the conversation changed. They talked about various humanitarian organizations on the ground, and how we, an assembly sitting in Hamtramck, could support them. There was some relief at the mention of direct action we could take, but a mix of anger and dread remained.There was a look of quiet defiance on the faces of the membership that I noticed during this panel, and I realized that I was in a space filled with people that weren’t just going to sit quietly and listen about atrocities happening and go on about their day afterwards. With that realization came some reassurance and a lingering curiosity: what would I do next?

The meeting continued. As it neared the end, Jess returned to the front with a few others to talk about the on-going petition drives within Michigan For The Many. I think the meeting had gone over time, because she proceeded to give a quick overview of each one herself instead of calling up reps to go over them (which I didn’t mind at all). What did catch me off guard was Jess calling the group’s attention to me as not only an organizer for my group, but also a future DSA member, which received a small applause. I was feeling a bit mischievous, so I smiled and said, “We’ll see.” I actually already had the membership page up on my phone and was just going back and forth on the pledge amount for a sustaining member. Afterwards, I joined my partner at the counter and signed up about a dozen comrades to carry our petition. It was not a bad day at all.

After the meeting, we packed up, and I was hungry. At Jess’s recommendation, we went to Yemen Cafe down the street, where I ate entirely too much. While I was waiting for my check, I unlocked my phone, set my pledge amount, and skimmed the page welcoming me to DSA.

So why did I join? It was being in community with others. Sharing a space that made me believe that a better world is possible, and knowing there’s over a thousand Metro Detroiters organizing to make it so.

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Why I Joined DSA: To be on the Right Side of History was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.