Today, our members celebrate as Issue 1 is passed and abortion rights are secured for all Ohioans. Abortion is healthcare, and healthcare is a human right. We will not let politicians, lobbyists, or their billionaire financiers take away our right to reproductive freedom, nor will we let them punish medical providers for providing critical care. They lost in August, and they lost again today.

Many organizations and volunteers have come together to secure this victory. We are proud to be seven of those organizations, united for a common cause. Together, DSA chapters in Ohio contacted tens of thousands of voters. We gained invaluable knowledge and skills in this election cycle. We will use these skills to change the political landscape in Ohio.

We proved that the people of this state have not surrendered their rights. Republican power in state politics reflects only how they have gerrymandered the state, even after Ohio voters resolved, twice, to establish fair districting. We still have much more work to do to make Ohio a truly democratic state where basic human rights are guaranteed; DSA is committed to that fight.

The fight for abortion rights doesn’t end here, and our battle for universal healthcare is just beginning. We continue to call on federal and state elected officials to codify Roe. To the thousands who volunteered statewide: we need your help to secure an Ohio for all people. You can help us prepare for the next fight by joining and building your local DSA chapter!

We have work to do to make Ohio what it can and should be. Join us: dsausa.org/join

Akron DSA is proud that Ohioans voted to legalize cannabis for recreational use in Tuesday’s election. As a chapter, we’re happy to have played a small role: we knocked on more than 650 doors in multiple cities in the greater Akron area to help encourage voter turnout.

Issue 2’s passage is not the end: Future efforts around cannabis must include prosocial considerations such as criminal record expungement, youth prevention efforts (including bans/restrictions on deceptive packaging that looks like candy), and measures to protect workers and patrons from second-hand smoke.

Want to help join in the fight? You can find out more about DSA and join here.

The post Fall 2023 appeared first on Socialist Forum.

Beginning in the late 1990s and early 2000s, Latin America saw a surge in left wing parties and candidates winning elections. Often referred to as the “Pink Tide,” this trend has encompassed a variety of different movements throughout the region, with its initial successes including the elections of Presidents Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva in Brazil. As of 2023, despite some shifts in the political landscape, much of the region is still governed by parties of the left. This development has led to increasing focus on the region from socialists across the world, including in the United States and DSA.

As DSA has grown and developed, the organization has built relationships with many of the mass parties that characterized the initial successes of the Pink Tide, such as the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV, United Socialist Party of Venezuela) and the Partido dos Trabalhadores (PT, Workers’ Party) in Brazil. Resolutions passed by DSA conventions in 2019 and 2021 outlined this approach, prioritizing solidarity and engagement with Latin American mass parties in our international work. This has included DSA’s participation in the São Paulo Forum, a big-tent network of left-wing political parties, multiple delegations to countries in the region, and consistent statements outlining DSA’s political approach in solidarity with our comrades in Latin America.

However, there has been criticism of this approach towards Pink Tide governments from some DSA members and caucuses. This has included calls to prioritize engagement with non-governing socialist parties or labor organizations rather than mass socialist parties that have won elections and governed, arguing the former share more in common with DSA. An example of this distinction can be seen in Brazil, with some advocating for further engagement with the Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL, Socialism and Liberty Party) rather than the governing PT. Proponents of this approach often argue the dangers of a “campist” approach to internationalism, and emphasize a vision of class struggle distinct from, and sometimes opposed to, governing mass leftist parties.

At the most recent DSA convention, critics of DSA’s international policy, including in Latin America, proposed an amendment to the International Committee (IC) Consensus Resolution which sought to re-orient along an approach in line with their vision of class struggle. Ultimately, the amendment failed and the consensus resolution passed unamended, showing a third consecutive convention mandate for prioritizing engagement with mass parties. However, this outcome does not mean this discussion is over in DSA. The nature of our engagement with the rest of the American continent is incredibly important and will continue to be discussed.

This is especially true as DSA works to find its place and grow in the post-Bernie era. If we want DSA to truly become a mass organization that can win state power for the working class, we must learn from those who have done the same, and show clear solidarity in their struggle against imperialism. With this in mind, we will outline the case for the continuing DSA’s prioritization of solidarity and engagement with the Latin American left and mass parties, which strengthens DSA and the global struggle for socialism.

As we continue to encounter important questions about the structure and vision of our organization, what should be of particular interest to any DSA member is how governing socialist mass parties in Latin America have been able to build strong and vibrant political organizations. Unlike the capitalist parties in the US, which do not conduct meaningful political work outside of election season, these socialist mass parties can count on the support of millions of member-organizers and broad sections of the population, as well as entire social movements.

Learning from our Latin American comrades who have successfully built mass parties will be important to our organization’s own political future. To learn how these parties have been so successful in their organizing, we interviewed three DSA members and IC leaders (Marvin Gonzalez, Luisa Martinez, Fern Kurago) that have first-hand experience, either through their own organizing work or as part of DSA’s delegations to Brazil and Venezuela, interacting with organizers from PT and PSUV. Throughout this article we’ll be relaying some of what they learned about how members of these parties conduct their political work, and how this can be applied to how we organize in DSA.

PT members will sometimes remark that their party is really a party of “60 million.” Although the official membership count is nowhere near this figure, it’s used to signify how not everyone involved in mass movements and political struggles PT has helped organize are members of the party, demonstrating how massive the scale and scope of PT’s mass work really is. This is a result of a conscious effort within the party to encourage members to join mass movements. As PT members help these movements organize, organic ties are built between the party and ongoing social movements. The building of these connections with mass movements is such an important part of PT’s organizing strategy that for the first few years of the party’s existence it did not run in elections, and instead focused on building up its support in the labor movement. This strategy would pay off, with the largest union in Brazil, the Central Única dos Trabalhadores (CUT, Unified Workers’ Central), being closely tied with the party and one of the strongest allies of the Lula administration.

This bottom-up organizing strategy has given PT the ability to deliver a convincing nation-wide left-wing political project that ties the demands of mass movements together into a vision for radical social change. It has also given mass movements the ability to directly influence policy making through PT. For example, the Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais Sem Terra (MST, Landless Workers’ Movement), an avowedly Marxist social movement of poor rural workers for land reform, successfully ran their own organizers for office under the PT ballot line. Although there have been serious disagreements between PT and the MST over PT’s willingness to carry out land reform, they continue to work closely together because of deep organic ties that have been fostered over years of shared struggle.

This model of bottom-up organizing was incredibly important in bringing the left to power in Chile. From 2019-2022, Chile saw massive protests known as the Estallido Social (“Social Outburst”) prompted originally over a hike in public transport fares that then spread to encompass broad discontent with the neoliberal order. Socialist parties in Chile, which operate under a coalition of the broader socialist left and include parties like the Communist Party of Chile and Gabriel Boric’s Social Convergence party, built upon this protest energy to provide a left-wing electoral alternative. Running Gabriel Boric, a former student activist who rose to national prominence during the protests, the intersectional work between the protest movements and the socialist parties brought the first socialist president to power since Salvador Allende.

PT hasn’t only built up a presence within social movements, it has also been active participants in community institutions like churches, as well as having conducted local mutual aid work. As a result, the party and its role in everyday life has become a major part of the lives of socialist organizers. Venezuela’s PSUV shares this, with the mass party having a presence in the life of the community. Those we interviewed who had gone on delegations to Venezuela described how the social life of both the community and the party took place in basketball games, which were important places for the community to discuss local politics. This presence in community spaces has helped the PSUV support the formation of community-based governing models. Community spaces in Venezuela have been hotbeds for radical organizing that has often led to government-supported efforts to turn apartment complexes into tenant-run cooperatives and create community areas that run their own local economies and practice direct democracy known as communes. This presence in the communities has been key in maintaining a strong socialist base among the urban poor of Venezuela, which has been especially important as they suffer from a US-backed economic siege. As DSA continues to grow, these parties show the importance of having less shallow relationships with our own member’s lives and being present in all parts of the life of our communities.

This integration of the party and mass movements together into a broader political project was critically important to building PT into what it is today. By not being afraid to form coalitions and join social movements, PT has not only been able to prevent itself from being politically isolated, it has also been able to offer social movements a political project that can turn limited demands into part of a broader fight for socialist politics and a new society. As most of the political work within DSA happens through campaigns run by local chapters, ensuring that our campaigns don’t remain isolated from ongoing social movements outside of DSA is a lesson PT has shown the value of.

This strategy has been especially important for PT, as unlike governing socialist parties in Venezuela, Bolivia, or Cuba, they have always had to govern with a minority. Lula’s governing coalition in the National Congress holds 225 seats in a 513 seat legislature (43%), with PT itself only holding 68 of those seats. The challenges faced by the PT in being a governing minority are especially prudent for us. A similar challenge is also facing the left in Chile as the left coalition faces a resurgent right that sabotaged the attempted effort at constitutional reform. DSA electeds have almost always found themselves surrounded by a political class inherently hostile to the vision we offer, and learning from how PT has been able to be a governing left in this similar predicament will be important for our own electoral strategy.

DSA is also still predominantly composed of members from urban centers. Appealing to rural workers, in part due to their work with MST, has been a strong point of PT’s organizational successes. Rural areas in the US lack a strong left-wing presence. Fostering connections with PT and other socialist mass parties will give us more insight into an organizing strategy that has been incredibly successful appealing to both the rural and urban poor.

Governing socialist mass parties in Latin America have been able to build themselves into becoming a viable electoral alternative through years of community organizing. By supporting grassroots movements in their own political struggles, and providing these movements with an electoral outlet, these parties have been able to win over broad sections of the working class. Learning from these parties, many of which have encountered and then overcome the same difficulties we face now, can be key to showing us how to win over our own communities to socialist politics.

The American continent has been shaped by a genocidal history of settler colonialism and slavery. While there are significant differences in how this oppression has been carried out across the continent, the history in common connects modern struggles for liberation. When in government, mass parties of the left in Latin America have taken many important steps in support of racial equality, indigenous rights, and defining achievable steps towards a decolonial future. Learning from the achievements and limits of these approaches is essential in combating the oppression that results from settler colonialism and slavery in the United States.

In Brazil, PT governments have made important strides in supporting racial equality and indigenous rights. This year, Lula’s inauguration centered the nation’s diversity, ascending the presidential ramp alongside indigenous and black leaders and thereafter immediately issuing decrees that protect indigenous land and the environment. Lula’s administration also created a Ministry of Indigenous People which is headed by Sônia Guajajara, an indigenous woman and PSOL member. Additionally, PT governments under Lula and his successor Dilma Rouseff have made significant policy changes promoting racial equality for Brazil’s Black majority, including mandating teaching of Afro-Brazilian history and culture in primary and secondary education, creating racial quotas and other affirmative action programs in the public education system, and creating national programs to address racism and representation in federal administration.

In Venezuela, anti-colonial leader Simón Bolivar has served as an inspiration for the political transformation that began with Hugo Chávez’s presidency. Now, the term Bolivarian has become intertwined with the Chávista project. Along with championing the end of colonial rule, the Bolivarian Revolution included many important changes for indigenous people. Venezuela’s enshrinement of indigenous rights and political representation in their 1999 constitution drafted under Chávez was one of the first of its kind, and was a crucial step forward for the enfranchisement of the indigenous population. This, accompanied by other social and economic gains under PSUV governance, has led to a very high level of support for Bolivarian candidates in indigenous communities.

These achievements put parties like PSUV and PT in stark contrast to their conservative opponents. Alongside these accomplishments, we can also look to the broader political vision which is articulated by the Latin American left as inspiration for how to fight complex racial hierarchies. It is important that struggles for liberation against racial inequality and settler colonialism are not only taken in concrete steps of policy, but also incorporated as key parts of our political project. One way to make the vision of this political project visible is to make the racially diverse nations of Latin America represented in leadership. Some examples of this can be seen in Brazil and Colombia. Alongside his symbolic inauguration, Lula’s 2023 cabinet appointments show a conscious effort to embrace Brazil’s diversity. Colombian Vice President Francia Márquez, who was elected in 2022 in a huge victory for the Colombian left, now serves as the first Afro-Colombian and second woman to hold the position.

For the majority indigenous nation of Bolivia, the leadership of the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS, Movement for Socialism) party has also served as an important step for representation. Evo Morales, leader of MAS, is largely considered to be Bolivia’s first president to come from an Indigenous background, and his tenure accompanied important steps for the formation of a political project centered around indigenous-self determination. As was done in Venezuela, MAS-led Bolivia adopted a new constitution in 2009 that articulated significantly expanded rights for indigenous people. This included the identification of Bolivia as a plurinational state which articulates the presence of multiple national identities within the conception of their political order. This was a key part of how MAS envisioned the support and recognition of indigenous nationalities which began under Morales. Plurinationalism provides a theoretical framework for how ideals of decolonization can manifest in the practice of governance, and serves as an important area for us to learn from as we aim to construct a decolonial future in the United States.

However, it is also here that we can learn from the limits that the Latin American left has reached. Parties in governance, even those with the support of Indigenous voters, have not always navigated the contradictions of state power in a way that appears to hold true to the principles of indigenous self-determination. Both Bolivia and Ecuador both adopted new constitutions identifying their nations as plurinational, but have struggled with criticism from indigenous communities during the governance of the left wing parties which implemented these changes. The source of these criticisms have been the contradictions between indigenous self-determination in land governance and state-led development projects. In Bolivia, the MAS government did receive significant criticism over its attempts to construct a highway that would divide protected indigenous land. Despite this criticism and the right wing coup in 2019, MAS has been able to maintain grassroots support among the indigenous majority in Bolivia, which has allowed them to stay in government.

However, things have played out differently in Ecuador. Allies of Pink Tide president Rafael Correa and his party the Movimiento Revolución Ciudadana (RC, Citizen Revolution Movement) have been unable to regain power since their betrayal by Lenin Moreno, who ran as a leftist but quickly pivoted to the right after his election. During the 2021 election, the Confederación de Nacionalidades Indígenas del Ecuador (CONAIE, Confederation of Indigenous Nationalities of Ecuador) as well as the indigenist party Pachakutik both recommended a “null vote” in the runoff between CRM candidate Andrés Arauz and neoliberal banker Guillermo Lasso. While the President of CONAIE did go on to endorse Arauz, RC’s loss in the runoff showed the consequences of a divide between the Pink Tide left and indigenous organizations. In order to win elections and govern in a way consistent with the principles of plurinationalism, the left in Ecuador will have to build strong ties with the organized indigenous community.

From Ecuador to Brazil, every left party that enters into state power faces limits in what they can achieve, and will struggle with difficult contradictions. No socialist party has governed without doing so, and it would be misguided to assume the same will not be true for DSA as we gain state power. We should not take these limits and contradictions simply as opportunities for criticism, but as opportunities for understanding and learning. From engaging with mass parties of the Latin American left, we can gain insight from the experiences most directly relevant to our organization, including how these parties navigated electoral victories, building a mass party, and engaging with settler colonialism and deeply ingrained racial hierarchy. Along with what we can get from engagement with the Latin American left, we must also consider what we in DSA can give in return through our solidarity.

What makes showing solidarity with the Latin American left most important is its ongoing struggle against imperialist attacks by our nation’s political elite. Both Venezuela and Cuba are under devastating economic sanctions as well as facing an open effort by the US to promote regime change. In 2002, the US supported a military coup in Venezuela against Hugo Chávezthat had briefly succeeded in establishing an American-aligned government before mass demonstrations brought him back to power. Attempts at regime change didn’t end here. Propping up Juan Guaidó, an opposition politician who had never been voted for as the legitimate President of Venezuela, the US supported his destabilizing efforts to encourage a military mutiny in 2019 against Maduro and the PSUV-led government. After recognizing him as the legitimate head of state, Venezuelan diplomats were ejected from their embassies in the US, and the buildings were given to Guaidó’s rival government.

During Operation Car Wash, an anti-corruption campaign heavily manipulated by the Brazilian right that led to the arrest of Lula, Brazilian prosecutors illegally worked with American officials to coach witnesses and create plea deals. The effects of this were enormously beneficial for Bolsonaro, sabotaging the left in Brazil for years and giving him the political monopoly he needed to carry out some of his worst anti-worker and anti-environment policies.

Both of these examples, alongside numerous other military coups and interventions in Latin America,  demonstrate how the threat of US-backed interference and regime change are very real. Despite this, socialist governments in Latin America have found ways to combat the threat of imperialism through building community power and worker’s control. The PSUV under Hugo Chávez created a political system of communes, which he described as the “basic unit” characterizing Venezuela’s socialist transition. These communes, many of which are armed and practice community-self defense independent from police forces, operate with radical participatory democracy over whole communities, many of which exist in poor neighborhoods that have historically been strong bases of support for the Bolivarian Revolution. These communities are expansive and touch every part of community life, running bakeries, clothing shops, schools, and even whole factories as worker cooperatives. This has allowed many communities to not rely on corporations for the production of essential goods, which has become especially important as Venezuela faces US sanctions and open opposition from the capitalist class.

Even while facing a state of economic siege, nations like Cuba have been able to build models for socialist democracy, presenting models to the liberal democracy that we live under. In 2022, millions of Cubans participated in community meetings to participate in the drafting of a new family code. This system of participatory democracy, which had also been used in 2019 for the drafting of a new constitution, was anything but a rubber stamp. 300,000 different suggestions were made by ordinary Cubans who participated in these meetings, which led to changes being made to nearly half of the first draft of the family code. There is a long precedent of this model of community-based decision making. In 2012, thousands of meetings with labor unions across the country were held to discuss a new labor code. Similarly, major changes to the labor code were made, with 101 new amendments and 28 entirely new labor regulations added based on community suggestions.

Although elections to Cuba’s National Assembly are not competitive, candidates are chosen through a nomination system that heavily empowers community organizations. Candidates are first nominated by members of their community. Then, representatives of mass organizations like the Federation of Cuban Women, the Workers’ Central Union of Cuba, the University Students’ Federation and many more, conduct interviews with community members and hold town halls before choosing a candidate for their constituency. Interestingly, the Communist Party of Cuba has had no official role in the choosing of a candidate for National Assembly for the last few decades, not even being present in the meetings of mass organizations. Two-thirds of Cubans belong to one of these mass organizations, which are incredibly important in the day-to-day political and social life of Cuba.

Although there is plenty to criticize the Cuban political experiment for, any criticism should not take away from the fact that Cuba’s struggle for a socialist society is part of the same international movement DSA should consider itself a part of. Socialist experiments in Cuba, Venezuela, and across Latin America are building the type of world that we’re also fighting for, and deserve our solidarity, especially in the face of US imperialist aggression.

The struggle against imperialism that socialist governments in Latin America are facing is not something they are dealing with in the abstract, it is a fight for their very survival. Mass parties like PT, PSUV, and the Partido Comunista de Cuba (PCC, Communist Party of Cuba) have had to contend with building socialism while having to face the real and very dangerous threat of US interference. This situation gives rise to contradictions that any socialist movement under the threat of imperialism will have to reckon with. For example, according to those we interviewed, supporters of the PSUV recognize the environmental damage being done by Venezuela’s reliance on oil. However, the reality is that no move towards sustainability can take place until the economic sanctions against Venezuela are removed. As long as Venezuela is under a state of economic and political siege by the United States, it isn’t materially possible for major changes in energy generation to take place.

Despite these challenges posed by US imperialism, the governing left continues to see their mission as transitioning to socialism. This is not an easy process in a world dominated by an imperialist power, which has given rise to contradictions that socialist movements in Latin America have found creative ways to address. Popular socialist self-government through Venezuela’s communes, or the regional power blocs like the Alianza Bolivariana para los Pueblos de Nuestra América (ALBA, Alliance for the Peoples of Our America) that operate on the basis of collaboration and solidarity, not domination, show how the fight for socialism and the fight against imperialism is deeply intertwined in Latin America.  It is here where the transition to socialism is connected to building an alternative to the current world order. In 2004, Cuba and Venezuela founded ALBA, a political and economic alliance based on collaboration and Latin American unity in the face of US interference, not hegemonic control by powerful nations over weaker ones. The São Paulo Forum has also built a network of leftist parties across Latin America, opening another avenue for the building of solidarity between movements attempting to radically transform the political and economic life of their own nations while dealing with the very real threat of imperialism. These organizations, alongside other collaborations between the governments of the Pink Tide, have played an important role in promoting regional integration and economic collaboration outside of neoliberal free market framework of the US. In the face of an imperialist power that is gradually weakening, the Latin American left has sought to build not another hegemonic power, but to construct regional power centers built on solidarity and cooperation, alternatives to the very idea of an oppressive center of power.

These political experiments show the possibility of making real progress in building socialism not only in spite of imperialism, but as a way to directly combat it. It goes without saying that regime change in socialist Latin America means only a reversal of their achievements and an abandoning of the socialist political project. In Venezuela, it would mean the destruction of the communes and a privatization of the commune-controlled workplaces, which would only intensify the current economic crisis and mark a return to an era of corporate domination that existed before the socialist experiment.

Our role as socialists in the US, especially if we have criticisms of nations like Venezuela and other socialist-governed countries, is first and foremost to relieve pressure on Latin America by conducting anti-imperialist and solidarity work. The brutal imperialist attacks that have hampered the ability of socialist movements to carry out their political project are directly caused by the interests of the American elite, putting us in a unique position to help our comrades in Latin America. In order to do this most effectively, our role as socialists in the imperial core is not to play favorites and pick which parties to prioritize based on our own sense of ideological alignment, but to support the governing socialist mass parties that have to directly deal with attacks by the US empire. If we’re serious about helping our comrades, let us make sure that the fight against imperialism is truly our priority.

DSA convention has now recognized for three successive conventions the importance of prioritizing mass parties, both for the benefit of our organization from what we can learn, and for the benefit of the global working class as we strengthen our anti-imperialist solidarity.

When considering what we can learn from our comrades in Latin America, we often look to those who have achieved significant political victories. However, it is not victory alone that should determine our engagement, but the struggle to meaningfully wield state power to the benefit of the working class. Out of this struggle emerges contradictions –  important wins can be made, but there are limits to what is possible. Navigating these is the task of any governing left party, and if we do not learn from those who have tried before us, we will fail to steer ourselves in the right direction. Engagement with parties who have significant achievements will not ensure our success, but can play an important role in guiding us on our journey to socialism.

Rather than picking favorites based on perceived similarities in ideological composition or size, this approach entails aligning ourselves in solidarity with left-wing mass parties at the forefront of the struggle against imperialism. Our solidarity connects to how we publicly support or criticize movements of the Latin American left. Internal discussion and criticism is appropriate, but it’s important we consider to what extent criticisms may carry water for US hegemony and US-funded movements. This reality is important to any conception of “critical support”, which must prioritize efforts towards support as compared to criticism. We challenge US exceptionalism which centers our own importance and the idea that we have a right to be heard about every issue. While a critical analysis of ongoing socialist experiments is important and necessary, the way to help the working class of nations like Cuba and Venezuela is not to endlessly criticize their movements. This is especially true for communications from official organizational channels. By focusing on offering our solidarity and conducting anti-imperialist work we can provide real relief for our socialist comrades struggling against US imperialism.

While we have focused on making the case for continuing DSA’s current approach to Latin America, it is important we also engage further with the arguments put against it. The 2023 convention amendment which attempted to change this approach argued for establishing solidarity based upon “the rights of workers and peoples and not the balance of geopolitical power or the nominal political identities of different governments.” The authors of the amendment also criticized the failure to meet with opponents of Maduro in Venezuela and a lack of criticism for the Nicaraguan government in a statement against US interference. The amendment  called for a “big-tent” approach which does not just meet with “ruling or leading parties”.

Further examination reveals why this framing misrepresents the policy of the IC and was ultimately rejected by convention delegates. First of all, it’s important to recognize that following a multi-tendency approach can pose difficult challenges in international work, as there is limited time and resources to dedicate to international delegations and other efforts to build connections. For example, the delegation to Venezuela cited by the amendment’s authors did attempt to meet with members of Maduro-critical leftist coalition Alternativa Popular Revolucionaria (APR, Popular Revolutionary Alternative), which includes the Partido Comunista de Venezuela (PCV, Communist Party of Venezuela). Ultimately, they were unable to meet due to scheduling conflicts and prioritization of plans made with PSUV. It is true that prioritizing mass parties can come at the expense of other work, but ultimately we believe it is worthwhile to prioritize engagement with the millions of comrades in these parties who are fighting for a better world, as we have outlined throughout this piece.

Balancing our engagement between mass parties and other organizations can be very difficult, especially during delegations with limited time and resources. However, there are many examples of the IC working to build connections with organizations outside of ruling parties. Examples of this in Latin American include DSA’s work in Brazil in collaboration and solidarity with PSOL, CUT and MST as well as collaborations with labor leaders in Mexico, US embassy workers on strike in Honduras, Starbucks union organizers in Chile, and indigenous organizers in Ecuador leading a national strike. This collaboration with labor organizations and smaller political parties is a crucial part of the IC’s work and demonstrates the ways in which the committee does in fact follow a big-tent, multi-tendency approach while maintaining prioritization towards mass parties.

Additionally, it is inaccurate to characterize the rights of “workers and peoples”  as at odds with geopolitics and the political orientation of governments. The struggle against imperialism is geopolitical, but it is also a class struggle waged against US capitalists. Support for the left mass parties is deeply tied to achieving tangible wins for the working class, with the alternative being right wing governments aligned with the US ruling class. The balance of geopolitical power, and specifically the strength of left wing Latin American governments seeking regional integration and opposition to imperialism, is directly connected to the rights of workers and peoples. The implicit separation of the two by opponents of DSA’s current internationalist strategy only serves to confuse our understanding of the struggle for socialism in Latin America.

Instead of changing course, DSA should continue prioritizing mass parties of the Latin American Left. This approach will strengthen our own ability to become a mass organization, continue an emphasis on solidarity and support for our comrades battling imperialism, and further class struggle throughout the American continent. With unity and engagement, we can hope to see a future beyond just a Pink Tide, and towards a socialist America from North to South.

The post How Should DSA Engage With the Latin American Left? appeared first on Socialist Forum.

In 1967, Martin Luther King Jr. published his final book, titled Where Do We Go from Here: Chaos or Community? Many of the basic goals of the Black freedom movement were achieved with the passage of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965. Despite these remarkable victories, however, King and others in the movement recognized that their work was far from over. In the book, he conceded that “the persistence of racism in depth and the dawning awareness that Negro demands will necessitate structural changes in society have generated a new phase of white resistance in North and South,” and that real equality for African Americans would not be won without the establishment of economic and social justice for all – a new society that he did not hesitate to call democratic socialism. In many respects, even after long years of blood and fire, the work had only just begun.

This issue is published at one of the darkest moments in recent history. On October 7th, Hamas fighters entered southern Israel from the Gaza Strip and massacred roughly 1,400 people, most of them civilians, and took over 200 hostages. In short order, the Israeli military launched a horrendous wave of collective punishment against the residents of Gaza. Many, including the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, have warned that this overwhelming assault could be an act of genocide unless it ends now. As of this writing, the death toll in Gaza passed the grim milestone of 10,000 dead – including over 4,000 children – while the Israeli military had effectively cut the territory of Gaza in half. Entire families have been wiped out. Under the relentless fire of bombs and artillery and suffering from a blockade of food, water, medicine, and fuel, Gaza’s population is trapped in a living hell. Amid this obscenity, Congress is considering sending billions of dollars in fresh aid to Israel, on top of the roughly $4 billion it already sends each year. The Biden administration claims it is pressing the Israeli government to exercise restraint, avoid civilian deaths, and increase humanitarian aid, but it’s clear as day – the US government is complicit in these crimes, and in the oppression of Palestinians in general.

DSA chapters around the country have played an important role in responding to the crisis. Members have made thousands of calls and sent thousands of emails to elected officials, demanding that they join the “Ceasefire Now” resolution in the House of Representatives bravely sponsored by Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush. They have helped to organize protests demanding an end to the killing in big cities and small towns and everywhere in between. They are showing in no uncertain terms that our government does not speak for us, and that we will do everything in our power, in solidarity with as many allies as possible, to help bring justice, equal rights, and security to all people – Arab, Jewish, and otherwise – living in the land of historic Palestine.

Even if a ceasefire is won tomorrow, it will have come far too late for far too many people. Many thousands are dead. Even more are injured, displaced, and dehumanized. The wounds of those who manage to live through this nightmare will never fully heal. The long, hard work of ending the occupation and securing a just peace will still remain. But maybe the sheer horror of this moment will finally lead, in time, to a new beginning. As Shahd Bishara, a Palestinian Israeli citizen and a leader of Standing Together, the left-wing Arab-Jewish solidarity movement, recently beseeched: “May our collective grief ignite a movement that shakes the foundation of the status quo and paves the way for a better tomorrow.” In doing so, she recalled the final lines of King’s last book, from a chapter evocatively titled “The World House“: “We still have a choice today: nonviolent coexistence or violent coannihilation. This may well be mankind’s last chance to choose between chaos and community.” We choose the latter.

The post Editorial Note: Chaos or Community? appeared first on Socialist Forum.

The majority of renters in Los Angeles live under rent control: the Los Angeles Rent Stabilization Ordinance (LARSO) covers 640,000 of the 870,000 renter-occupied housing units in the City of Los Angeles. Since it was established in the 1970s, the RSO has allowed for a floor of 3% rent increases annually and a ceiling tied to increases in the cost of living. Under the emergency order issued during the pandemic, the RSO increases have been frozen, creating a lifeline for millions of people who live as tenants in the City of Los Angeles. That freeze expires one year after the end of the emergency: February 1st, 2024.

Without any action from our City Council, owners of RSO properties would be allowed to raise rents 7-9%. (7% is the baseline allowable rent increase. An additional 1% is allowed for electricity and gas each included in rent, for a total allowable increase of up to 9%.) A study by the U.S. Government Accountability Office found that rent increases of $100/month were associated with a 9% increase in homelessness. A massive rent increase could trigger a disaster for tenants.

In January 2023, City Council passed a motion calling for the Los Angeles Housing Department (LAHD) to report back on the best way to amend this ordinance to keep people in their homes, but they failed to return that report. Accordingly, two of our endorsed council members, Hugo Soto-Martinez and Eunisses Hernandez, introduced a motion to extend the hold on rent increases for six months, until August 1, 2024, while the LAHD finished their report back.

However, in the Housing and Homelessness Committee meeting on Wednesday, November 1st, Bob Blumenfield and Marqueece Harris-Dawson rejected the call for a rent-freeze. They cited legally dubious rationale from the City Attorney – who has been lobbied heavily by the Apartment Association of Greater Los Angeles and the landlord lobby – saying that the temporary rent freeze would not be legally defensible in court. We disagree with this ruling, and believe it was politically motivated to prioritize landlords over tenants.

Landlords are bragging about how well they’re lobbying City Council: instead of going forward with the six month rent-freeze proposed by our DSA members, Blumenfield and Harris-Dawson introduced an amendment allowing landlords to raise the rent 4-6% in February, instead of the default 7-9%. They made it clear they would only move the motion out of committee, and to the full City Council, with this amendment in place.

As the chair of the Housing and Homelessness Committee, council-member Nithya Raman was forced to decide between two bad options. If she voted against the Blumenfield/Harris-Dawson amendment, then the full 7-9% increase would be automatically instituted in February. If she voted in favor of the proposed amendment, then the smaller rent increase would be brought to full council for debate and final vote. While we support an extended rent-freeze, we recognize her vote was an attempt to minimize the damage. It also offers the crucial opportunity for additional amendments by the full City Council.

I first learned the name Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez the same night she astonished the world, winning her primary race against all odds, bringing the Bernie movement into Congress. Here was a working-class person running on a democratic socialist program who had unseated one of the most corrupt and conservative Democratic leaders in Congress, Joe Crowley. The difference between the two couldn’t have been more stark, and I wanted to join the AOCs against the Crowleys. After that night, I quickly became interested in organizing with Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), given its role in getting her elected.

Luckily, I got my chance, diving headfirst into the Julia Salazar campaign for State Senate. Just as in AOC’s race, Julia was an outsider running on a democratic socialist platform against a comically corrupt corporate Democrat. The incumbent, Martin Dilan, had served in one seat or another for decades, was a member of the Brooklyn Democratic Party machine, and, at the behest of his real estate industry funders, championed policies that displaced his working-class constituents.

All the staffers and bulk of the volunteers on the Salazar campaign were open and proud DSA members, many of the canvasses were organized by the chapter, and Julia had been DSA cadre. It was also a clear “us versus them” battle — tenants versus real estate, workers versus capitalists, democratic socialists versus corporate Democrats. I joined DSA a week into volunteering on the campaign. Since then, I’ve been involved in more DSA electoral campaigns than I can count, including the 2021 and 2022 NYC-DSA City Council and State Assembly slates.

However, 2021 and 2022 felt different from the electoral work that had first brought me into DSA. While those earlier campaigns were clear “us versus them,” class struggle battles against corporate stooges, our opponents often opted for a different tack in 2021 and 2022, adopting many of our policy planks and messaging, which often made it more difficult for us to distinguish our own candidates. This was made all the more true by our communications and literature which often presented our candidates not as democratic socialists, but as progressive Democrats — a shortcut to win over Democratic Party partisans in these low-turnout closed primaries.

These experiences led my caucus Bread & Roses to put forward the 1-2-3-4 Plan for Building an Independent Party, at last summer’s NYC-DSA convention. This proposal sought to  advance coordination and discipline between our campaigns and socialists in office, to craft a clear independent public identity for our electoral work. Though that proposal was rejected, its core principles overwhelmingly passed the 2023 National DSA convention this past August in an amendment to the NEC Consensus Resolution: Act Like an Independent Party. Putting this proposal into practice will help our organization distinguish our candidates from run-of-the-mill progressives, help us escape from primarily appealing to a narrow base of Democratic Party primary voters, and, alongside non-electoral movement work and campaigning for electoral reform, will set the groundwork for a new independent party of the working class necessary for winning socialism.

Socialists Versus Progressive Capitalists

When volunteering for Phara Souffrant Forrest’s 2022 re-election campaign, I quickly realized that our opponents had stolen our platform. If a voter took a quick glance at Phara’s literature alongside that of her challenger, Olanike Alabi, they would find it difficult to distinguish the candidates beyond their lists of endorsements and Phara’s accomplishments as an incumbent. Both candidates were running on single-payer healthcare, a Green New Deal for New York, making CUNY tuition free, universal rent control, and ending mass incarceration. This was not unique to Souffrant Forrest and Alabi’s race. During the 2021 City Council elections. DSA-backed tenant-organizer Michael Hollingsworth narrowly lost to progressive career politician Crystal Hudson, whose platform and literature also mimicked our own.

But there are three major differences between our DSA candidates and their faux-progressive opponents:

1. Our opponents were career Democratic Party operatives, while our DSA candidates were working-class movement leaders: Hollingsworth and Souffrant Forrest were both organizers in Brooklyn’s robust tenant movement. While canvassing, one comrade met a voter who said that Hollingsworth had organized their apartment building, so of course they were voting for him!
2. Our opponents usually took corporate money, while our DSA candidates were funded exclusively by working people. Despite our opponents’ promises to stand for working-class values, they couldn’t be trusted to deliver on their promises because they were compromised by their corporate bankrollers.
3. Both Hollingsworth and Souffrant Forrest were running as members of democratic socialist slates. They were accountable to a working-class movement that would keep them true to their word, and were committed to acting as part of a team in office. Our policy goals face the resistance of immensely powerful enemies. Well-meaning individuals cannot defeat these class enemies and deliver real change for working-class New Yorkers. Insead, we need a mass working-class movement and a core of elected officials committed to coordinating with each other, and answering to and building that movement.

While canvassing, when voters would ask me the differences between Alabi and Souffrant Forrest I would hit on these three points, especially the last one. While Alabi was running on the same platform as Souffrant-Forrest, if she had won she would have weakened the bloc in Albany that is accountable to and fighting for workers. This was one of her strongest selling points at the doors.

People also appreciated my honesty about the difficulty of the task ahead. I didn’t say that by electing our candidates, their lives would immediately change. I made clear the power of our enemies and put forward a strategy to defeat them which relied on building mass movements of regular people, engaging in direct conflict with capitalists and their politicians, and expanding the bloc of democratic socialist legislators.

Unfortunately, neither our literature, nor our canvass training and scripts, emphasized that our candidate was running on a slate or accountable to a movement beyond the campaign. Our literature displayed a DSA endorsement, but as one as many among others, and identified Phara as a Democrat running for re-election, as opposed to a democratic socialist running as part of a slate in the Democratic primary. While I’m sure there were other volunteers who took a similar approach as me, the vast majority of constituents were not hearing this powerful message, instead likely seeing our candidates as good individual progressives, and in some cases, not so different from their opponents.

These reflections motivated my caucus in DSA, Bread & Roses, to put forward the “1-2-3-4 Plan” at the 2022 NYC-DSA convention. This plan would have committed our candidates to using the words democratic socialist on their literature and scripts, distancing themselves from the label of Democrat, using a common campaign identity during and between election cycles, bloc voting with each other, and cross-endorsing each other and future DSA candidates as part of a longer-term project of building an independent working-class party.

Why a Party? And How?

Marxists have long identified the importance of independent working-class political action. This independence is essential for simultaneously winning pro-worker reforms, and to build working-class organization and consciousness. Cross-class parties like the Democrats, while at times winning reforms for workers, have historically subordinated working-class power and interests to those of their capitalist leaderships. They also tie workers movements to the brand of anti-worker capitalists. Working-class parties on the other hand allow for workers to have control over their own political apparatus, strategy, brand, and politicians. Together, the movement rank-and-file, elected leaders, and members in political office can collectively present an alternative vision of society in direct conflict with capitalists and their politicians to serve as a rallying cry for workers sick of the status quo.

The 1-2-3-4 plan would have oriented our legislative and movement fights toward helping build their own self-directed struggles through fights that pit their own movements against the interests of capital and forge a working-class identity. Through these fights, we could demonstrate that DSA is the organization — or party —  to join to further their interests as workers, and that to expand working-class power means expanding DSA’s bloc in the state. Moving toward acting like a party and forging a voter-base devoted to our organization and strategy would set the groundwork for one day breaking from the Democratic Party and forming our own party.

The United States’ anti-democratic constitution and electoral rules make it particularly hard to break out of the two-party system forced upon workers. Most in the socialist movement acknowledge this reality, and its implications that at the current moment we need to contest Democratic primaries as a primary terrain of electoral struggle. For some, these hurdles have made building a working-class party seem quixotic, and that we should instead accept our lot as a faction of the Democratic Party. But this ignores that for centuries Marxists and socialists have focused their efforts on fighting for a more democratic state to enable working-class power. Some of the earliest programs of 19th and 20th century mass workers parties even led with demands around universal suffrage and proportional representation.

We don’t have to look as far back in history as Europe’s 19th century workers parties for relevant examples. Following Chile’s managed transition back to democracy, its constitution effectively created a two-party system through 2-seat-large congressional districts that delivered seats to the highest two vote getters. But following the 2011 student uprising against neoliberalism, and the subsequent entry of some of its leaders into Congress in 2014, Chile passed major electoral reforms, expanding the size of its congressional districts to allow for greater representation of other parties than the dominant center-right and center-left coalitions. These reforms, in turn, facilitated the massive growth of representation by Chile’s new left coalition, the Frente Amplio in 2017, in an election that broke up the country’s two-party system.

This was only possible because left-wing politicians and movements fought for this reform, and tied it to their broader economic program of ending neoliberalism. Building a government and society that worked for working people, they argued, required a political system that allowed working people real democratic control over their lives. DSA and our socialists in office should also fight for proportional representation and other democratic reforms that would make it easier to build a new working-class socialist party, and break from using the Democratic Party’s ballot line. In fact, YDSA just passed a resolution to this effect at our recent National Convention, urging

“DSA as a whole to take up a stance of opposition to the Constitution, openly indicting it as antidemocratic and oppressive, encouraging all DSA members in office to do the same, taking concrete actions to advance the struggle for a democratic republic such as agitating against undemocratic Judicial Review, fighting for proportional representation, delegitimizing the anti-democratic U.S. Senate, and advancing the long-term demand for a new democratic Constitution.”

While we don’t get to choose our conditions, we can still make our own history.

Base Building

Building a party can’t solely revolve around winning electoral reform. We have to do the hard work of building a working-class base for independent class-struggle politics. Notably, our rank-and-file labor efforts are going to play an essential role in breaking off a considerable chunk of the labor movement from the Democrats in favor of our socialist project instead and is already paying dividends.

Building mass democratic struggles of workers, showing workers that change is possible through their own independent collective action are essential in building what Kim Moody described as “a sea of class-conscious workers for socialist ideas and organizations to swim in.” Participating among the rank-and-file as the strongest union builders and advocates of union democracy and militancy, supporting workers through extensive strike support, and using the bully pulpits of our socialists in office to amplify and build their struggles, is a clear path for DSA to attract large numbers of working people to our organization.

Last, our electoral campaigns and the actions of our socialists in office have a large role to play in building a democratic socialist identity among our voter base. Literature, scripts, and campaign messaging can foreground that our candidate is running as part of an alternative political movement, DSA, that they are oriented toward building the struggles of regular people, and that they’re planning on blocking with other socialists in office who will together remain accountable to the movement.

Our socialists in office can collaborate with DSA and broader working-class organizations to facilitate mass working class struggle and draw clear identifiable lines between DSA’s electeds and mainstream Democrats. A great example of this has been the campaign for the Not on Our Dime legislation to end New York State’s subsidization of Israeli settlements, championed by most of NYC-DSA’s socialist in office. The Not on Our Dime campaign has oriented toward building people power, not legislative maneuvering, has forced the majority of the Democratic Conference to demonstrate they’re bought by the Israel lobby, and has emphasized the importance of having DSA members in office to truly champion the interests of working people.

Is Working in the Democratic Party Desirable in the Long Run? 

Some argue that we have no choice but to remain in the Democratic Party coalition indefinitely. But there is significant evidence that this is a failing strategy for the long term. First, the Democratic Party is incredibly unpopular, especially when compared to our socialist policy goals. Nationally, the Democratic Party has a 39 percent approval rating. And in red states, like Florida, Republican candidates regularly win state-wide office, while progressive ballot initiatives like a $15 minimum wage and legalizing medicinal marijuana pass by large margins.

Second, the Democratic Party is losing support from significant parts of its base who would form crucial parts of a workers’ party. While there has been a historical base in the South that identifies strongly with the Democratic Party, especially among Black southerners, support for Joe Biden among all non-White voters is quickly declining. According to the New York Times, while Biden won 70 percent of non-white voters in 2020, he is now polling at 53 percent among the same group. Biden’s drop in support among non-white voters is largely concentrated among those without a college education, are younger than 45 years old, and who make less than $50k per year or between $50 and $100k per year. While support for Biden among poorer people of color has plummeted, support among non-white voters making more than $100k per year has actually increased.

This parallels larger trends of diminishing support by workers of all races for the Democratic Party, and the Party’s increasing reliance on higher-income and more highly educated voters. While Obama’s 2012 campaign won voters with incomes under $50k per year by twenty-two points, and lost those with incomes over $100k by ten points, Biden won the former group by merely nine points, and reversed Obama’s loss among the latter group, winning top earners by thirteen points. And during the 2020 presidential elections, support for Trump by immigrants living in major cities massively increased. In Los Angeles and New York, districts with over 65 percent combined Latino and Asian populations both had Republican ballots increase by 78 percent compared to the 2016 election, while Democratic ballots only increased by 23 percent and two percent respectively.

The Democratic Party is quickly alienating key segments of their base to whom a socialist program may appeal — and who are necessary to realize said program. Winning over these groups – working people, people of color, immigrants in cities, and those in former industrial heartland – seemingly requires a sharper distinction from the Democratic Party, a willingness to establish ourselves as an explicit alternative to the party, not just a faction within.

What About Blue States?

In blue states, many argue that identifying as a Democrat is required to win office, but the reality is far less clear. In many of my canvassing conversations I’ve encountered working people whose first question is if our candidate is a Democrat or not. I’d often respond that our candidate was running in the Democratic Primary but was fundamentally different from traditional politicians of both parties, elaborating on the three points that distinguished our candidates from even most progressive non-socialist Democrats. I’d admit we had to run as a Democrat because of our two party system, but that our movement was independent from and in conflict with the corporate politicians of both parties. I’ve never had any problems with this messaging.

For the most part, workers just want to know our candidate is not a Republican. The laundry list of poor experiences with corporate Democrats is near universal. Anecdotally, many of my working-class co-workers hold highly negative views of Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, Eric Adams, and other leading Democrats, and recognize them as fundamentally alien to their own interests. Last summer, upon learning I was involved in political organizing, one co-worker asked me to help her learn about politics. She felt like she didn’t know much, just voted Democrat because that’s how she was raised, and wanted to learn more. She asked what I thought about the Democratic Party and I replied that it’s home to both poor people and the oppressed, and the ultra wealthy and oppressors. When push comes to shove, it will always choose the wealthy donors over its working-class base, and holds that base hostage because the only alternative is the even worse Republicans. We need a party built by working people independent of the ultra wealthy, and able to actually represent working people’s interests. For the time being we’re stuck in a two-party system and should generally vote for Democrats over Republicans, while building toward that independent party.

She was convinced, and the following week direct-messaged me an Instagram post about Nancy Pelosi’s extreme wealth. The idea that working people would not find this message compelling demonstrates a lack of confidence in both working-class political independence and the ability of workers to understand complex political ideas and put them into practice. The larger challenge is demonstrating that our vision is possible, not that it’s desirable.

Prioritizing Democratic primaries — a partial necessity of our electoral system — also narrows our audience too. Many voters in low-turnout Democratic primaries likely do identify with the Democratic Party. But it’s also true that our electoral campaigns in New York have generally targeted “triple-prime” voters — those who have voted in the three Democratic Party primaries. Since these primaries often receive only thirteen to twenty-six percent turnout of eligible Democrats, this strategy makes sense if one sees the primary task of socialist electoral work as delivering our candidates the greatest number of votes, while also remaining a permanent internal faction of the Democratic Party. But it makes far less sense from an electoral orientation that seeks to use socialist electoral campaigns to organize workers, regardless of partisan identity, into struggle around an alternative vision of society in direct conflict with capitalists and their politicians.

This is also not a good sample source to draw conclusions about the primary source of Democratic Party identification by working-class New Yorkers: negative feelings toward the Republicans or positive ones toward the Democrats. It’s safe to say that my co-worker, who spent her ten-minute breaks at our fast food job simultaneously pumping breast milk and calling up SNAP to try and secure her family food, was not participating in these primary elections. But she should be the prime target of our campaign efforts: a lifelong working-class New Yorker, person of color, mother, pro-union and pro-Bernie, pissed off at her landlord, boss, and the state, and interested in learning more about politics.

Building the Party

It’s exciting to see “Act Like an Independent Party” pass at the DSA convention. This vision of  building on our organizational independence, and establishing strategic independence and a strong public independent identity has super-majority support in the organization. Now we have to put it into practice. DSA can run socialists around the country on a common program and a common identity, build up our national and local electoral infrastructure to recruit and develop class-struggle candidates, and coordinate with them once in office to block together and build worker-oriented mass struggles. We will strengthen our electoral project and build real long-term power for DSA and the workers’ movement.

To do this, the National Electoral Committee needs to support chapters in establishing their own Socialists in Office (SIO) committee and to develop a federal one. These committees can take the best practices from NYC-DSA’s SIO committee, while also learning from its challenges and difficulties. They can coordinate with our officials, help set their messaging, policies, and strategy, collaborate in organizing their constituents into struggle, and ensure that our socialists in office are moving together as a disciplined team.

It also means developing a candidate school, to prepare our candidates to be class-struggle socialists in office, resist the state’s conservatizing pressures, and to rely on mass struggle by working people instead of goodwill with their capitalist colleagues. Additionally, we can work to set clear standards for bloc voting, coordinating with DSA, cross-endorsing our other candidates, and establish national and local brand identities for our electoral work. Using the same identifiable party brand between electoral cycles and between districts during the same cycle will help establish our organization as a party-like fighting movement in the eyes of voters.

Last, we can champion electoral reform to help break our two-party system and create new openings for forming our own party. It’s not enough to simply acquiesce to our material conditions, we must seek to transform them. Workers are itching for something different from politics as usual. It’s on us to give it to them.

The post Getting to Work on Acting Like an Independent Party appeared first on Socialist Forum.

In light of an increasingly active and militant labor movement, the question of DSA’s strategy and role in the movement presents itself with greater urgency. DSA Santa Cruz’s Labor Working Group offers this analysis as an attempt to pose crucial strategic questions and offer guiding principles we believe can provide a path forward. As a chapter with many members who were active in both the 2019-20 University of California Santa Cruz (UCSC) wildcat strike and the recent 2022 contract fight at the University of California (UC), we had a front row seat to the ways DSA’s imprecise labor strategy has been an obstacle to growing militant rank-and-file union movements capable of challenging the bosses. It is crucial that socialists clarify how we relate to rank-and-file militancy and how we understand effective strike strategy, in general, and in our own unions. The recent contract fight and extended strike at the UC is a critical juncture to deepen DSA’s position on these questions.

Presently, DSA doesn’t have a labor strategy. The 2021 DSA convention passed a labor resolution that side-stepped advancing strategic choices. Authored by representatives from different caucuses and tendencies, the 2021 patchwork resolution had a little something for everyone. It recommitted DSA to prioritizing labor but went on to affirm virtually every possible orientation towards the labor movement as a “top priority.” The resolution passed with overwhelming support by delegates who agreed on little else but found their preferred tactics represented in this pastiche resolution. Among the “priorities” of the resolution were passing the PRO Act, supporting shop floor organizing at Amazon, advancing new organizing drives, strengthening EWOC, supporting “rank-and-file” strategy, creating industry and sector networks, building power in the south, supporting chapters in mapping their own labor networks, prioritizing working with Black and brown workers, strike solidarity, and promoting an internal organizing campaign to get DSAers to join unions. These are laudable projects, and we should aim for a strategy that encompasses many tactics. But what is notable about the DSA’s current labor orientation is its inability to prioritize a specific militant, socialist strategy for workers.

This is a problem in DSA as a whole, but the stakes of this strategic incoherence are higher for labor because of its centrality to building proletarian organization. In high-stakes fights, such as the 2022 UC strike, all sides of any issue can claim to represent the DSA position. DSA members made up an important part of both leadership and the more militant rank-and-file of the 2022 UC-UAW fight. DSAers were prominent on the union’s executive board, including the UAW 2865 president, on the bargaining team, on the staff, and among the ordinary strikers on the picket. DSAers advocated for both YES and NO positions on the tentative agreement and simultaneously argued for the “long-haul” grade strike strategy as well as flashy direct actions. DSAers, at times, pushed for open bargaining and, at others, for closed “mediation” with the boss. Some DSAers argued that the strike had passed “peak power,” while some argued against the concept of “peak power” itself (instead arguing for a power-analysis centered on the boss’s weaknesses). In other words, on virtually every controversy that came up during the campaign, DSAers found themselves on all sides of the fight–to the point that the disputes within UC-UAW were simultaneously disputes within DSA, and conversely that the UAW contract fight dramatized the core strategic questions that have remained in suspension within DSA since least the last convention.

A Little Background 

Core organizers at UC Santa Cruz sought to foster a strategy based on patience, resilience, and principled commitment to our demands. This strategy became known as the “long-haul strike.” Workers come to learn the power that we possess: building up greater trust and solidarity such that we continue collectively withholding our labor until our demands are met. Academia is not an industry in which striking for a few days or even two weeks necessarily causes intense disruption to the boss. It is only through the gradual accumulation of incomplete work and grading deadlines that the power of withholding labor makes itself felt in this sector. Because of high levels of specialization within academic fields, graduate worker labor is difficult to replace. In our analysis, if workers in this sector are able to commit to an extended strike, the university will make concessions to our demands to continue operating normally. This is not to suggest that the strategy of this strike or the lessons learned through its course are exclusive to the kinds of intellectual labor that Teaching Assistants (TAs) and Student Researchers perform. Rather, against perspectives that propose that a mere demonstration of power through a strike authorization vote or short symbolic actions are sufficient, we propose that workers in various industries should consider the action of striking itself, often in the long-haul, as a potent force with the capacity to change the balance of power between themselves and the boss.

In contrast to the “long-haul” perspective, the union’s statewide leadership appeared to enter the strike with the expectation that it would be resolved quickly. They assumed that a decisive strike authorization vote and the threat of a labor stoppage would foment fear and panic within the UC administration, resulting in quick concessions. This positioned the exercise of power through the strike itself as secondary to the demonstration of power through the vote and the picket as a media spectacle. This was never a strategy conceived to win our demands in full. The feeble goal was to meet the UC somewhere in the middle. Indeed, the more conservative majority faction of the bargaining team always appeared to accede to the UC administration’s framing of the COLA demand as an unreasonably high raise, rather than a necessary social demand based on living conditions in the cities where we work. The way we see it, the COLA demand is not a simple raise, but a fundamental restructuring of what wages are and how they operate. This is especially salient in light of the fact that the UC was not only the boss in the UC strike but also the landlord of many of the strikers. As tenant organizer Tracy Rosenthal points out, “The U.C. system generates revenue not only by depressing wages in its role as the state’s third-largest employer but by extracting rents as a landlord to some 106,000 students.” By indexing wages to the cost of living, the COLA demand is part of the larger socialist strategy to guarantee that workers can afford to live where they work, no matter how much the cost of living rises.

Some among those claiming Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts as an organizing bible were deeply committed to the concept of the supermajority action’s ability to scare the boss into concessions and on this basis approved the obvious shortcut of secret closed-door bargaining sessions before the strike had even begun. We note that while McAlevey herself is pointedly critical of closed bargaining, the emphasis on the spectacle of worker action and the myopic focus on supermajority as the only form power can take ultimately led UAW leaders to adopt precisely this closed door strategy.  We think that this points to a tension, or perhaps a contradiction, in McAlevey’s conceptual framework. That statewide leadership believed that a better deal could be achieved through negotiation without worker input was one among many indications of the paternalism and lack of confidence with which this leadership treated the rank-and-file. When no serious UC concessions occurred after the strike authorization vote or in the first couple of weeks of the strike, statewide leadership began to panic — the fear that they had hoped to stimulate in the administration shifted to the union leaders themselves as the UC held its nerve. This is the point at which, on the basis of showing our “seriousness” at the negotiating table, the bargaining team made unilateral concessions. First, the bargaining team dropped the COLA demand for future years, and second, decreased the starting wage demand from $54k to $43k. These decisions sought class compromise rather than engaged in class struggle. Rank-and-file members responded by packing Zoom caucuses within minutes of their opening to voice their opposition to these concessions.

While far less pernicious than statewide leadership’s concessions, Santa Cruz core organizers also voiced skepticism regarding calls for spectacular direct actions, such as blockades and dining hall occupations. These are all legitimate tactics available to strikers, but many calls to “escalate” appeared to come from a panicked rush for quicker results, rather than being integrated into a broader strategy. While calls for greater militancy initially came from quarters denouncing the union in its entirety, without differentiation between rank-and-file organizing and top-down approaches, ironically, statewide leadership began adopting similar calls for direct actions aimed at generating media spectacle later in the strike. This is to say that the liberal-bureaucratic and ultra-militant tendencies in the union collapsed into one another based on a shared register of impatience and lack of utilization of strike power itself. A further irony here is that the union’s statewide leadership had long accused UCSC wildcat strike organizers of being “ultra-leftists.” This term has become little more than an invective in DSA discourse, but its connotation of impatience and an absence of strategy clearly applies better to the statewide leadership itself and not to those willing to wildcat.

A further twist came during the contract ratification vote, in which the dominant bureaucratic tendency in the bargaining team sought to co-opt the language of the long-haul strategy to, counterintuitively, argue for the strike’s conclusion. On December 23, the final day of the vote, UAW2865 president Rafael Jaime sent a mass email to union membership with the title “Vote YES and organize for the long-haul.” This usage of “long-haul” rhetoric to kick the can down the road exemplifies the proclivity of statewide leadership to twist militant language into its opposite. This same proclivity was on display with catch phrases such as deep organizing, class struggle unionism, and mass action. At the same time, that statewide leadership felt the need to frame their political perspective in our terms — even though the two approaches are ultimately incompatible — demonstrates the influence of our intervention to promote the long-haul strategy among rank-and-file workers in the union.

Our Strike Strategies During the UC Strike 

Our long-haul approach to organizing aimed at building worker power, which we see as the top priority of socialists. And while the long-haul strike is an essential part of our contract struggle, it was just one element of a greater strategy to organize power among workers as a class, which we’ve been building at UC Santa Cruz for years. There are a few key tactics we’ve used to build power among graduate workers at UC Santa Cruz. It’s important we highlight the ways in which these tactics differ from those that were being championed by our union’s statewide leadership, and moreover, how our differing positions on tactics indicated a larger schism in the overall strategy of what it would take to win our demands and what would most successfully build worker power.

The first tactic employed by DSA members at UC Santa Cruz was to form an active and vibrant stewards network, in which departmental stewards kept communication channels strong between academic departments. The stewards network is a way to disseminate information from internal organizing circles outward. But stewards also act as the eyes and ears of their department. They are able to talk to workers in their department, learn about the challenges they are undergoing at work, and report back to the organizing committee. During the strike, the stewards network became a mode for assessing how great our power was as a body of workers withholding our labor. While statewide leadership spent the weeks leading up the strike (and the first couple weeks of the strike) obsessed with maintaining a large turnout on the picket line, we were more interested in meeting consistently with our stewards network. A couple of times a week, we would meet on the picket line for a stewards meeting, in which every steward would share if there were any challenges in their department, and what percentage of workers they estimated were on strike. This had dual effects: it enabled us to accurately determine how many workers were withholding labor on our campus and indicated which departments we needed to work harder on. Furthermore, it busted the myth that the picket line was the “structure test” of the strike. Halfway through the strike, we determined that, despite having an at times thin picket line, 18 out of 30 departments had more than 90% of workers on strike. The culmination of this engagement in the strike, empowered by the stewards network, was when 80% of academic student employees and 81% of student researchers at UC Santa Cruz voted to reject the ratification of the contract we currently have. Our analysis is that this rejection, at least at UC Santa Cruz, was solidly grounded in an organized workforce that saw a path forward to continue striking.

The second tactic we used to build and assess our power as workers was viewing participation in the strike as defined by withholding labor, as opposed to taking action on the picket line. Our assessment that the picket line numbers did not correspond to the strength of the strike also aligned with our strategic decision to avoid certain “militant” actions that would result in potential altercations with police. At a certain point during the strike, statewide union leadership began advocating for strikers to occupy buildings and block intersections (a sharp turn from their initial position that this could get the union in legal trouble). We saw this turn as an indication of suspicious intentions to create a spectacle that might distract workers, the media, and the public from the behavior of elected bargaining team members who were capitulating to the university. Moreover, we viewed this as a potential drag on our resources (should we need to shift energies toward jail support), and a misreading of the real power of the strike: the withdrawal of our labor.

As DSA members, we must continue to demonstrate that we, the workers, are the union –– not the staff who are hired to work for the union. Hired staffers tried to make decisions on behalf of workers, making every effort to pre-determine the actions of striking workers. But despite this, workers on our campus consistently looked outward to their coworkers, not upward at bargaining team members and staffers.

Class Struggle Unionism: The Strike as Weapon

During the strike, DSA Santa Cruz Labor Working Group was a site in which extensive strategic discussion took place among strikers and other workers in the community, much of it centered on furthering a strategy termed by veteran labor organizer Joe Burns as “class struggle unionism,” as opposed to a milquetoast and spectacle-oriented approach that he refers to as “labor liberalism.” Terms such as “class struggle unionism” and “rank-and-file strategy” are phrases we see evoked in many labor organizing debates on the left. It has become common to point to strikes and direct action as tactics that are unequivocally tied to building a strong, militant, rank-and-file and that support class struggle unionism. But tactics should not be conflated with strategy, and even militant tactics can work in opposition to class struggle unionism and undermine the rank-and-file when the strategy is not centered on disrupting the production of capital. It is with this in mind that we pose that within DSA there are two different strategies associated with the same tactics: class struggle unionism and labor liberalism.

Class struggle unionism aims to lean into the antagonisms between workers and bosses, and sees bosses always as the enemy of the working class. In this way, class struggle unionism uses a variety of tactics to disrupt the production and flow of capital and to severely limit the boss’s profits. Class struggle unionism believes that power lies in the hands of the rank-and-file and that through their collective action gains can be demanded and won and with this in mind, focuses on shop floor organizing and rank-and-file agency. Class struggle unionism uses militant tactics as a weapon against the boss.

Labor liberalism, on the other hand, seeks to negotiate peace between workers and bosses, and sees bosses as collaborators in a common struggle. In this way, labor liberalism uses a variety of tactics as an appeal to the press to garner outside support and a speedy resolution. Labor liberalism believes that power lies in the hands of elected officials and lobbyists and that worker action should always be oriented towards appealing upward to the people with the real power. Labor liberalism focuses on turning out workers to support contract campaigns and relies on professional staff for critical decisions. Labor liberalism uses militant tactics as a spectacle.

All sides of every debate in UAW 2865 throughout the strike framed their positions in the language and aesthetics of class struggle unionism. But were the tactics pursued by the union’s statewide leadership consistent with a strategic outlook based in class struggle and the agency of workers themselves, or do they correspond more closely to the strategy of labor liberalism, which seeks to garner the support of the press and politicians? Against the dilution and aestheticized appropriation of the term “class struggle,” we would assert that a more rigorous set of criteria is required to determine if a given tactic is being used in service of class struggle unionism, as outlined in the following concluding and guiding principles.

7 Strike Principles

1. The strike is a weapon, not a spectacle: power comes from hurting the boss, not publicizing the strike.
2. Strike to win: socialists should make demands with the aim of actually winning the demand, as in the COLA demand, rather than as a signal in a back-and-forth game with the boss.
3. Strike for the long-haul: our power comes from our ability to withhold labor as long as it takes to win our demands.
4. Tactics must serve strategy: the stewards network and emphasizing withholding of labor rather than picket line numbers were successful tactics for strengthening the capacity of the rank-and-file to act and organize.
5. Our tactics must strengthen the capacity of rank-and-file to act and organize.
6. Our tactics must aim to disrupt or limit the flow of capital.
7. “Supermajority strikes” should not be elevated to the only form that worker power can take. The choice between supermajority and minority action is not a moral one, but a strategic one, and must be settled by strategic debate between rank-and-file workers themselves as they fight the boss.

With the labor movement poised for a militant resurgence, many of the categories and terms that have structured socialist approaches to labor strategy –– and which were operative in our recent strike –– have been rendered significantly more blurry than they were in previous decades when the distinction between a bad “business unionism” in power and a good “rank-and-file” or “organizing tendency” struggling to take control had bright lines between them.  The partial successes of the latter have meant that the bad, old form of unionism has grown a lot more sophisticated and has metabolized much of the critiques we used to distinguish ourselves from it. Our experience of the UC strike in Santa Cruz was one in which the contest over the meaning of these terms (rank-and-file, structure test, deep organizing, power-analysis, peak-power, long-haul, etc.) was appropriated for use against the workers.

We are in a moment when self-professed allies of UAW’s Administration caucus can articulate their positions in terms borrowed from the pages of Labor Notes and argue that closed door mediation is an essential component of, rather than an alternative to, open bargaining. A time when DSAers who nominally support the Rank-and-File Strategy argue that supermajority action by rank-and-file workers requires union staffers shutting down minority action initiated by that very rank-and-file. To us, this all indicates the need for socialists to engage in sustained conceptual labor and strategic debate, something DSA has historically struggled with. While the UC strike did generate copious discussion, little of it actually added clarity to these core strategic questions raised by the strike. More often, different factions would simply deploy their preferred terminology taken from the pages of No Shortcuts as a cudgel against opponents. We call on socialists and communist militants in the labor movement to develop a more critical engagement with the whole coterie of concepts we use, first and foremost, those handed down from McAlevey and which tend to serve less to clarify strategy than as a sort of catechism for leftists in the labor movement. The UC strike is over. Real material gains were made, alongside the imposition of a two-tier pay system and a contract that fell far short of the hopes of most graduate workers. If we want the next fight –– whether at the University of Michigan, at UPS, at the Big Three automakers, or anywhere else –– to have a less ambiguous result, socialists need to go into it with a much clearer sense of strategy.

The post Rebuilding the Socialist Labor Strategy: Lessons from the UC Strike appeared first on Socialist Forum.

A fellow Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member recently told me I’m the first person they met who joined the organization because of Michael Harrington. It’s true – I joined DSA in the late 1990s largely because of Harrington’s influence. Like Harrington, I was raised a devout Catholic, and in Catholic school I was fortunate to learn about the preferential option for the poor, the dignity of labor, and the rights of workers. I stumbled upon The Other America, the 1962 book on poverty that made Harrington famous, read it, joined DSA, and have been a socialist ever since.

The remark reminded me that I’m not a spring chicken anymore, and it underscored just how much the organization has changed since I first joined. For years, many of the people I knew in DSA worked with Harrington before his death, at only sixty-one, in 1989. We all took it for granted that democratic socialism was a distinct political tradition, with a clear lineage and a core set of principles that distinguished it from other currents on the anti-capitalist left. Since DSA’s revival and expansion, however, the meaning of “democratic socialism” has become somewhat fuzzy and, at times, contested.

Political organizations, if they possess any vitality at all, change with time. The average person who has joined DSA since 2016 has an entirely different frame of reference than those from the organization’s founding generations. Many of the newest recruits joined with little or no connection to the Old or New Lefts, the labor movement, or the progressive religious institutions that furnished the socialist cadres of an earlier period. Many of us have no memory of the Cold War or the bitter fights among the various factions of twentieth century socialism. This is, in many ways, a positive thing. At the same time, the lack of a broad consensus about what exactly constitutes democratic socialist politics sometimes contributes to internal conflicts, reflecting an anxious search for collective identity.

These dynamics can lead to the question of whether democratic socialism is a distinct political tradition at all. For skeptics, “democratic socialism” often simply seems to mean whatever those who call themselves democratic socialists happen to say it is. This view embodies the relative lack of dogmatism that has attended the socialist left’s revival. But it also makes it difficult to respond with any consistency to the most basic questions a political movement needs to answer: what do you want, and how do you plan to get it?

Democratic socialism is a distinct political tradition that has found expression in many countries, with common roots in a democratic interpretation of Marxism. In the United States, whose democratic socialist movement I will specifically focus on here, it has also drawn extensively on the country’s secular and religious reform traditions, from radical republicanism to the Black social gospel.

Three core elements, in my view, have defined it historically: a vision of “democratic socialization” that deepens political democracy and extends it into the economic and social realms; a strategic emphasis on social alliances and coalition politics, rooted in but reaching beyond the labor movement; and a commitment to democratic internationalism. Here in the United States, it has seen liberalism — particularly its left wing — as an important ally because it has been the political home of the country’s mass-based reform movements, including the labor movement since the New Deal era.

If there is hope in getting human civilization to the next century with even a modicum of freedom and democracy, it lies in the democratic socialist movement. As democratic socialists in the world’s most powerful country, we bear a heavy responsibility to be as committed and effective in our efforts to change America as possible. It is no exaggeration to say that everyone’s future depends on it.

Fortunately, we do not need to begin from scratch, for we stand on the shoulders of giants. Harrington described the invisible world of the poor as the “other America,” but this phrase has many resonances. We are heirs of the other America that has fought, since the country’s founding, to make it live up to the best aspects of its national creed: abolitionists and feminists, Socialists and Populists, the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and civil rights movement, New Leftists and participatory democrats. Our calling is to respect this tradition, draw upon it, and carry it forward as we fight the battles of our own time.

Toward Democratic Socialization

In the opening passages of the Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels survey the development of capitalism with an admiration bordering on awe. As the bearers of capitalist social relations, the bourgeoisie “played a most revolutionary part” in breaking the bonds of traditional society and creating “more massive and more colossal productive forces than have all preceding generations together.” It did this by bringing scattered people and means of production together in ever greater combinations, concentrating property ownership in the hands of a few and the exercise of political power in the modern state. In doing so, the bourgeoisie laid the foundations for a world of abundance by tapping the power of social labor, the cooperation of many individual workers in the production of commodities.

The problem with this arrangement, from a Marxist point of view, is the contradiction between the reality of social production and the private ownership of the means of production. Before capitalism, an individual owner of the means of production would also tend to enjoy the fruits of their labor. Think of a subsistence farmer producing directly for their family’s own consumption using their own land and tools. Under capitalist social relations, people tend not to produce directly for themselves, but are dependent on securing their livelihood through market exchange with others.

As Engels observes in Socialism: Utopian and Scientific, the “socialized producers and means of production and their products were still treated, after this change, just as they had been before — i.e., as the means of production and the products of individuals.” The products produced collectively by large numbers of workers, who now did not own their own means of production nor necessarily need to come into direct contact with each other in order to cooperate, “were not appropriated by those who had actually set in motion the means of production and actually produced the commodities, but by the capitalists.” Before capitalism, people tended to produce small amounts of goods, mostly food and other agricultural products, and either consumed it themselves or turned it over to a landlord. Under capitalism, people tend to produce not for themselves but for others, and it doesn’t really matter what the product is so long as it finds a buyer on the market. But when those products are sold it’s the employer of those who do the work, not the workers themselves, who reap most of the benefit.

This contradiction between socialized production and private, individual appropriation of the product is capitalism’s calling card. It “contains the germ,” Engels concludes, “of the whole of the social antagonisms of today,” which finds fundamental expression in the conflict between the working class created by capitalism and the capitalists who employ workers’ labor power.

In his final book Socialism: Past and Future, Michael Harrington describes this process as the “antisocial socialization” of the world through capitalist development. The social organization of work unleashed human productivity on a previously unimaginable scale. But under capitalist social relations, this process gave birth to a novel social condition: poverty amid plenty. The deeply contradictory — and for many around the world, utterly disastrous — consequences of capitalist development spurred the emergence of socialist organizing, which in Harrington’s words was the first political movement to pose the question: “How does one democratically control the revolutionary consequences of our increasingly social human genius?”

One major twentieth-century answer to this question was Communism, which grew out of the socialist tradition but departed from it in important ways.

Following Marx and Engels, socialists tended to assume that the most advanced capitalist countries with the strongest labor movements would be the main theater of socialist revolution. But it was tsarist Russia, not Britain, France, Germany, or the United States, where socialist revolutionaries made their first breakthrough. Lenin and the Bolsheviks took power on the assumption that the Soviet experiment could survive only if it was the first explosion in a chain reaction of world socialist revolution. Those hopes were quickly snuffed out, and the Soviets embarked on a crash course of modernization to overcome tsarist stagnation and catch up to the leading capitalist states of the west. They called it socialism, but socialist critics of the Soviet system and its emulators thought otherwise.

Harrington, for example, argued that the upshot of Communist revolutions was not “to achieve the democratic production and distribution of the wealth of a successful capitalism,” as he argued in Socialism: Past and Future, but rather a “desperate attempt of emergent elites in poor countries to catch up, to modernize” and compete economically and militarily with the leading capitalist states. For democratic socialists, this was not socialism but a variant of antisocial socialization – even if this was not what its architects originally intended.

It is certainly true that some Communist party-states have made impressive achievements in reducing extreme poverty or providing comprehensive health care services, and these advances should be respected. The Communist movement’s support for anti-colonial and national liberation struggles around the world should also be recognized. While Washington shamefully backed the government of apartheid South Africa, for example, the African National Congress found allies in the South African Communist Party, the Soviet Union, Cuba, and others in the Communist world. “Actually existing socialism” certainly did not turn out the way its inaugurators hoped, but it retained some connections to socialism’s emancipatory heritage. This is why it is problematic to lump Communism together with fascism – a project that has contributed nothing but hatred, violence, and death to the human experience – under the rubric of “totalitarianism.”

At the same time, democratic socialists have always viewed the freedom to organize, speak, and publish as the “light and air” necessary for working people to develop their capacity to rule and to organize toward a society without classes. Here is where democratic socialism’s contrast with other expressions of socialist politics, particularly those which claim the mantle of the Bolshevik revolution, becomes most clear. Communist parties have historically been extremely undemocratic organizations, and the party-states they’ve run have suppressed representative democratic institutions and many basic political freedoms. Nicos Poulantzas, the Greek theorist of democratic socialism, posed the question in no uncertain terms:

It is necessary to take sides. If we understand the democratic road to socialism and democratic socialism itself to involve, among other things, political (party) and ideological pluralism, recognition of the role of universal suffrage, and extension and deepening of all political freedoms including for opponents, then talk of smashing or destroying the state apparatus can be no more than a mere verbal trick. What is involved, through all the various transformations, is a real permanence and continuity of the institutions of representative democracy — not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism.

Many Communists, it must be said, were sincerely committed to the cause of democracy, equality, and freedom and made very important contributions to those ends. In the US, Communist Party activists like Dorothy Healey and Jack O’Dell played key roles in labor organizing and the fight for racial equality, among other struggles. People became Communists not because they wanted to become Kremlin agents but because they were outraged by injustice and wanted to fight for a better world, and they thought joining the Communist movement was the best way to do that. Many had their lives ruined by state surveillance, harassment, and persecution because of this commitment. At the same time, however, we cannot forget the terrible crimes committed in the name of “socialist construction,” the undemocratic and sectarian nature of many Communist parties, or their subservience to the needs and interests of the Soviet party-state. All of this did massive damage to the socialist movement, and we have only recently started to recover from it.

What would a practical program for democratic socialization look like? In a 1978 essay titled “What Socialists Would Do in America – If They Could,” Harrington sketched the outlines of a democratic socialist program for political and economic reconstruction, much of which is still a useful starting point for us today. First, he proposed the adoption of a national planning process “in which all the people would have an effective right to participate.” This would be done by ensuring the technical capacity of citizen groups to challenge official plans and present counter-plans, and by radically democratizing the already existing political process.

The second major element would be a “profoundly modified private sector,” with institutions of workers’ control and public participation in corporate governance and major curbs on profit making through tax and regulatory policy. Finally, there would be a dramatically expanded, locally oriented cooperative sector based on cheap credit subsidized by the federal government. An expansive welfare state would collectively provide goods and services in areas where market provision is not effective like health, education, and transportation. Markets would still function in areas where private choice is actually efficient and does not determine the basic direction of the economy.

This is a radically ambitious agenda, and the socialist movement is nowhere near capable of achieving even part of it on its own. This is where the strategic element of democratic socialism comes into focus.

Forging a Democratic Majority

Here, I will consider the strategic orientation of the mid-to-late twentieth-century iteration of US democratic socialism, particularly as it was expressed through the civil rights movement, not the early twentieth century heyday of the Socialist Party (SP). This is not because Eugene Debs and his contemporaries were not democratic socialists – they certainly were – or that they are unimportant. It is because the conditions under which they operated are very different from those we face today.

The SP was the last sustained, nationally organized third party in US history. Outside of residual pockets of strength like Milwaukee, it ceased to be a viable independent electoral formation by the mid-1920s. While the party found success in a number of states and localities, it only ever succeeded in electing two members to Congress, Milwaukee’s Victor Berger and New York’s Meyer London. London was voted out of office in 1922, Berger in 1928, and they were never replaced.

The spread of direct primary elections at all levels, legal rulings that made parties less like private membership organizations and more like public utilities for nominating candidates, and the political-economic changes inaugurated by the New Deal and its underlying coalition (which crucially included organized labor), closed off the available space for independent left-wing parties. Debs, Berger, Morris Hillquit, and other early SP leaders were, as historian James Weinstein observes in The Long Detour, “products of the years when the door to participation in major parties had been tightly shut.” Those doors were pried open roughly a century ago, and the most effective democratic socialists have decided to walk through them ever since.

Democratic socialists decisively reject minority strategies for winning political power. Since self-conscious socialists have rarely constituted a majority of the population anywhere, not least the United States, this necessarily entails a strategy of social alliances and coalition-building aimed at forging a democratic majority. This is a strategic imperative in any context, but it is especially salient in the US, where the lack of a proportional representation system shoehorns the wide array of social and political groupings into one of two big coalition parties.

The outlines of this strategy were, to a significant extent, developed by Black and white socialists in the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King, for example, worked with many organizers who came out of various corners of the Old Left. These included SP members A. Philip Randolph and Bayard Rustin, former Communist Party members and fellow travelers like Jack O’Dell and Stanley Levison, and non-party socialists like Ella Baker and Pauli Murray. Harrington was a follower of Max Shachtman, a former Trotskyist who brought his Independent Socialist League into the SP in the 1950s. The Shachtmanites were a rather small group, but they were able to punch far above their weight because their number included key strategists and organizers like Rustin who made important contributions to developing the movement’s strategic orientation.

In their excellent book A Freedom Budget for All Americans, Paul Le Blanc and Michael Yates outline “The Strategy” formulated by the democratic socialist wing of the civil rights movement. In their telling, The Strategy had two main elements. First, it projected “a mass struggle against segregation and second-class citizenship” in the form of direct action campaigns against Jim Crow. Second, it incorporated civil rights demands into a comprehensive program of economic reconstruction, “channeling the struggle against the Jim Crow system into an even more massive struggle (through a coming together of the anti-racist and labor movements) for jobs for all, an end to poverty, and democratic regulation of the economy, which would involve a transition from capitalism to socialism.”

The earliest formulations of this strategy aimed at the formation of a new labor party independent of the Democrats and Republicans. In his contribution to a new volume on Bayard Rustin, historian David Stein recounts a 1959 letter to Rustin from SP activist Tom Kahn about a plan for civil rights protests at the upcoming Democratic and Republican national conventions: “just keep repeating the formula: 1960 ProjectProject → increased tension within Democratic Party → Split Democratic Party → formation of Labor Party → Labor Party, under influence of mass socialist left.” In this sense, their approach as originally conceived was rather similar to the “dirty break” strategy some DSA members advocate today.

But no battle plan survives first contact with the enemy. Kahn and other socialist civil rights activists modified their strategy as their engagement with the US political system deepened. Stein conveys the experiences of former SP activist Rachelle Horowitz, who recalled that “We got hit in the head with…two realities…that, one, the labor movement was not about to split to form a labor party,” and second (as Stein summarizes it) that “most Black people were not willing to abandon the Democrats, Dixiecrats notwithstanding.” While Rustin, Harrington, and others remained SP members, by the mid-1960s they thought that the main political vehicle for their program would be a realigned Democratic Party led by its liberal-labor elements. In their view, this approach was necessary to break the power of the de facto party that had a stranglehold over American politics for decades: the conservative Dixiecrat-Republican coalition.

The reactionary Southern Democrats who dominated key committees in Congress and held great sway over presidential nominations would be pushed into the Republican Party, together with northern and western conservatives. Without the albatross of racist, anti-union reactionaries hanging around their necks, the Democratic labor-liberal coalition could be pushed to adopt a program responsive to the needs and interests of trade unionists, African Americans and other racial minorities, the poor, and the “conscience constituency” of progressive professionals and religious faithful.

Martin Luther King, the greatest democratic socialist the US ever produced, was a consistent and forceful advocate of this strategy. Like Randolph, King did not shy away from criticizing the racism and discrimination that still plagued the house of labor in his time. Nevertheless, he was committed to the proposition that a political alliance between organized labor and the Black freedom movement was the key to progress for both groups, and the essential foundation of a mass movement to transform American society.

In a speech to the AFL-CIO’s 1961 constitutional convention, King declared that the “two most dynamic and cohesive liberal forces in the country are the labor movement and the Negro freedom movement.” African Americans, King noted, were an overwhelmingly working-class people whose interests and methods of struggle overlapped considerably with the labor movement. They needed allies because they constituted a minority of the population; labor needed allies to prevent technological progress “from becoming a Moloch, consuming jobs and contract gains” won over decades of hard-fought battles. It’s in labor’s best interest, King implored his audience, to support the fight for racial equality, because labor’s political strength would thereby be multiplied. “Negroes given the vote will vote liberal and labor because they need the same liberal legislation labor needs.”

The Black-labor alliance was at the heart of The Strategy, but even this would not be enough to forge the majoritarian coalition needed to win and wield political power. It was already evident in the mid-1960s that organized labor faced a difficult future if it could not organize new sectors, find more allies, and regain its former dynamism. In a 1965 speech to the Illinois AFL-CIO, King observed that the labor movement was organizationally powerful but “stagnating and receding as a social force. As the workforce has grown substantially in the past twenty years, the ranks of organized labor have remained stationary, and its moral appeal flickers instead of shining as it did in the thirties.”

In addition to working-class Blacks and the poor of all races, one potential source of renewed strength was the growing strata of educated professionals in postwar America. As Harrington argued in his 1968 book Toward a Democratic Left, the rising tide of “collective-bargaining impulses among professionals” — nurses, teachers, technicians, and other kinds of highly credentialed workers — “is something more than a new attitude within a traditional social class. Perhaps it is one portent of the appearance of a social class which has never existed before and which will play a significant role in the formation of a new majority of the democratic Left.”

Such an outcome is far from guaranteed. People occupying the twilight zone between the working and middle classes could be, in Harrington’s estimation, “an ally of the poor and the organized workers — or their sophisticated enemy.” Given its growing size and social weight, this group, which is disproportionately composed of women and often the source of feminist and queer liberationist demands, had to be brought into a political alliance with organized workers, the poor, and another group democratic socialists paid close attention to: religious progressives from the full range of faith traditions.

For King, Harrington, and others in the democratic socialist tradition, a coalition strategy uniting disparate groups on the basis of common interests and values is essential. It is forced upon those who seek a thorough transformation of American society, because there simply is not, as Harrington concluded, “some majoritarian proletariat with internal cohesion and solidarity seeking its own mighty voice.” Nor is there, absent fundamental changes to the US electoral system, a viable alternative to being the left wing of a coalition party that includes non-socialist progressives and liberals.

We should strive to gain a leading position in that coalition, but winning it will be a very difficult task. Pursuing, much less attaining, the lofty goals of democratic socialism in the US requires a healthy dose of strategic realism, an avoidance of sectarianism, and a consistent policy of alliances. The alternative is political isolation and all of the self-defeating habits that come along with it.

Democratic Internationalism

“Workers of the world, unite!” has been socialism’s watchword for nearly two hundred years. If there is no socialism without democracy, the same can be said of internationalism. International solidarity, opposition to national chauvinism, and the fight against militarism is in the movement’s DNA, and it has been a key element of democratic socialist politics in the US.

Internationalism is a moral and political imperative for socialists everywhere, but it is a particularly crucial aspect of democratic socialism in the US. Since the country’s founding, the US working class has been composed of all the nations and peoples of the world — some through voluntary immigration, others through forced importation and enslavement, and in the case of indigenous people, through violent expropriation of their land. Another dimension of the internationalist imperative is the fact that the US has been the world’s leading economic, political, and military power for nearly a century. This places an enormous burden of responsibility on Americans to minimize the harm our government causes and promote the world’s common good whenever possible.

Once again, democratic socialists in the civil rights movement provide some of the best examples of these principles in action. Though not as well known as King, Reverend James Lawson — still alive and active at age ninety-four — is a key figure in the history of our movement. He embodied the kind of democratic internationalism that suffused the Black freedom struggle and shaped its strategies and tactics. Lawson was working in India as a Methodist missionary when he got the news about the Montgomery bus boycott in 1955. According to historian Michael Honey’s account in Going Down Jericho Road, “Lawson leaped out of his chair, clapped his hands, and shouted for joy. This was the movement he had been waiting for…He was eager to build a movement to overturn what he called the interlocking ‘cruelty systems’ of colonialism, racism, and war, using a revolutionary philosophy called nonviolence,” Gandhi’s philosophy of satyagraha (“soul force”).

According to Honey, Lawson “met socialists and nationalists in India and toured Africa. Observing a parallel freedom struggle building among the colored peoples of the world, he vowed to become a part of it.” Upon his return from abroad he met King; joined the Fellowship of Reconciliation, a religious pacifist group that counted socialists A.J. Muste and Norman Thomas among its founders, as a southern field organizer; and sought to mobilize the power of nonviolent direct action against Jim Crow in Tennessee. He played a key role in leading the 1968 Memphis sanitation workers’ strike where King was assassinated and continued his work in support of workers, immigrants, womens’ and queer liberation, and international solidarity for decades afterward.

Nobody, however, could move masses of people with a vision of universal humanity like Martin Luther King. By the mid-1960s, King was a moral and political leader of truly global stature. In that capacity, he did what he could to promote a vision of common humanity against the powers and principalities on both sides of the Cold War.

In 1964, Willy Brandt, the mayor of West Berlin and the future social democratic chancellor of West Germany, invited King to visit the city to headline a cultural festival. He spoke to a rapt crowd of 20,000 West Berliners, met with students and clergy, and preached a message of peace and common humanity. King insisted on crossing the Wall to East Berlin, where he gave a powerful sermon to an overflow crowd on the topic of reconciliation. “It is with great humility that we in the United States in the freedom struggle have taken the liberty to assume that we are serving as agents of God’s reconciliation.”

He recounted the main events in that struggle and extolled the faith that allowed the movement to keep pushing forward toward victory, even in the face of death. “This is the faith I commend to you Christians here in Berlin,” King intoned in his peroration. “A living, active, massive faith that affirms the victory of Jesus Christ over the world, whether it be an Eastern world or a Western world.” King’s message of democratic, nonviolent revolution left a deep impression on both sides of the Wall, inspiring youth in particular to take action against “the kingdoms of this world” who would keep them divided and afraid.

Vietnam was a major test of democratic socialists’ internationalism, and unfortunately the record in this regard was mixed. Harrington did not support the war and thought US policy in Vietnam was immoral and indefensible. But his wariness toward what he saw as the “middle-class elitism” of the anti-war movement and his lingering personal loyalty to Max Shachtman, who was an apologist for the war on anti-Communist grounds, prevented him from taking a more effective position against the war. Harrington came to regret his approach and broke with long-standing comrades like Shachtman and Rustin over it. As he put it in his memoirs, Rustin — a pacifist who educated King in the theory and practice of nonviolence in the 1950s — “made the wrong decision: to subordinate his anti-war convictions to what he became convinced were the imperatives of domestic coalition politics. He was wrong because this position assumed that the social programs could succeed while the war raged, and because it ignored one agony to deal with another.”

At the 1972 SP convention, Rustin and his allies defeated the faction around Harrington and a smaller faction known as the Debs Caucus, and changed the party’s name to Social Democrats, USA. Harrington and his allies resigned to form the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee, while the Debs Caucus formed the Socialist Party USA. Simply put, the Vietnam war was a moral abomination and a political disaster. It divided the labor movement, split the democratic Left, and dealt a fatal blow to the hopes for economic reconstruction outlined in the visionary Freedom Budget. King, in Harrington’s retrospective estimation, made the right decision. While King shared the aversion to Communism common among democratic socialists, he did not let this prevent him from demanding an immediate US withdrawal from Vietnam, even if this meant victory for the Communist-led National Liberation Front.

In his remarkable 1967 speech “Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence,” King lacerated not just the US war in Vietnam, but the deeper spiritual decay the war represented. In laying waste to Vietnam, America wasn’t only destroying the lives and homes of millions of Vietnamese. Its war effort acted like a “demonic, destructive suction tube” wasting American lives and resources that could be put to far more constructive use at home. He denounced the US government as the “greatest purveyor of violence in the world today,” and called on Americans to “get on the right side of the world revolution” against “the giant triplets of racism, extreme materialism, and militarism.” King paid a heavy price for his forthright condemnation of the war, isolating him from many he once considered to be allies. Yet over half a century later, this speech stands as a shining testament to King’s moral clarity and the international consciousness that suffused his democratic socialism.

Democratic internationalism requires frequent opposition to US foreign policy, which has too often wreaked havoc and destruction around the world. But democratic socialists like King never let this responsibility, nor their horror at the violence our government has so often unleashed, morph into the kind of radical alienation that drove the New Left’s most self-destructive tendencies. They were able to galvanize mass movements because their politics were grounded in an immanent critique of American society that, in Gramscian terms, transformed its “common sense” into “good sense” — a critical consciousness forged out of materials from the dominant ideology itself.

They called on the nation to actually live up to its democratic and egalitarian ethos, with no double standards based on race or anything else. The country had written a “promissory note” of freedom to all Americans, including those who were poor or Black, and they fully intended to collect on it. King made this plain in the speech he gave to striking Memphis sanitation workers the night before he was assassinated:

All we say to America is to be true to what you said on paper. If I lived in China or even Russia, or any totalitarian country, maybe I could understand some of these illegal injunctions. Maybe I could understand the denial of certain basic First Amendment privileges, because they haven’t committed themselves to that over there. But somewhere I read of the freedom of assembly. Somewhere I read of the freedom of speech. Somewhere I read of the freedom of press. Somewhere I read that the greatness of America is the right to protest for right. And so just as I say we aren’t going to let any dogs or water hoses turn us around, we aren’t going to let any injunction turn us around.

The revolution of values that King called for in his “Beyond Vietnam” speech was, in important respects, an appeal to return to the country’s origins in a revolt against British imperialism. He pointed out the supreme irony of American support for counterrevolutionary movements in the post-colonial world. “It is a sad fact,” King lamented, “that, because of comfort, complacency, a morbid fear of communism, and our proneness to adjust to injustice, the Western nations that initiated so much of the revolutionary spirit of the modern world have now become the arch anti-revolutionaries.” Communism’s appeal to revolutionaries in what was then called the Third World was, in King’s view, “a judgment against our failure to make democracy real and follow through on the revolutions we initiated. Our only hope today lies in our ability to recapture the revolutionary spirit and go out into a sometimes hostile world declaring eternal hostility to poverty, racism, and militarism.”

Once again, King identified himself with the country’s revolutionary, democratic heritage in order to criticize its conduct that much more effectively. In doing so, he held out the possibility of a positive, constructive role in the world for America — so long as people of conscience fought to build a more perfect union at home.

Shortly after King was assassinated in Memphis, his wife Coretta Scott King — a steadfast political activist in her own right — summed up the democratic, internationalist spirit that shaped her husband’s life and work. “He gave his life for the poor people of the world, the garbage workers of Memphis and the peasants of Vietnam,” she eulogized. “The day that Negro people and others in bondage are truly free, on the day want is abolished, on the day wars are no more, on that day I know my husband will rest in a long-deserved peace.”

King, Lawson, and other democratic socialists at the forefront of the civil rights and anti-Vietnam war movements set an enduring example for those who seek to take up their banner. Their example inspired millions around the world, including democratic socialists in other countries. One of them was Sweden’s Social Democratic prime minister, Olof Palme, who got a first-hand look at American racism and the struggle against it while living in the US after World War II.

During an election campaign in the early 1980s, Palme declared:

I am proud and glad to be a democratic socialist. I became that when I traveled around India and saw the appalling poverty, contrasted with the immense wealth of a few; when I traveled around the United States and saw what in some ways was even more degrading poverty; when, as a young man, I saw at first hand the lack of freedom and the oppression and persecution in the Communist states; when I visited the Nazi concentration camps and saw death lists with the names of Social Democrats and trade unionists.

During his two stints as prime minister in the 1970s and 1980s, Palme was critical of political repression in the Soviet Union and the Eastern bloc while opposing the Vietnam war, supporting Salvador Allende’s government in Chile, supporting national liberation movements in Latin America and Africa, and backing the Palestinians’ struggle against Israeli occupation.

The challenge for democratic internationalists is to vigorously oppose our own government’s actions whenever necessary, while avoiding a self-defeating alienation from our own country. It means opposing interstate rivalry in principle, holding all the powers of the world to a single standard while supporting all genuine movements for democracy and justice however we can.

Democratic Socialism in the 21st Century

Democratic socialism, as I have described it here, is a distinct political tradition grounded in three core elements: a vision of democratic socialization, a strategic emphasis on social alliances and coalition politics, and a commitment to democratic internationalism. It has roots in a democratic interpretation of Marxism but draws on a diverse array of ideological and intellectual sources, including a deep well of religious commitment as exemplified in the civil rights movement, where democratic socialists like Martin Luther King played leading roles. Finally, democratic socialists in the United States have, particularly since the New Deal, treated the left wing of liberalism as an important ally because that is largely where popular movements for social change, including the labor movement, have been politically organized.

Democratic socialists are enormously fortunate to have this tradition to draw upon, for it furnishes valuable intellectual, political, and moral resources rooted in our country’s history and culture, and which already have a deep resonance with millions of people who aren’t socialists. Why look to tsarist Russia or imperial Germany for guides to practical action when we have our own movements and traditions to learn from?

The examples I have recounted here nearly all come from the twentieth century. It is fair to ask how (or even whether) this tradition is relevant in the twenty-first century, where we confront crises and dilemmas our forebears scarcely could have foreseen. One often hears that the crises of the century don’t afford us enough time for the sort of politics outlined here. Majoritarian, democratic politics can be slow and painstaking, and the political system we have in the US places many barriers in its path. Faced with the truncated timetables of the climate crisis, propaganda of the deed and other minority strategies born of a sense of desperation may well find a renewed appeal. But actions born of despair are far more likely to facilitate the imposition of some sort of authoritarian statism than anything else.

Are the ideas and strategies our democratic socialist predecessors left behind adequate to the tasks we face? With certain modifications and adjustments, I think they are.

To begin with, the electoral revival of American socialism vindicates many of our predecessors’ strategic conceptions. The realignment that they and many others fought for — the polarization of the Democratic and Republican parties, with Southern reactionaries pushed from the former to the latter — actually happened. It did not necessarily have the effect many hoped for at the time, not least because it happened at precisely the moment organized labor entered a long period of defeat and decline. In recent years, however, the Left has used primary elections to oust moderate Democrats, replace them with socialists and progressives, and start winning victories for working people and the climate.

There is still much further to go in this regard. The Left has won a surprising number of successes in a short period of time, but it needs to keep growing its geographical and social base. If pushing the Dixiecrats out of the Democratic coalition was round one of the process, confronting the neoliberals and winning a leadership position for the progressive Left — including, but not limited to, democratic socialists — is round two.

This electoral project’s chances of success would be enormously improved if the current glimmers of labor movement revitalization continue to brighten. Unions are more popular than they have ever been, young workers are showing a marked interest in organizing across sectors, and two of the largest private sector unions — the Teamsters and the United Auto Workers — are now led by reform administrations who put a strong emphasis on organization and struggle. These are still just glimmers. We are probably not on the verge of a big bang in union organizing on the scale of the 1930s. But the fruitful interplay of left-wing electoral insurgency with the renewed stirrings of labor organization provides grounds for hope. If these trends continue to reinforce and propel each other, the dynamic left-labor alliance that earlier generations of democratic socialists worked so hard to build could become a renewed political force.

One area of strategic consideration our predecessors did not pay enough attention to is how to transform state institutions outside of electoral politics and representative bodies. Here is where US democratic socialists can learn quite a bit from our counterparts in the Global South, like Brazil’s Landless Workers’ Movement (Movimento dos Trabalhadores Rurais sem Terra, MST). The sociologist Rebecca Tarlau developed the concept of “contentious co-governance” based on her study of the MST, which has been dealing with these issues in a highly challenging political environment for nearly forty years. For Tarlau, contentious co-governance is “not just implementing a reform, you are having a social movement enter an institution as part of a broader plan for social change.” Protest, pressure, and negotiation continues to keep reforms moving forward after legislation has been passed.

This is especially the case when political opponents win elections, but it can sometimes entail conflict with allies in public office. It also entails winning footholds within the agencies and institutions of the state itself, not just elected offices in representative bodies. “State power exists in a lot of different spaces,” Tarlau observes, “so we need to think about how we can solidify a movement and then find the spheres of state power in which we might be able to wield some control.”

The MST does this primarily through educational institutions; there are many other potential sites of power building in addition to this obvious example. The democratic Left must continue to elect democratic socialists to office, but this is just one aspect of the project of democratic socialization. We must also, as Nicos Poulantzas insisted, increase the “intervention of the popular masses in the state: certainly through their trade union and political forms of representation, but also through their own initiatives within the state itself.” The War on Poverty arguably made a tentative, highly contentious move in this direction through its Community Action Agencies, which were intended to facilitate the “maximum feasible participation” of the poor and oppressed in the local administration of federally-funded health, medical, job training, and education programs. It also provided funding for local civil rights organizations, which often used these resources to challenge entrenched political machines and business interests. The growing crop of democratic socialist legislators and policymakers should study the history of maximum feasible participation and work to implement updated versions of it in our own time.

The US Left has a proud heritage and a usable past – the democratic socialist tradition. It is a precious legacy, deeply intertwined with our country’s history and culture, with much to say about our current moment. Let us embrace it, learn from it, and continue building on it together.

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Rounding the bend to election, DSA endorses SIX candidates with Boston DSA! First off, check out Joel Richards running for Boston City Council, District 3 – going head to head with conservative interests. Joel is looking to consolidate left/progressive support after coming in second in the primary.

Dan Totten is an active DSA member running for Cambridge City Council, whose top priorities are reducing homelessness, universal afterschool care, and raising the minimum wage for city workers.

Also running for Cambridge City Council, Jivan Sobrinho-Wheeler joins the rest of Boston’s “sidewalk socialist” crew, also focusing on housing justice and afterschool care. With robust labor support, he’ll support organizing on the shop floor and the streets.

Running for Medford City Council, Zac Bears is focusing on better funding for city services, housing and displacement, and enhancing city democracy. He’s been endorsed by Our Revolution, the Environmental League of Massachusetts and the Greater Boston Labor Council.

Somerville City Council incumbent Willie Burnley, Jr. has passed significant legislation expanding rights for tenants and workers and increasing protections for LGBTQ+ folks with first-in-the nation non-discrimination ordinances.

Also a Somerville City Council incumbent, JT Scott has been a champion for DSA and has regularly met with the chapter’s Socialists in Office committee. His platform includes transparency around new development, affordable housing, and defunding the police.