Fund the Future, Build the Party!
Statement from the youth of Marxist Unity Group on the defunding of YDSA
The YDSA members of Marxist Unity Group are deeply disappointed with DSA’s NPC for seeking to ameliorate the ongoing budget crisis by voting for historic cuts to YDSA’s budget. We share the frustrations that have been expressed across the political spectrum in YDSA since the decision, and we welcome the NCC’s call for united action by all YDSA members to defend YDSA’s funding. The following points form the bedrock of our position on this issue:
Defunding YDSA was not unavoidable—it was a political decision. There is a conservative tendency within DSA which takes a managerial approach to running the organization and sees areas where organic membership democracy flourishes, of which YDSA is a prime example, as of secondary importance. Marxist Unity Group rejects this logic. MUG’s members on the NPC supported fully funding YDSA with every vote. We consider this the standard and are displeased to note that Red Star, Groundwork, Socialist Majority Caucus and independents failed to meet it. Of the multiple competing visions for how we should resolve the budget crisis, a vision that sees defunding YDSA as preferable to other measures has been chosen as a consequence of an internal political struggle in DSA. That political struggle is not over.
YDSA can move mountains when we unite in our diversity. Years of persistent, united work won us an unprecedented level of investment in YDSA at the 2023 DSA National Convention. The current budget crisis requires us to remain united, collaborating towards a solution that not only honors the democratically elected priorities of our organization but also charts a course for the future of DSA. Through continued persistent, united work we can win back every dime YDSA has lost during the deficit crisis, and more.
YDSA is more than just a line on a balance sheet. YDSA is a vital site of social reproduction for DSA. Year after year, our work develops some of DSA’s most committed and skilled organizers as we grow even in times of contraction for the rest of DSA. In addition to representing a disproportionate fraction of the active membership of DSA, the organizers currently coming into their own in YDSA will be the cadre leading the way for DSA as a whole during the coming decades. This period will be decisive for the socialist movement as our undemocratic political order, capitalist economy, and ruined biosphere continue to collapse. Choosing to invest in YDSA now will be paramount to our ability to one day win the battle for a better world.
Defunding YDSA is not fiscally responsible. Despite the arguments we have heard from the tendencies in DSA responsible for the cuts to YDSA’s budget, underinvesting in an important engine of growth and on-ramp for young members will be actively detrimental to DSA’s financial health in the long run. To convince working-class youth to become dues-paying socialists, we must fight to bring more, not less, of their money back to the sites of class struggle they organize around on their campuses and in their communities.
Our foremost task is to build a mass workers’ party. Stipends for elected leadership make it possible for working-class socialists to seek leadership in DSA, shaping it into a membership-led party that puts politics in command and gives workers the power to emancipate themselves. For this reason, we congratulate YDSA members on successfully defending NCC stipends, and express our strongest possible disagreement with any further efforts to reduce or eliminate them, especially from tendencies which have made it known that they see staff layoffs as a red line to be avoided at all costs. Between a democratic, rank and file-oriented party and a bureaucratic, staff-oriented one, MUG chooses democracy and the rank and file every time.
YDSA is the vanguard of DSA. As we saw at the 2023 YDSA National Convention, it is the youth who lead the way to new horizons in the movement for socialism. MUG was proud to see YDSA pass resolutions affirming the need for a mass socialist party, independent class-struggle electoral campaigns, programmatic unity, a political strategy that aims to win the battle for democracy against the antidemocratic slaveholders’ Constitution, and an approach to internationalism that centers the fight to undermine and ultimately abolish the imperialist US military. Instead of holding us back, DSA must give YDSA the strength we need to keep pushing the socialist movement in this country forward into a new era.
We, the YDSA members of MUG, are proud to be in a caucus that always has and always will give everything for the future of the socialist movement. We invite all other members of DSA, old and young, caucused and independent, to make the same commitment. The revolutionary youth are the hope of the world.
