MUG Tasks & Perspectives 2025

Feb 24

Cover of the Liberator, March edition 1918

Our task is to merge socialism and the workers’ movement.

This is the merger formula, as essential today as when it was identified by the first mass socialist movements in the 19th century. We seek to end the terrible reign of capitalism and the horror it inflicts daily on people and the planet. This is the historical mission of the working class.

Capitalism plants the seeds of its own destruction, but this does not mean that we simply wait for it to decay on its own. This system is built on exploitation and will always oppress people. No matter how the working class is exploited and brutalized, people will resist. Within the working class, there will be people fighting back. This is the workers’ movement, the fighting working class in action against the bosses and capitalists. Within the workers’ movement itself, some are aware of socialism as their ultimate goal. In order to mold the working class into the force that can fulfill its great calling, we must continually organize to expand this awareness outwards.

The foundation of Marxist strategy is to merge the day-to-day interests that inspire the fighting working class with a final goal of socialism. It is essential, but not enough, to organize only for the economic demands of the working class, such as higher wages or better working conditions. Our organizing must connect economic demands with political demands. We must continually make the connection between the undemocratic workplace and the undemocratic state.

In every struggle–whether at the workplace, for racial justice, reproductive freedom, trans rights, against imperialist bloodshed, and so on–our role is to tie injustices to the lack of political power held by the working masses. As long as the ruling class can simply ignore or overturn anything we win, fighting only for reforms to the existing system is at best treading water until those wins are rolled back. In our organizing, we must make it clear that the only way to achieve lasting victories for the working class is to end the minority rule of the capitalists established in the slaveholder’s constitution.

At each MUG congress, members write and debate a tasks and perspectives document to assess where we stand and what we must do in order to achieve this overarching goal.

Tasks and Perspectives of the Marxist Unity Group

Adopted January 2025

PREAMBLE

The longue durée of bourgeois society gives shape to our current moment. The bureaucratization and subsequent collapse of the Soviet Union and turn towards managing capitalism have led to the hollowing-out of existing socialist and communist parties. Meanwhile, capitalist development has quickly progressed, leaving long-running Communist peasant insurgencies in India and the Philippines with an ever-diminishing base. In the face of ever-increasing challenges to the Left in the epoch of reaction, Democratic Socialists must take the long view to shape our strategy. In many ways, we are seeing the need for the rebirth of the class-independent mass socialist party. This is why we as Marxist Unity Group look to the emergence of mass socialist parties in the 19th century as a loose guide to action.
The economic development of the world capitalist system has led to a singular problem: deindustrialization. In the advanced capitalist countries, deindustrialization began after the Volcker Shock of the 1970s and signaled a shift from industrial production in the metropole to the so-called “developing nations” under the jackboot of imperialist domination, simultaneously increasing the capitalists' share of profit extracted from the production process and dismantling the power of the organized industrial working class. As the center of global industrial production shifted to Asia, socialist opposition diminished. Now, the general glut in industrial output and increase in capital-intensive production processes are leading to premature deindustrialization in the Third World, where capitalist development leads to lower employment in industrial sectors, instead increasing the service and informal sectors.
However, this does not lessen the effects of capitalist development, especially the urban-rural divide, displacing people from traditionally-held lands and expanding urban areas. This shrinking industrial proletariat presents an existential problem for the socialist parties of the world. The working class, organized around industry, was their primary base of support. The failure of the 20th century socialist movement has led to a loss in direction and standing amongst the global proletariat for socialism today. Promising national economic development or rebirth, the reactionaries have taken over as the primary opposition to the ruling parties on the world stage.
The capitalist world system is completing its shift from a U.S.-dominated “super-imperialist” coalition into a “multipolar world.” This is a world of more violent inter-imperialist rivalry, intensified competition of international firms, and a gradual dissolution of diplomatic international relations in favor of military intervention and economic warfare. In this decade, two fronts have opened in the new world war: the Russia-Ukraine war and Israel's genocidal assault on Palestine which has spread across the Levant and threatens to envelop the whole Mashriq. Two more fronts could open as U.S.-China relations deteriorate and Trump threatens military intervention in Mexico.
The victory of Donald Trump in the 2024 election is the conclusion of this stage of U.S. working class dealignment and a victory for the reactionary project. We now face a Leviathan with the executive as its sovereign, safeguarding from the threats of "wokeness,” immigrants, and the Left. The judiciary breaks down the federal administrative state's bureaucracy in place of direct, personal Presidential control over agency staff. Trump’s cabinet promises to impose further austerity on the state, slashing regulatory agencies and social spending. Clearly, the so-called "Constitutional Revolution of 1937" did not allow for a permanent state of social welfare under the New Deal agencies—the U.S. Constitution itself allows this backsliding because it creates the legal foundation for our fundamentally undemocratic state.
Meanwhile, the Democratic Party has embraced this rightward turn, conservatizing when faced with threats to its electoral success. This is a mirror of 2020, where Left and progressive calls to abolish the police and ICE were met with Democratic fear-mongering around crime rates and "illegal immigrants" and refusal to support much-needed social programs under their decades-long austerity program. In the end, even the most progressive forces within the Democratic Party, afraid of the forces of reaction, continued to support the Harris/Walz campaign and the Biden/Harris administration in the 2024 Presidential election. Instead of becoming a strong, vocal opposition to U.S. support of Israel's genocidal campaign in Palestine, leveraging the election to secure an arms embargo, progressive Democrats like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Bernie Sanders fell behind the Harris/Walz campaign as the "lesser evil." Despite the dangers of the Trump presidency, Democrats have already begun to backpedal on the incoherent “resistance” they offered Trump during his first term. The Left must rediscover itself as a force independent from the progressives.
International
Imperialism in the 21st century involves exporting labor-intensive manufacturing processes from organized high-wage nations to their low-wage counterparts. This has contributed to the proletarianization of these countries, generalizing the phenomenon where “the bourgeoisie therefore produces[…] its own grave-diggers,” (Communist Manifesto) while also inflicting atrocities upon them under the combined dictatorship of multinational corporations and global finance. This order operates out of the First World and the international military regime spearheaded by the U.S., creating a common enemy for the international proletariat.
The development of capitalism on a world scale has produced a growing stratum of proletarians, national capitalist classes, and international capitals that bind nations to supply chains which command the loyalty of their capitalist classes. In doing so, international capital has flattened and generalized an increasingly stark class struggle across the whole of the globe. Moderating influences, such as the alliance between the haute and petty bourgeoisie for national independence and development have been rendered historically obsolete. The national liberation movements of the 20th century became co-opted by US imperialism’s support of “decolonization” and its promises to integrate these new nations into the capitalist order— that, or they were outright crushed as in the cases of Chile, Grenada, and Indonesia. Mass political movements of the urban and rural proletariat, including the mass protests for a democratic constitution in Peru, the party-movements of the ‘pink tide’ in Latin America, the Intifadas in Palestine, the National Democratic movement in the Philippines have shown the increasingly proletarian face of modern political movements as they run up against the interests of capital and its reactionary bulwark in U.S. hegemony. The aims of the neoliberal offensive have ultimately only served to bolster the number of capitalism’s gravediggers and generalize the conditions of democratic and socialist proletarian struggle.
The countervailing tendency is the rise of global reaction, particularly in the First World, which exploits the working class’ response to suffering under deindustrialization, the historic loss of the Soviet Union, and the betrayal of the coalitionist socialist parties. Reactionary forces have mobilized this response around a nationalist program that addresses declining standards of living through militarism, protectionism, and the strengthening of border regimes. Trump's Republicans, along with their European counterparts such as National Rally, Alternativ für Deutschland, Reform (formerly UK "Independence"), and Vox have become predominant forces. Mirroring the move to reaction, governing liberal parties have adopted many of their policies. Socialist parties who joined in coalition governments are tied at the hip to this program, seemingly forced to decide between continuing to their coalitionism or risk a reactionary takeover of government— principled opposition being outside of their frame of reference. Now the options presented to the First World governments are neoliberalism or protectionist border regimes, a geriatric liberal coalitionism or a new reactionary nationalism.
Despite hopes that a multipolar world would cause a social revolution led by the Third World, global reaction has a base there as well. In particular, the Duterte and Marcos families in joint rule over the Philippines, the Bharatiya Janata Party, and Modi in India pushing the Hindu nationalist extermination of Muslims, Erdoğan and Islamists in Turkey have each shown their own imperial and expansionist tendencies. The center of global reaction has found itself in the Americas, particularly Argentina under Javier Milei, who is testing the prototype of a vicious austerity regime. Global reaction continues to organize itself at the international scale as well, with the long-time US-based Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) hosted in Buenos Aires including incoming Trump officials, Spanish reactionaries, and family of Jair Bolsonaro.
As in the First World, the Third World reaction is a reflection of growing defiance to liberal coalitionist regimes, global economic trends, and reductions in social spending at home; however, they differ in that Third World reaction also has a distinctly preventative function towards established workers and anti-imperialist movements. Additionally, the Third World reactionaries seem very willing to submit to international finance capital for the sake of national economic development, whether that is in Argentinian lithium or Brazilian lumber. Both Chile and Bolivia are targets for the next wave of reaction – both to prevent the growth of anti-systemic politics (Boric and MAS) and to expand the reach of Milei’s foray into the lithium extraction industry.
Since October 2023, we have witnessed an unrepentant genocide of Palestinians in Gaza. Despite building a broad front, the Palestinian resistance forces could not stop Israeli military power untethered from norms of international law and morality. The IDF has effectively seized Gaza. They have brutally murdered all in their way, including an unprecedented number of children and journalists. All infrastructure necessary for a functional society has been destroyed as part of the genocide, engineering a horrific humanitarian crisis. Meanwhile, state-supported settler violence has only escalated in the West Bank. The West Bank was already divided into an Israeli-administered occupation zone, Area C, and small bantustans supposedly under Palestinian Authority control through the Oslo Accords. Attempts at international diplomacy have been fruitless, with widespread outcry from nations across the world. Even the International Court of Justice and the International Criminal Court’s landmark proceedings have left the Zionist entity undeterred; the IDF continues to occupy and encroach upon more territory in Gaza, wiping out all human life they encounter. True to form, the U.S. blocks all UN intervention through its veto on the Security Council.
With the fall of Bashar al-Assad in Syria, it has become clear that the Axis of Resistance is an illusion as a coherent force, instead representing a web of alliances, rivalries and flows of arms, contradictory in their relationship with the Palestinian resistance. The folly of some Marxists in relying on the Islamic Republic of Iran and other actors within the bourgeois interstate system in the Middle East betrays a historical weakness in international socialism. While maintaining critical support for all who stand with Palestine, we do not see the strategy of radical Shi'a Islamists as the answer either. After the 1979 revolution and the assumption of state power, the Islamists commenced the total annihilation of the Marxist Left in Iran. With the Left out of the way, they have been gradually moderating since as a result of operating within a system that requires the maintenance of the capitalist nation-state above all else, marked by the long decline of the Principlist faction.
Principled anti-Zionism began its long decline with the defeat of Nasserist Egypt in the 1967 war. Following Ghassan Kanafani, the struggle for Palestine is also a struggle of the whole Arab nation. After Nasser's defeat in 1967, monarchs, military leaders, and coalitionist governments all turned their back on Palestinians in favor of normalization with Israel. This policy was pursued in spite of the mass of Arab people desiring Palestinian freedom to this day. Palestinian resistance continues to fight, but largely isolated due to this defeat and subsequent betrayals by comprador states, vacillating allies, and the sabotage of anti-Zionist states such as Morsi’s Egypt established through the Arab Spring. Anti-Zionism and socialism can only grow together, and both must be rebuilt from the ground up throughout the Arab world. Our anti-Zionist work in the First World must aim at eliminating the Zionist bulwark against the Palestinians’ valiant resistance, and more broadly the necessary conditions for a mass socialist movement amongst Arab peoples. In order to do so, we must be even more steadfast in opposition to our own nation's support.
The IDF's intensified assault has reshaped the Middle East over the last year. Hezbollah suffered severe losses to their top command and Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) deposed Bashar al-Assad, who fled to Russia. This effectively cuts off supply lines crossing Syria, isolating Resistance forces in Lebanon and Palestine from Iran. Lebanon faces an unequal ceasefire imposed after a brutal Israeli offensive, pushing Hezbollah away from the border in Southern Lebanon. While a defeat for Hezbollah, this is still not the preferred outcome of the Zionist forces, who would like an all-encompassing defeat or another military occupation of Southern Lebanon.
Immediately after this ceasefire, HTS launched an offensive against the Syrian government forces from their territory in the northwest, seizing Damascus in 11 days and deposing al-Assad after over a decade of civil war. HTS, a takfiri Salafist group formerly allied with al-Qaeda against the Islamic State, has become a Turkish client state and a part of a US ally-controlled political order, pursuing a public relations strategy of "moderation" in depictions of softening relations with Syrian Christians despite continued sectarian violence under their territory. Additionally, following Turkish “advice,” HTS will likely begin a process of normalization with Israel, having already countenanced the IDF’s occupation of the Golan Heights. The IDF continues to advance and launch airstrikes against Syria and Lebanon, extending a so-called "buffer zone" from the occupied Golan Heights further into Syrian territory. European countries will likely remove HTS from their terror designations, overseeing repatriation—in other words, mass deportations—of Syrians from Europe and Turkey into the Islamicist government and fulfilling a promise of the far-right ethnonationalists. US diplomatic relations with HTS also spell disaster for Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces, leaving room for their subjugation to Turkish expansionism. Even worse, the Syrian model provides a template for further destabilization throughout the region, such as AnsarAllah-controlled Yemen, the last remaining bastion of anti-Zionist resistance outside of Palestine.
The war in Ukraine broke out as the result of both the massive eastern expansion of the US-dominated NATO military alliance over the past three decades, the dominance of far-right pro-Western Ukrainian nationalism in that country’s politics since the 2014 Maidan events, and the following civil war between nationalist and regionalist forces. The war has now ground to a brutal stalemate, reminiscent of the trench warfare of World War I. While US/NATO support bolsters the Ukrainian resistance, they are being slowly pushed back into "trench" warfare by more numerous Russian troops. To maintain their line amidst shrinking volunteer forces, the Zelensky regime has relied on an intensive mobilization campaign forcibly shipping men over 25 with no adequate training to the front. In order to keep a pool of troops, the right of movement has been severely restricted for the working class; meanwhile, the wealthy and well-connected are able to avoid conscription by paying a fee or living in exile. Differences between working class and privileged sections of the military have grown more stark, with police, mobilization, and military police given broad powers to coerce.
Despite this mobilization effort, there is no victory in sight for Ukraine. Russia has continued to slowly gain territory through a better trained military and is outlasting Western sanctions. If Trump withdraws support to Ukraine, this year may be the last gasp for Zelensky's regime, but that does not mean the defeat of a NATO proxy is a victory for the working class. Internally, Ukraine has moved from primarily an oligarch-ruled state to a three-way fight between Zelensky's dictatorship, reactionary military cliques like Azov, and the Western-backed NGOs. As these struggles for control of the nation play out, US finance is already salivating over the profit earned from land speculation; Blackrock and JPMorgan Chase are at the center of the multi-billion dollar "reconstruction bank." After decades of culling the population through post-Soviet "shock therapy," a final push of mobilization will secure much-needed capital investment. Ukraine has already accrued over $100 billion of debt to foreign entities including the IMF, contractually obligating even more austerity in the future. Trade unions and socialist opposition parties, outlawed under Zelensky's martial law and mobilized to be slaughtered by Russian troops, have been hollowed out. The few surviving elements are vacillating between social chauvinism, like Western-backed NGOs, or vulgar anti-nationalism. All of these factors combined will likely prevent any material relief from reaching the devastated Ukrainian working class.
The United States’ political and economic competition with China continues to teeter towards a direct war. One of Trump’s campaign promises was the escalation of the trade war with China. Trump’s cabinet appointments include incoming Secretary of State Marco Rubio, an anti-Chinese war hawk, and Elbridge Colby as Under Secretary, who explicitly calls for a return to Cold War policy of "defense through strength." This conflict has been built through the last several decades, centered on military build-ups in Taiwan and the South China Sea, including military funding assistance to Taiwan, and training and military bases in the Philippines (which carry the added bonus of providing counterinsurgency against the New People's Army). At home, we see expressions of rising tensions with China expressed in various forms, such as bans on companies like TikTok using the spectre of Chinese intelligence. State legislators are attempting to ban land ownership for Chinese citizens, eerily reminiscent of the racialized citizenship and immigration policies of the 19th century.
The next social revolution may very well take place here in the Western hemisphere, but only in the form of a continental democratic republic that forms a global beachhead of socialism, sweeping away the imperialist domination of multinationals for an industrial democracy. This requires intransigent opposition to the existing border regime that maintains unequal conditions for the workers of this hemisphere and plays them against each other, while subjecting those who cross it to acute exploitation, police terror, surveillance, and death. Democratic Socialists must fight for universal residency citizenship, freedom of movement, and high levels of economic organization among workers of all nationalities.
The highest level of unity for the workers’ movement is on political grounds in an international party. To be able to participate in building this international party requires sharpening the political strategy of our national party, DSA. This process points in the direction of a class-independent and oppositional political strategy that fights for democracy as the specific form of working class rule and communism as its end goal, organized as a mass party-movement with organizational democracy at its center. By demonstrating this strategy at home and building connections with politically-aligned sections of the workers’ movement abroad, we can form the basis of an international democratic socialist movement that can credibly challenge the international order of capitalism and its imperialist dictates. In Lenin’s words: “There is one, and only one, kind of real internationalism, and that is—working wholeheartedly for the development of the revolutionary movement and the revolutionary struggle in one’s own country, and supporting (by propaganda, sympathy, and material aid) this struggle, this, and only this, line, in every country without exception.”
BUILDING THE PARTY
Revolutionary strategy revolves around the workers’ political party. A workers’ party in the Marxist sense is a mass association of the working class formed for collective political action, defined by a set of tasks in a democratically-ratified program. The basic commitment of any party member is to pay dues to the party and to pledge their activity towards fulfilling the party program. In the case of DSA, MUG is pushing for a minimum-maximum program, with a minimum section that commits our organization to the tasks of fighting for a democratic republic with political and social rights for all within its boundaries, expropriation of the commanding heights of the economy, and an immediate end to U.S. imperialist domination. This commitment does not entail full agreement with every aspect of the program, but rather acceptance of a common duty to carry it out. This principle is known as programmatic unity. Therefore, the workers’ party is united by the tasks that it seeks to convince the workers’ movement of organizing to fulfill.
To cohere the leadership of the working class within the ranks of the party, democratic centralism must be practiced on a mass scale, starting from dues-based membership and programmatic unity. From there, the party must guarantee to all members equal right of participation in the democratic process, regular congresses of the sovereign membership, open leadership elections at congresses, local party organizations organized around a sovereign membership body, and the free organization of factions. These votes and the structural obligation of administrative and leadership bodies to the general membership are how the socialist movement practically educates itself.
The foundation of party democracy is freedom of information, association, and discussion. An organization where decision-making is in the hands only of leadership or cliques may involve rubber stamping by members to give the appearance of democracy, but is only a façade. At all levels of our organization, members must be given the opportunity to debate and make decisions on the most vital and controversial questions of our movement. The path to an organization that maintains healthy political diversity while remaining united around programmatic goals is not to paper over the major questions that divide us or suppress dissent in order to appear unified. We must be honest and clear about our disagreements within the organization, and it is equally our responsibility as individuals and as a faction to practice comradely disagreement and critique.
Building the party necessarily requires struggling for the value of deliberative and democratic governance against rule by experts or informal rule by clique. While advocates of “digital democracy” in DSA like Groundwork have justified themselves with the phrase “one member, one vote,” a move to polling as the method of party decision-making sidelines deliberation and the membership entirely, turning the agents of our democracy from meetings where members come together to strategize, debate, and synthesize positions to the whip lists of individuals. Digital democracy offers alluring promises of horizontal openness and a way to divine some true will of the membership. Recreating the same issue with direct democracy in general, removing deliberation and debate in favor of online referenda simply hands control to party leadership who determine the nature and wording of the straw polls. Instead of giving members the experience of collective decision making, this path offers members an alienated binary choice, a fig leaf for ratifying the will of entrenched leadership.
Because working-class associations consist largely of members devoting their limited time outside of wage labor, we require a subset of members that can dedicate themselves full-time to practical work on behalf of the whole membership. We prioritize fighting for paid political leadership alongside staff, not in replacement of them, to ensure the democratically elected representatives of members are among those able to devote their full time to the party. Unlike a capitalist enterprise, DSA hires staff for the useful quality of their labor, not to produce surplus-value. Like all laborers, staff should have a union that can defend their livelihoods. However, a union of full-time workers in the DSA bureaucracy that begins to take political stances is a recipe for undermining democratic decision-making on how to allocate their labor. Contesting the NPC’s right to determine the allocation of DSA’s resources, as seen in the DSA budget crisis, is ultimately using the union’s ability to leverage withdrawal of their labor as a veto over the member democracy of DSA. We should work collaboratively with staff on working conditions, avoiding both assuming desires and dictating ours. Rather than the Bread & Roses proposal to pass a policy (“Proposal: Policy on Staff Political Activity” on the DSA Forums, July 2024) establishing lines around staff political activity, it would be advisable for the NPC to begin a dialogue with the staff union to first understand what staff see as the boundaries of acceptable political action and continue from there to find a mutually acceptable agreement.
Party congresses must be the site of incisive and clarifying political discussion, where members can settle positions on the party’s tasks, strategy, and tactics. DSA Conventions, the “party congresses” of our organization, have historically been a site of petty procedural squabbling. While the 2023 Convention offered a significant improvement on this front, it was nonetheless dominated by a bureaucratically-managed agenda that prioritized consensus resolutions. Most consensus resolutions functioned more as committee reports that delegates felt compelled to approve, with any political discussion arriving as a secondary factor. It was only through member-initiated amendments to the consensus resolutions and the agenda that delegates could participate in political discussion with stakes.
This effort points to a broader trend within the party: members may combine to organize for the party to unite around tasks, carry out campaigns, endorse theses on political questions, and elect blocs of like-minded delegates to leadership elections. These associations within the larger party may also cooperate or compete to implement various mandates settled by party congresses and steer the direction of local party organizations. When formed on a permanent basis, these combinations are called factions or caucuses. Within the party, factions compete on strategies and their concrete tactical applications.
The relationship between the party and its factions is an important feature of mass socialist politics. The party may unite around tasks, but these tasks will always entail different strategies for fulfilling them, given that at any scale there will be differences across regions and timescales. Beyond that, different orientations will always emerge in the course of shared work owing to the different beliefs and experiences of those who do that work. All of these trends and positions represent real tendencies in the workers’ movement that must be deliberated through party democracy, acting and perceiving themselves as factions. Factions practice their strategies and tactics while participating in the internal debate and polemic between the tendencies that they represent. This democratic process informs the decisions of the movement and the class. Fighting for working class self-government must mean creating a mass membership that has the tools and experience to practice this democratic process. Discussions of trends and tendencies within the party must therefore be public and facilitated by various party and factional organs, building a connection between the practical outcomes of their work and their various tactics and strategies.
This open struggle of tendencies allows for the politics of the workers’ movement to play out as visible blocs within the party. DSA’s caucuses have similarly played varying, if limited, roles in public discourse. Only by virtue of its factions does the party become a democratic instrument of the working masses, while only by virtue of the party do factions not dwindle into sects. This dialectic between faction and party is key for forming political consciousness within the working class, no less revolutionary political consciousness.
When organizational democracy is stifled, splits inevitably arise. However, this has resulted in the codification of splits as a strategy, on one hand through ultimatums issued by minority factions, and on the other by using political purity to justify systematic purges. This carries significant political ramifications. Following the Communist International’s principle of purifying “centrists” and reformists from its sections’ ranks through purges to “Bolshevize” in anticipation of a civil war, and the Russian Communist Party’s ban on factions, the organizational structure of workers’ parties took on a narrow form of unity which precluded the strategic competition that defined the Bolshevik-Menshevik factions in the RSDLP. Tellingly, both sectarian socialists and left-liberals reduce the history of this mass factional struggle to the trope of the “Bolshevik and Menshevik parties,” with the result that factions are commonly misidentified as parties. This orientation problematizes practical cooperation between different strategic tendencies that otherwise share the same tasks and denies a democratic relationship to the workers’ movement. The erratic vacillations between the United Front, Third Period, and Popular Front policies are practical demonstrations of this issue. Factions existing in isolation from one another lose their mass character as various strategic and tactical questions are foreclosed from mass deliberation through a cycle of splits. The only path remaining for the socialist movement under this principle is to degenerate into sects or bureaucratic parties of government (typically in coalition with bourgeois parties).
DSA, while often imperfect, has proven to be the greatest contemporary basis for a mass party of the working class. By contrast, the ecology of orphaned factions on the left of eccentric theoretical journals, single-issue committees, and micro-organizations has emerged less successful. At their best, these enfant terribles can house specialized activists and produce unique and generative ideological formations. At their worst, the strict criteria for membership and “disciplined” internal censorship give way to careerism and the subordination of committed members to the whims and abuse of uncontrolled cliques, resulting in burnout and explosive and discrediting scandals. Acknowledging that the existing left can’t be circumvented, in tandem with mass work DSA must pose itself as an alternative to advanced workers and socialists new and old, to fulfill its historical role as the core of a mass socialist party. Externally, DSA should engage in principled coalition and united front work, being willing to publicly and honestly criticize our partners to advance mass partyism. Internally, through social-republican and democratic-centralist institutions, DSA must demonstrate an organizational culture and practice of politics that insulates our members from intimidation or rebuke as an antidote to the domineering found in sections of the existing left.
Unity through party democracy is necessary for the working class to emerge as an independent political force. Much of the socialist movement’s political failures come back to the inability to understand the distinction between faction and party. This distinction is often seen as harmful to the “party” (the orphaned faction). Sects often cite the Communist Party of the Soviet Union’s temporary ban on so-called factionalism enacted against the organized opposition to NEP reforms to consolidate the Soviet government. Elsewhere, parties of reform rely on more philistine justifications for hemming in their internal democracy or outright banning factions, which typically cover up the maintenance of coalitions with bourgeois parties. In either case, the final result is the foreclosure of their mass character. The progressive bourgeoisification of reformist parties dovetails with the degeneration of revolutionary cadre organizations into sects, leaving a comfortable status quo for the capitalist class.
Where the capitalist mode of production prevails and suffrage exists for the working class, the party pursues political action by contesting the national electoral system with campaigns for representatives that can demonstrate the viability of the party’s program in the legislature. While the vast majority of electoral systems under capitalist rule take forms that complicate or even render the conquest of political power through them impossible without their transformation, abstaining from elections on this basis alone betrays a misunderstanding of how the working class relates to even the most limited suffrage. Political options are a product of organization. The capitalist class has its own forms of organization, from chambers of commerce to a state structured around its interests. Still, it also provides formal rights and real services to citizens. Today, the working class is far less organized than their bourgeois antagonists and lacks an organized political alternative to motivate its self-organization. The working class can only compete with the capitalists’ institutional leverage, monetary power, and ultimately its state to the degree that it is organized independently.
Absent a visible organized force that can justify the risk of alienating bourgeois societal elements that the working class may otherwise rely on, workers will operate on the terms the capitalist political framework has provided to them. Capitalists will exploit these bourgeois political prejudices to secure hegemony over working class institutions, to the point that they fail to secure the interests of the workers organized within them. This leads to a section of the working class one-sidedly rejecting political participation. Another section will begin their political analysis from the value they see in the limited rights and concessions they enjoy, employing a logic of “harm reduction” through voting for left-bourgeois parties instead of organizing in defense of existing gains. Both will demand practical proof of the political alternative on the bourgeois terms that they understand politics through, and it is up to Marxists to demonstrate their alternative. In a developed party factions represent strategic tendencies, as the party is united on the basis of carrying out its program. We see three main tendencies: the right, left, and center.
Following a similar logic to “harm reduction,” the strategy of the right is to organize a party whose activity is exclusively oriented around securing reforms in the interest of the working class, existing as a “left of left-bourgeois” option. This exclusive practical focus on reforms leads the right to advocate for the party to form cross-class coalitions to attain them as quickly as possible, necessitating a willingness to operate as a coalition partner. At its most productive, this strategy entails a working class movement rallied around “militant” reformist political leadership that relies on mass movements to become a senior coalition partner. This carries the benefit of proving the working class’ ability to organize for its interests and wrest demands from the capitalist class through its own state, which often stems from the desires of the working class to control the conditions of their lives. But while the right relies on mass movements to secure a reformist program in practice, their coalitionism makes it such that in terms of their own strategy, they are independent of the workers' movement and will organize their party in a way that reflects the coalitions they desire.
The programmatic concessions inherent to the strategy’s coalitionism lead to a premature seizure of political power, independent of the strength of the workers’ movement. The consequences of this premature seizure ultimately disappoint the class and disorganize the movement. These concessions start with giving up on a transformation of the form of state, theorized as the “impossibility of revolution.” In practice, this manifests as the bureaucratic management of the workers’ movement to discourage and hold back any revolutionary surge until the moment is "just right." Working class self-government ceases to be a political possibility as a result of this practice. This abandonment of self-government as a programmatic goal eliminates the long-term threat of the workers’ movement, allowing for the concession of other demands, either through coalition strong-arming or by force. An infamous outcome of this strategic problem is the mass entry of right-wing socialists into war governments during World War I and failed coalition governments that followed during the interwar period. Another example is the fall of the socialist-led Popular Front government in Chile due to the bourgeois parliamentary majority aligning with CIA-backed military force. This defeat reverberated across the international working class, going so far as to motivate the Italian Communist Party’s policy of peaceful co-governance with the Christian Democrats.
However, the socialist movement in the United States hasn’t reached this point. The bourgeoisification of American legislatures caused by the stringent obstacles to entering them has enfeebled working class politics and, thus, the right in turn. DSA’s right, revolving around Groundwork and Socialist Majority Caucus, consistently advocates and practices DSA’s entry as a junior coalition partner with progressive Democrats that have largely failed to win their reform agenda. “Governance” involving socialists has been reduced from the formation of a government with the workers’ party as a senior partner (such as electing a socialist President) to aspiring for hegemony amongst the progressive NGO sphere in negotiating bills with the centrist wing of the Democratic Party. This currently places us in the position of a junior partner in a progressive coalition that itself is a junior partner to the Democratic mainstream. This manifestation of liquidationism within DSA represents an extreme point of tension between the party’s practical dependence on the workers’ movement and its independence.
A common response to the political failures of the right is to recognize the structural limitations of the capitalist state, seeing interventions in the capitalist state as disconnected from or even antagonistic to revolutionary strategy unless the party can call for its downfall. This is the starting point of the strategy of the left. Following this principle, the left avoids the state, instead pushing the workers’ movement towards the conquest of political power from outside the sphere of political action, independent of the sections that wish to intervene in elections or form governments. To this end, the left will use tactics like direct action not requiring mass involvement that seek to demonstrate their strategy through real damage to capital or the state, or a general strike that conceptually triggers the fall of the state and “hands” political power to the working class. A more advanced position, represented in DSA by Communist Caucus, recognizes the necessary connection between independent working class organization and effective political action. Following from the strategic conclusions of the left, however, this tendency argues that the working class must be “formed as a class” (read: organized) before the formation of a party and determination of its program. This position effectively routes their practice back to a more organized form of the left strategy.
The left is correct in identifying the structural constraints that constitute the capitalist class character of the state, avoiding the right’s orientation towards it. Their orientation, however, similarly leaves the party unprepared to deal with the questions of political authority that the state poses. Following their orientation, the party is additionally deprived of a practical basis for organizing the working class as a mass political force unified through party democracy. Both the right and the left involve bureaucratic management of the revolution, with the right's management from within the state and the left's from without. For the left, this can lead to a downward spiral of sectarianism: a tendency towards an expansive basis for abstention, which is how the left defines opposition to the state.The endpoint of the spiral is simply the cycle of sects, with rigid tactics, elaborate theoretical unity, and bureaucratic leadership to enforce it through splits, abuses, and purges. Large sections of the left end up outside of the party as a result. Conversely, the strategic weakness behind the left also leads to its members flipping over to the right once the left strategy is frustrated, as both sides see interventions in the state as disconnected from revolutionary strategy.
The strategy of the center is based on the recognition that the working class’ power derives from its ability to organize collectively, and the necessity of doing so to achieve partial aims. We recognize that this necessity is shared between struggles on the shop floor, struggles for reforms, the struggles of the working class for self-government in the form of a democratic republic at home, and the struggle for the international interests of the class. Building on this, the center then seeks to steer the party around the following strategic principles: 1) using the party’s presence in legislatures and its election campaigns to build up the surrounding organized movement around a revolutionary program, both through anti-coalitionist reform efforts and agitation; 2) refusing to form a government until the workers’ movement is both organized and aware enough of the necessity of democratic self-government such that a conquest of political power, a revolutionization of the state, and the subsequent self-emancipation of the majority is possible.
The specific form of program we advocate for, the minimum-maximum program, is split into two sections. The minimum program represents the minimum conditions for the party to assume power on the basis described above. It consists of a set of demands that, if fully enacted, allows the working class to self-govern. Some goals in a minimum program may be possible under capitalism, but if all of the demands are achieved, the state would be transformed into a democratic republic. The maximum program describes the final, communist aims of the party as well as the development of capitalism and the conditions that the party and the working class face. Over the past year, MUG has worked on developing a draft minimum-maximum program to serve as a model for what we hope DSA will adopt, and we will fight for its drafting principles at 2025 Convention and beyond.
While it is true that the center tendency grounds the left and right in the party, this is an effect of its strategy. To focus on unity above all else merely serves to obscure political disagreement, causing a split behind the backs of party members. At worst, it privileges the right when it is on the wrong side of the barricades. Unity is not a mechanistic “golden mean” between the left and right achieved by making the right balance of decisions between them, as seen in the practice of members of the Bread & Roses caucus on divisive political questions. Rather, the political practice of the revolutionary center is what grounds and unifies the party up through the point of revolution. Through this practice alone, a party emerges that can both wrest reforms from the capitalist class and conquer political power. This allows all levels of the party to become productive sites of cooperation and competition between the left, center, and right tendencies towards fulfilling the party program. From here on, we will describe the specific implications and mandates of the center strategy as we seek to carry it out within DSA.
Electoral Strategy
Beyond generalities, the development of a Marxist electoral strategy in the United States has been stuck in the rut of an undemocratic electoral system. The Constitution dictates the fundamental structure of the federal government and the separation of its powers into three independent branches: the legislative, executive, and judiciary. The legislative branch is split into two bodies: the House of Representatives, with seats allocated to states proportionate to their populations but divided between 435 increasingly populous single member districts since the mid-20th century, and the Senate, with seats allocated equally between States of mismatched populations and elected to staggered terms. The executive is headed by a President, elected indirectly through an Electoral College, which assigns delegates by State per the number of combined seats that they possess in both the Senate and the House, who then vote as a bloc for the plurality winner of their respective State. The resultant decision-making structure and electoral system have increasingly constricted socialist political action for the past 100 years.
This undemocratic electoral system conditions an equally undemocratic decision-making system within the capitalist state. The undemocratically elected Senate, not the House, has the powers of advice and consent over Presidential treaties, impeachment, cabinet appointments, and Supreme Court judges. These powers, combined with the land-based nature of the Senate, give the legislative process a reactionary skew that reflects the politics of the white petty bourgeoisie, inheritors of the yeoman settler. If a bill can make it through both Houses, it must face further “checks” from the other branches of government. Following the precedent of Marbury v. Madison (1803), the judiciary, headed by the Supreme Court, may practice its so-called right of judicial review to declare “unconstitutional” any law within the United States. The President may further veto a bill, requiring a 2/3rds vote of both Houses to override.
The 10th Amendment further serves to explicitly reserve all other functions not elaborated in the Constitution for the States. These States, determined arbitrarily to "fairly" divide settler power between the more and less pro-slavery forces in the early republic, are given broad oversight over "their own" affairs. As capitalist development proceeded, the divisions between urban and rural grew but the boundaries of states, so essential for the apportionment of the Senate, did not change. The result is the division of major industrial areas into fragmented constituencies within states dominated by big agriculture and large landowners. In practice, this means that erstwhile social and democratic reforms cannot find the necessary working class majority in constituencies and are cut down by the interests of landowners, capitalists, and their political elites. Even in urban centers with a working class majority, winning a majority within municipal government faces many challenges, as seen in Jackson, Mississippi, and various municipal governments in Texas. States are given discretion over municipal government itself, often placing limitations over taxation and large capital budgets, and can easily overrule or carve out jurisdiction over the heads of the municipal government itself.
DSA’s legal status as a 501(c)(4) grants it flexibility in navigating a mazy election law system that gravitates around political party committees, which a 501(c)(4) is required to operate independently of for political action. However, electoral work cannot be the primary purpose of a 501(c)(4), whose legal purpose is “social welfare.” Rather, legal campaign work must be separated into a separate legal entity, a Political Action Committee (PAC). This divorce of the 501(c)(4) from political action continues into the formal nomination of party candidates, which must occur through government-run “primary” elections, while party member registration typically also occurs through the government. States, meanwhile, are free to craft electoral systems at their discretion. They may apportion districts, structure primaries, set ballot access requirements, and structure the ballot itself with few limits, preventing only the most absurd arrangements. This has created an uneven web of undemocratic electoral systems throughout the country that divide and conquer the class’ attempts at political action. In effect, this system formally divorces freedom of association for the working class from organized political action through a party.
The challenges posed by our electoral system have produced multiple orientations to address them. The party surrogate, the electoral strategy of organizing a party in the Marxist sense without necessarily using a corresponding ballot line, is the hegemonic position within DSA. The “clean break” tendency argues for a legal ballot line as the minimum condition for running a candidate on behalf of DSA. While recognizing the importance of identifying ourselves outwardly as independent and distinct from the Democratic and Republican parties, the clean break places primacy in the ballot line, not program or party organization, as the key distinction. Much like the example of the Green Party, this deemphasizes the role of the Marxist program and its role in uniting economic and local political movements into a nationwide party-movement of the class.
The liquidationist position in DSA, described in Socialist Majority Caucus’ The Agitator as the “dirty stay,” takes this primacy but turns it on its head. Rather than seeing this supposed identity with the Democratic Party as a problem to be overcome, the dirty stay tendency argues that we must learn to work as part of a broader left faction of the Democratic Party, corresponding to the progressive NGO sphere. Following the “junior partner, twice removed” position, the tendency advocates for organizing DSA’s existing party surrogate as the prime mover of this faction, which will win influence and reforms from the Democratic Party center through its demonstrable electoral performance as the “consistent progressives.” Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) will be the most likely figurehead of this faction if she follows through on her potential 2028 presidential run, having attained an ascendancy within the Democratic Party by leaving behind many of the principles she built a coalition on to enter office.
Broadly positing itself between these two extremes exists the “dirty break” tendency. Although the name would suggest a productive synthesis, the liquidationists and clean breakers alike have correctly pointed out the lack of movement behind its advocates. Underlying it is a broad set of tactical and electoral-strategic positions that fail to form a coherent practical orientation towards an otherwise shared goal of developing the working class into an independent political actor. Most striking is how its advocates frequently ask, "how do we break from the Democratic Party?” MUG’s position can best be described as a unity between “party surrogate in form” and “clean break in content.” We believe the way to break out of being a junior partner in the progressive faction of the Democratic Party is to recognize that DSA is a party in the Marxist sense by virtue of its democratic structure and subsequent operational independence. Consequently, it has no necessary political obligation to the Democratic Party. Our program is not reducible to the agitation we engage in to awaken the working class base captured by the Democrats.
The “dirty stay” capitulation is not the means to address our undemocratic political system, nor is the shortsighted rebellion of the “clean break.” Rather, we must bring our independent organization and program to whatever races we can run candidates, be it on the Democratic, independent, or third-party ballot line. As part of our program’s demands for a democratic republic, Democratic Socialists must put forward a democratic electoral system in intimate connection with the mass party we are building through DSA and the election campaigns that it conducts. We want an electoral system that is simple to prevent the labyrinthine system of election laws; proportional to give adequate representation to various political minorities; party-based because we understand that a political system is not a neutral bureaucratic administration of the state but one with class character and political disagreement; and allowing both self-government of the municipalities as well as collective decision making to be carried out on a national scale. On one hand, it is pedantic and reductive to see partyism as the mere desire for a third-party legal entity. Yet it is also true that this system disorganizes working class political action. Democratic Socialists should put forward the mass party and a democratic electoral system built around it as key planks of our vision for a democratic republic and fight for a single nationwide election law that organizes elections on this basis.
Election campaigns are a function specific to the workers’ party, but what makes the party’s campaigns unique is their ability to connect with the various movements and institutions of the working class. In the field, a “party surrogate” relies on the mass deployment of its members beyond the cadre that develops the campaign to reach workers' homes with socialist politics. This deployment to at least thousands of doors is only possible when the campaign expresses the politics of its members, which can only be discerned through democracy. A democratic campaign presupposes end to end infrastructure run by DSA members and in concert with the politics of the body (chapters or national) running it. Conversely, the political option that Democratic Socialist election campaigns put forward is the party's program and the democratic character of its operations all the way down to the field. This quality of Democratic Socialist organization in connection with the party program must play a key role in campaign agitation for DSA’s electoral efforts.
For these efforts to remain part of the long-term party project, their continuation into the elected office must also bear the politics of the party membership. This requires disciplined organization of the elected officials for which the party organizes campaigns. However, discipline does not emerge from the threat of a retracted endorsement, recall, or of organizing a campaign against a renegade incumbent. Both represent failures of the party to elect strategically aligned candidates who can work within a larger body of electoral cadre to fight for the party program, which produces abstentionist and recallist tendencies. Rather, discipline emerges from cultivating an open culture of critique, where membership and member bodies are capable of channeling discontent with unprincipled behavior of electeds. This can be done with the help of Socialist in Office (SIO) committees that organize elected officials to carry out the programmatic politics decided by membership, with a democratic and transparent relationship to party members.
To facilitate this democratic relationship, elected officials must integrate themselves into the party structure to democratically participate in political debates as equal members, not leaders beyond our capacity to disagree with or tools without their own wills or politics that can be engaged with and developed over time. Similarly, candidates must enter the endorsement process prepared to work as individual members of collective organizing efforts toward revolutionary parliamentarism on behalf of the party program. This entails a level of political education that the candidate must already have, or must agree to follow through on as a duty of being a socialist in office.
A threat to the democratic nature of DSA’s electoral program is strategy conferences held for DSA electeds outside of member control. Despite the connection suggested by the name, the DSA Fund is a legally separate organization from DSA. The historical overlap between the organizations has withered over time and the self-perpetuating board is under no obligation to follow democratic decisions by DSA’s membership. The DSA Fund has been holding retreats for members in office on electoral strategy and governance, including by inviting electeds who may be members but are not endorsed by their chapters. This blurs distinctions around which elected officials have received the democratic approval of DSA members. Decisions about electoral strategy and who is a DSA elected must belong to DSA members and DSA members alone. The DSA Fund needs to be repurposed from a shell for the DSA right’s sectarianism into a proper fundraising apparatus for a mass party. The DSA Fund's activities, including but not limited to events and expenditures, must be subordinated to the democratic mandate of membership, or it must cease to exist.
Bringing our vision of the party to electoral work necessarily begins and occurs primarily at the level of the chapter. However, DSA’s electoral work has faced repeated crises where chapters like Philadelphia, LA, and NYC have failed to publicly respond as a chapter to the unprincipled behavior of elected officials. Even in cases like Nithya Raman where both a significant portion of membership and the majority of electoral cadre across tendencies feel national leadership should intervene, national has few established tools with which to do so.
Creating the national bonds between electoral organizers needed to to address this, with reforms like abolishing the national/local endorsement division, requires local electoral organizers to see themselves as part of a nationwide political party. This depends on a dramatic increase in the capacity of the National Electoral Commission (NEC). Last year, MUG and our allies, on both the NPC and NEC, successfully opened the NEC to broad membership instead of a more selective cadre model. This reform made an expansion in the NEC’s capacity possible, but we must recognize that considerable work remains to be done to realize this possibility. In practical terms, this means working to integrate the hundreds of NEC members into practical projects such as targeted national support for projects like the Zohran Mamdani race; formalized trainings and mentorship programs replacing informal caucus based relationships; developing common processes for electoral work and campaigns that align to our national electoral policy for locals in order for national/local consistency in practice; building national research capacity around legislative and compliance questions; and support groups for electoral organizers in similar conditions to discuss how to successfully organize and build deeper bonds nationally.
Independent Working Class Organization
Our Constitution was born in part from the need for landowners, merchants, and slaveholders to muster a national response to local rebellions of enslaved people, agrarian yeomen, and indigenous nations. As Mary Frances Berry wrote in Black Resistance/White Law: A History of Constitutional Racism in America, “the perpetuation of the slave system and the protection of white people against slave revolt” was a “constitutional responsibility of the government.” Our constitutional order underlaid the national war against black freedom, from the Seminole War to the bans on abolitionist pamphleting. Later, it was used to ban workers’ militias in Presser v. Illinois (1886), exonerate the Klan in United States v. Cruikshank (1877), ban closed shops in public sector unions in Janus v. AFSCME (2018), and ban labor organizers from entering farmers’ “property” in Cedar Point Nursery v. Hassid (2021). Soon it may be used to permanently enforce open shops. Effectively speaking, our organization as a fighting, disloyal proletariat is unconstitutional.
At the same time, we aren’t the first to claim that America is not a democracy. This was a central claim of the revolutionary pan-Atlantic abolitionist movement, the Socialist Party of America, and the radical wing of the civil rights movement. As a response to an anti-democratic state, these movements built an alternative world of institutions. Such institutions facilitated the shift of the working class from being a mere recipient of conditions to being an active force in shaping them - to being a protagonist. We recognize the power of that participatory collectivity. Educating and agitating against the order that says property equals democracy must contribute to building a working class governance powered by mass democratic protagonism. To organize these independent working class institutions most effectively, the party must settle on systematic orientations towards work in various arenas of working class life—including but not limited to trade unions; tenant unions; national, ethnic, and cultural societies; mutual aid societies and cooperatives; and progressive religious institutions—which guide its organizers towards building the independent organized strength of a working class that recognizes its place in the historical moment and places itself in the work and programmatic vision of the party.
The patient construction of a working class party-movement requires forming practical connections between the party’s political activity and the diverse movements of the class. This presupposes not only strong solidarity work, but the visible presence of Democratic Socialists within these associations, fighting for the interests and militant organization of the rank and file as well as the movement as a whole, all while connecting this work with the party program. Conversely, we cannot wait for the party to be built or the right “transformative legislation” to be passed before working on these independent working class organizations. We do not create hegemony through “policy feedback” that molds the working class like lumps of clay. Our organizing around the ballot box must connect with our participation in projects such as labor and tenant unions. We must tie our political action in with engaging the rank-and-file to build these institutions, establish the party as the guardian of their independent strength, and bring the workers involved in these struggles into the party. This work connects the workplace, home, and community to the high politics of the party, and vice versa. Organizing becomes integrated into our lives and centers workers and tenants as protagonists who can achieve their goals through collective action in both the union and the party.
In DSA, MUG members lead reading groups, campaigns for state legislature, sit-ins, rent strikes, choruses, ballot initiatives, and union reform caucuses. We are building an alternative culture in the form of democratic spaces that create the starting point of politics. But how we do politics in working class institutions matters. We do not believe in pursuing politics in mass institutions exclusively through lowest common denominator issues that are “widely and deeply felt.” In this framework, our victories are not just putting meat and potatoes on the plate “for” the working class, but expanding the circles of awareness and political consciousness that sustain a party. Through participation in rent strikes, tenants not only win lower rent and safer living conditions but, with the collective of their neighbors, rebuke the oppressive relationship between landlord and tenant. They become the embodiment of that alternative experiential vision.
Since the deindustrialization and tax revolts of the 70s, cities have grown more and more reliant on tax break-funded redevelopment and rezonings to raise property values and the tax base. Cities are bound through mandatory balanced budgets and tax caps to fund themselves through regressive user fees, budget cuts, and the mirage of real estate development catalyzing a wealthier tax base. As the tide of the George Floyd Uprising recedes, liberal cities are now turning to a politics of urban revanchism, promoting “solutions” to homelessness like further carceralization, institutionalization, sweeps, and deportations. Simultaneously, there is a concerted effort to create a cross-ideological consensus on pushing new construction of private market rate housing as the “solution” to the housing crisis. The market must be free, the people must be disciplined. In these frameworks, working class organization is absent and tenants are victims to be helped with mild “protections” as capital shapes and controls their neighborhoods. Our vision sees tenants as those who do not have control over their homes, and tenant unions as bodies to fight for community control and sovereignty.
Militant, independent, working-class tenant organizations and unions exist across the country; they are an organic response to the deprivations of landlordism, municipal revanchism, and a political economy fixed on rent-extraction. The principled socialist orientation to these organizations is twofold. First, we must recognize their existence and necessity as life-making forms of working-class self-organization grounded in the hyper-local scenes of apartment buildings and neighborhood blocks, through which tenants assume political agency. As such, we must join them, organize within them, and support them. Second, we must understand their contemporary existence within considerations of socialist futures; tenant unions are scenes of localized working-class self-governance that prefigure what Marx called “reabsorption of state power” constitutive of class emancipation. Our political program must not only call for the alleviation of tenant immiseration (e.g. public housing, etc.) but be oriented toward supporting independent tenant unions and, more broadly, what Poulantzas referred to as “the mushrooming of self-management bodies.”
We believe protagonistic tenant organization is the answer, but an answer that raises more and more questions. How do these organizations relate to our embryonic party? What do our organizations stand for, if not the marching orders of progressive think tanks? Politics can and do come out of tenant unions, and our organization needs a space to legitimize these politics, and develop them. We cannot figure out these questions through small local organizer cliques, we need partyist structures capable of holding and sustaining debates on organizing strategy on a national level. Now more than ever we need a revitalized Housing Justice Commission capable of sustaining chapter tenant union initiatives for the long term. As socialist tenant organizers, we need to be able to learn how to name the system, how to connect day to day fights to a broader struggle for community sovereignty, and how to connect that to our mission to fight for a new political order.
Labor Strategy
The history of the labor movement in the United States cannot and should not be treated separately from this country’s history as a European settler colony and as a slaveholding power, nor from its active status as the beating heart of a vast global empire. The weakness of the American labor movement–characterized today by a loose mass of atomized workers not only disorganized, but misorganized by racism, national chauvinism, and petty bourgeois individualism–can be traced through the material foundation that has been laid down by these histories. If our goal is to unite the labor movement with the socialist movement, our labor strategy must be armed with a program that can reconstitute the American labor movement, for the first time in its history, on the basis of class independence, Black and indigenous self-determination, and internationalism.
Since the passage of the National Labor Relations Act (NLRA) in 1935, labor has been mediated by the state. This has secured its stability, but on the condition of tying unions to federal regulation. The Act did not cover all sectors equally, however; domestic and agricultural workers and "independent contractors" are excluded. The Railway Labor Act (1926) subjects workers employed by rail and airlines to more direct oversight, which places bargaining under a government-appointed mediator and further restricts the ability to legally strike. Also restricted are public workers, including teachers, who face strike restrictions in many states. This legal framework, unevenly distributed across the working class, gives an incentive for unions to join grand coalitions of "pro-labor" politicians. For union leadership, this means hobnobbing with various government officials for meagre shows of support or legislative answers to organizing questions.
Of course, this approach to politics arose at a different time, with drastically different conditions. The upsurge in labor struggles leading up to 1936, helped along by politicians with an unknown mixture of sympathy and fear, led to the creation of modern labor law, with unions generally supportive of this shift to legality. This was a significant shift from the old AFL policy of purely organizing trades and opposing any government intervention or concessions. More broadly, it represented a hope that state mediation could lead up to a form of industrial democracy through the outside pressure of labor, even without the presence of a politically independent workers’ party given the CPUSA’s “popular front” policy. This illusion still colors the labor movement's relationship to the state today, in spite of the Taft-Hartley Act (1947), McCarthyite trials, and economic crises such as the Volcker Shock.
Since the late 1970s, deindustrialization has involved transformative changes in the labor process, the export of large-scale manufacturing, and a move towards the service sector have altered the makeup of the class. Both craft and industrial unions suffered as a result of these economic pressures and subsequent policy decisions, with membership numbers sharply declining. Their solution to this crisis of organization has been amalgamation "from above" and a turn away from sectoral organizing into many “general” organizing unions. The 1990s and early 2000s represented the pinnacle of this trend. Andy Stern's “Purple Monster” devoured smaller unions and stitched together ultra-bureaucratic national unions and affiliations such as 32BJ, and the now-defunct Service Workers Union. Stern's SEIU also created the Change to Win federation in a process driven by interpersonal spats and the corporate reorganization of labor into a professionalized staffer organizing model. The culmination of the "mega-merger" era was the short-lived marriage of UNITE (textile manufacturing) and HERE (hospitality sector) in order to generalize the union, preventing UNITE’s death from the hemorrhaging of the textile industry while giving HERE a much needed cash-infusion through dues and control over UNITE's Amalgamated Bank.
These union mergers created top-down associations of bloated locals, which spread over a wide geographic area. Rather than serving as associations of the rank-and-file, they are run by a professional layer of labor-liberal staff. Instead of relying on the power of the union’s organized numbers, staffers operate on behalf of the union through corporate campaigns whose successes rely on offering favors to politicians. The “organizing-by-agreement” style of the new mega-unions encouraged them to pressure incoming politicians in the Obama era to support the Employee Free Choice Act, which would have enshrined the card check agreement into law and bypassed the typical NLRB election model used before. Despite extensive lobbying, EFCA and its successor The PRO act, failed to pass under multiple Democratic party administrations. The Change to Win federation, promising mass organizing “from above” through competent administration and big spending, failed to live up to its promises and SEIU, tail tucked between their legs, has returned to the AFL-CIO to ride out the Trump administration.
Generally, the building trades have shifted to nearly all-encompassing municipal works to high-cost projects in commercial real estate. Here business union is in its most reactionary form: business agents offer up highly-skilled labor to project management, often encouraging building spurious projects like hotels, stadiums, and other commercial real estate for the sake of continued employment. For the service unions, these backroom deals usually earn card check agreements and gentlemen's agreements exchanging meagre contracts for labor peace. For the building trades business agents, there is little interest in new organizing through deals, or the traditional organization of casual labor. Some trades are being left behind with technological changes, such as boilermakers; others – bricklayers, roofers, and painters – refuse to organize work that isn't directly controlled by the business agent's contract.
Unlike UNITE or UAW during the shift in light and heavy industry, there are no attempts to move away from irrelevance or parochialism and merge into cross-industrial unions or expand into general organizing unions. The issue of membership in trades is exacerbated by insular apprenticeships, though these have generally opened up in the last decade after many years of small and selective recruits. The untapped sections of the building trades perform the vast majority of the work: private contracting, utilities, small-scale construction, and most residential housing is all performed largely outside organized labor. This work is also predominantly organized by sections of the class less frequently represented by the building trades, especially immigrant labor and Black labor. These masses of workers, fresh and potentially rejuvenating to the labor movement in the building trades, are neglected and ignored by the old school bureaucrats, relegating them to the hardest and most exploitative casual labor in their sector.
The predominant tendency of existing unions follows from the strategy of the old school bureaucrats which prioritizes legislative cretinism over the organization of the rank-and-file. Old school bureaucrats rely on amalgamation, political favors, and existing funds, ignoring the growing mass of unorganized workers who now form 90% of the American workforce. Yet this merely results in failures and setbacks for organized labor. Organizing the unorganized into unions must be made a top priority and a core responsibility of all existing unions, yet it lacks political valence for their top brass. This is grounded in a fundamental political difference between socialists and labor liberalist union administrators. Only the party coordination between our elected officials’ attack on undemocratic labor law that divides the working class, and our labor organizers’ attack on workplace dictatorship can offer a path forward that involves the increase in union density. Even if we offer this path as DSA, labor organizers must identify with the organization and struggle for union support of this party project— this is the only way we can bring this task forward as a genuine organizational priority for unions. The other option is for organized labor to continue its downward spiral into irrelevance, making it easier for the capitalist class to isolate existing union members and pit them against unorganized workers. The UAW organizing drives in the South are a positive move in that direction as are other national campaigns such as that of Starbucks and Amazon workers. Dwindling numbers notwithstanding, unions possess tremendous resources, over $13 billion in liquid assets collectively, to invest in new organizing drives but either sit on those resources as if this were not an existential question or misuse them by prioritizing “pro-labor” election campaigns over organizing workers. Open socialists should agitate for and take the lead in new organizing drives in order to demonstrate solidarity with the masses of workers, connecting their struggle against dictatorships at the workplace with DSA’s struggle against the dictatorship of the capitalist class.
There has been a new wave of labor action in the past decade, with major strikes like the red state teachers strike and the UAW stand up strike. Despite this rise in militancy, however, the raw numbers of the labor movement are still at its nadir: union elections by the NLRB may be rising, but the overall bargaining unit size is small. Particular sections of the labor movement do seem to be leading the way, especially Starbucks Workers United and the various Amazon organizing campaigns that have seen an upswing the last four years. The “organizing-by-agreement” spirit of legislating labor wins briefly returned under the Biden administration as support of the PRO Act, but this was quickly extinguished. Now, the biggest fight on the horizon appears to be related to Shawn Fain’s talk of a “general strike” in 2028, coordinated by a mass contract alignment across industries. There is no evidence that it is actually being organized, despite the grand pronouncements.
Only an independent socialist party can provide the basis for an independent labor movement. Through the dedicated work of its openly affiliated organizers within unions and the workplace, the party establishes immediate practical links with organized workers. Through the support it can offer through legislation, strike support, and agitation that develops pro-union consciousness in tandem with the program, the party provides a path between these practical links and its political interventions, including that for the conquest of political power. Establishing these practical links first requires a party orientation towards workplace organization, which in turn means systematic party organization within the workplace. This does not mean running to plant a red banner with resolutions or socialist caucuses, but rather the organization of party members within the same industries and workplaces to develop tactics, labor strategy, and analyses which inform their interventions. All of this leads into how the party wins the support of unions: through the rank-and-file. “Affiliation,” a subject of debate within Bread & Roses, simply means a rubber stamp from union leadership, and leads to a violation of the “one member, one vote” policy so central to party democracy. Instead, our approach must be grounded in political discussions with workers which stem from the practical links we form through our organizing. The party we are building should be a socialist party, united by a program for the conquest of political power by the whole international proletariat, not a labor party of procedurally affiliated unions dominated by parochial and economistic or social-chauvinist interests.
Two labor strategies predominate in the socialist movement: the sectarian approach of the "left" and the neutralist approach of the right. The sectarian orientation is the "red union" group, where socialists engage in agitation as part of a permanent campaign of pure opposition within their unions. This comes to a head during contract campaigns, where the "red caucus" seeks to provoke and maintain a strike indefinitely to catalyze the workers’ movement. However, these are typically small groups of radicals and a few frustrated rank-and-filers looking to move the class from without, not a democratic organization seeking to win a majority. This is directly related to the sectarian conception of the party: the "general staff of revolution" who can manage the mass of workers through their small, professionalized groups during a revolutionary upsurge. We see this in Teamsters Mobilize, who took off alongside the 2023 UPS contract fight, opposing O'Brien and the TDU.
The position of the right, neutralism, is DSA’s current practice in the labor movement. In practical work it manifests as the tendency to avoid high political divisions within unions and, by extension, avoids a systematic focus on winning the rank-and-file to the party. In strategic discussions it is exemplified by figures such as Jeremy Gong, who see the labor movement as an independent and separate field from the party that effectively precedes it in terms of strategy, despite his numerous individual caveats. Without the option of a Democratic Socialist opposition, the workers organized through the rank and file strategy are left with the dead ends of continued suffocation under the Democratic Party, the false promises of the Republican Party, or an apolitical and Sisyphean commitment to organize to recreate a New Deal.
The alternative isn’t to attempt to seize control of the labor movement as a “militant” minority, or break with the democratic decisions of the rank-and-file. Instead, we patiently use every struggle as a chance to contrast the program and practice of Democratic Socialism against all others in the labor movement, putting ourselves forward as the latter’s most consistent fighter.To put forward the practice of Democratic Socialism in the labor movement, we need a robust National Labor Commission (NLC). The current state of the NLC is dysfunctional even for the basic functions of practical coordination and support for chapter labor organizing. While consisting of hundreds of dedicated labor organizers, their focus exists largely outside of the Commission. Neutralist policy draws practical attention almost entirely out of systematically building organic connections between the party and the workplace, which leads to the neglect of bodies such as the NLC. To thrive as a body for supporting and coordinating our labor struggles, the NLC needs to set its primary focus around forming coordinating sections for the industries that DSA members are organizing within.
NLC’s industrial sections must be the starting point for our political interventions in labor. Through these groups, DSA members can study the structure and practices of their industry, map major workplaces, and assess the state of unionism to develop effective interventions. We can provide education in industrial and union history, both on the shop floor and through Labor Notes-style gatherings, and develop literature that takes aim at the business practices and maneuverings of business leaders. Workers can develop policy and political interventions using research and on-the-job knowledge. More importantly, this prepares the class to develop the skills and expertise necessary to administer society collectively. With the support of the NLC, chapters can support the development of industrial sections by building workplace branches, encouraging chapter members to take jobs in strategic sectors and coordinate political interventions in the workplace.
Tactics will naturally vary between sectors and workplaces. Workplace bulletins and political education can help develop a rank-and-file culture where workers think beyond the drudgery of work, and toward the collective rule and administration of the economy. Depending on the circumstances, we may build broad caucuses on the basis of union democracy and militancy, and run leadership slates through the caucus to challenge labor misleadership, or we may intervene in existing caucuses by advocating for independent political action. It is not enough to simply put a red coat of paint on hollowed out unions. We aim to win endorsements of political action organized by the party through meetings of the rank-and-file, not through the rubber stamp of leadership. Through our interventions, we will build a commitment to industrial unionism and organizing the unorganized.
We are small numbers of socialists intervening in a battered and often ineffective labor movement under conditions where large sections of the working class remain unorganized. In many cases, our immediate tasks are basic: fighting for a union to exist at all, or fighting for the right to access our contracts or holding regular union meetings. As we educate, organize, and struggle against the bosses, our numbers will grow. Broad caucuses organized on the basis of basic union democracy will be eclipsed by expanding socialist industrial sections in truly democratic unions, as workers join the party itself and take on Democratic Socialist demands. This mass vanguard will transform their unions into organs of class struggle, united by their party and its program for a new republic. This merger of ideas and struggle begins with our intervention as socialists, which is, by necessity, explicitly and openly political.
The Trump Administration
In the next four years, the Left will have to deal with serious changes in domestic policy. The border regime, a bipartisan vehicle for exploiting the victims of US imperialism, will continue both ratcheting up its personal brutality and pushing the nation rightwards. Trump has expressed a desire for an immediate state of emergency to drastically increase deportations. With the Biden administration-supported expansion of ICE facilities to New Jersey, Rick Scott calling on Congress to approve spending for "thousands" to run the deportation machine, and "border czar" Tom Homan promising a return of family detention, we are on the doorstep of a dramatic crisis enabled by both Republicans and Democrats. These policies will, of course, require a massive increase in funding as well. Regardless of the actions of the federal administration, the Texas National Guard has been unleashing greater violence on migrants, firing live rounds at people at the border. Greg Abbott has already been utilizing the National Guard against migrants, even coming into conflict with the federal government in Eagle Pass last year. It is likely that stricter border policy will only embolden this behavior. We must fight against this turn towards violent ethnonationalism, without making compromises for any short-term gains.
While faced with an increasingly violent border regime, the Trump administration is setting up for harsh austerity in other federal agencies. The vision for implementing austerity is personified in Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy’s supposed Department of Government Efficiency and a private equity model of plunder and extraction as “efficiency.” Inspired by Javier Milei's Decree 70/2023, the far right's irony-laden cryptocurrency fetish, and corporate downsizing schemes, they seek to emulate Milei's decretazo in Argentina, where emergency measures were passed immediately followed by the deregulation and privatization of public companies. Here we'll likely see the same effects: federal agencies already targeted by broad decrees of the Supreme Court will also face severe cuts and political staffing reductions. The entire Department of Education may also be on the chopping block, with Trump promising to get rid of the agency in its entirety. While likely needing staff from state-level agencies in the meantime, any policies passed in the will mostly be a "war on woke," intended to punish the Left, LGBTQ+, and Black studies. A major challenge for the Left in these conditions is maintaining a critical stance towards the professional federal bureaucracy, which often promotes anti-democratic aspects of the US regime while opposing cuts to government functions that the working class has depended on for many years.
Healthcare will be another target of austerity, this time under Kennedy family crank Robert F. Kennedy Jr. and television quack Mehmet Oz. Kennedy's program is centered on "natural" solutions, using popular discontent with the healthcare industry to promote the false consciousness of opposition to scientific healthcare. Instead, the House Oversight Committee recently released a report on COVID-19 decrying the World Health Organization, supposedly under the influence of the Chinese Communist Party, and claiming that preventative measures such as social distancing, mask mandates, and lockdowns did not prevent infection. Further, the report alleges widespread fraud by claimants of emergency social welfare measures such as unemployment benefits and small business grants.
The National Labor Relations Board under Biden has been favorable for many unions – they restored the "quickie election" rule and more aggressively sought 10(j) injunctive relief. There have been challenges to the Board's rulings, both directly as Starbucks v. McKinney further limits the NLRB's ability to seek injunctions and broader challenges against federal agencies in SEC v. Jarkesy, Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and others. These rulings will likely increase as the Trump administration begins, with his appointees gradually reversing the course of the last four years. In anticipation of this, the Board has made some extraordinary 11th hour decisions, including ruling captive audience meetings as unfair labor practices and even de facto "overruling" the Second Circuit decision about multiple union buttons. While they may be temporary stopgaps, this will likely help some nascent organizing in the short term. But lamenting the loss of the worker protections is not enough; labor law and Board rulings are useful in advancing the organization and militancy of the working class, but they are fundamentally constrained by the judiciary. No matter who holds the presidency, the Board cannot compel companies to follow its rulings alone, since they must petition for enforcement from federal courts, and they cannot seek extensive damages for the worst offenders. As before, the NLRB is just a tool (though an important one) for organizing the class.
Another burning issue faced by the Left is the rapid advance of repressive measures against transgender people across the country. On the one hand, sweeping measures are being pushed in reactionary strongholds in select state legislatures, particularly in Texas, Florida, Ohio, Missouri, and South Carolina. These measures are generally targeting trans youth under the auspices of "protecting children," although these bastions of reaction are cutting into the rights of trans adults as well, imposing restrictions on nearly every aspect of their lives—ending legal recognition, sports and book bans, healthcare restrictions, bathroom bills, and forced outing—even imposing civil penalties in some cases.
Meanwhile, a concerted anti-trans push has made its way to the national stage. Nancy Mace (SC-01) is taking on a key role in a highly public showdown against Sarah McBride (DE-AL) "fight [her] every step of the way." To explicitly target McBride, Mace introduced a bathroom ban (H.R. 10186) in "any building, land, or other real property owned, leased, or occupied by any department, agency, or instrumentality of the United States (including the Department of Defense and the United States Postal Service), or any other instrumentality wholly owned by the United States, or by any department or agency of the District of Columbia or any territory or possession of the United States." If passed as written, this would likely affect all public institutions in DC and various pockets in other states. Mace also wrote the "Childhood Genital Mutilation Prevention Act" (H.R. 9874) banning federal Medicare funding for gender-affirming care for minors and imposing criminal penalties (up to 10 years imprisonment) on those who travel between states/nations to have any gender-affirming care for minors. From the Senate, SB 5424 seeks to explicitly ban gender-affirming care for minors and allows the Dept of Health (RFK and Oz) to seek civil penalties on providers up to $10k. Alongside these full-on attacks, we also see explicit bans on federal funding through appropriations bills.
On the other side, we find the Supreme Court tasked with setting the stage for trans people's legal rights in United States v. Skremetti. Arguments against protections for trans people relied on two primary questions: whether or not there was an adequate historical record of de jure discrimination and whether or not the status of being transgender was immutable, which is a dual attack on trans people by refusing to acknowledge their historical and current existence (even moreso aided by challenges to legal recognition as in S.B. 5356.) Petitioner and amici made arguments that healthcare and other essential rights could be provided or taken away by "the democratic process," an aberration of the conception of democracy. For us, the democratic process preserves the rights of all people in society, and the actions of the majority cannot remove the fundamental rights of national and sexual minorities. Some hope that Tennessee's injunction is upheld, using the last chance of textualists Gorsuch and Coney Barrett but our hopes should not be a last stand of "defenders of the constitution" who worship the text itself. The movements that wrested the essential rights of minority groups sought a higher ideal beyond their simple self-survival— the universalist fight for democracy and justice was baked into movements such as the struggle of enslaved Africans for freedom and the subsequent battle for Civil Rights. Both transgender workers and immigrant workers are at the forefront of labor and democratic struggles in the US, and their battle for survival is a continuation of the larger struggle.

Preparing for 2028
The majority view in DSA is that our abstention from the presidential election was a significant missed opportunity—and a publicity “campaign” for a "broad consensus" action program does not count as participation, let alone a political solution. The minority viewpoint follows from the left strategy, broadly rejecting participation in the election. Two positions exist amongst the majority: field a DSA candidate or support a progressive like AOC in a possible 2028 campaign.
Before engaging in a presidential run of our own, we should consider results from the past. The enthusiasm of the Bernie campaigns, particularly in 2016, benefited DSA’s growth and provided a base of experience for many active DSA members. The power of Bernie’s campaigns was their ability to inspire the working class to organize collectively, tapping into the basis of its independent political power. Yet the legacy of these campaigns living on in active socialist organizing is almost entirely incidental. Bernie has done nothing to promote an independent party. A Democratic Socialist presidential run must be fully accountable to DSA and focused on growing its ranks. It is our position that supporting a presidential effort involving a progressive such as AOC will represent a significant step back for DSA’s development as a party and that, if we are to participate in the 2028 presidential election, we must field our own candidate.
AOC’s speech at the 2024 Democratic National Convention included a resounding endorsement of Kamala Harris and the dubious claim that Harris was “working tirelessly for a ceasefire [in Gaza].” She has also started paying dues to the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee and rumors are circulating across the bourgeois press that she may not endorse primary runs against incumbents. She has sent multiple emails to her fundraising list proclaiming that she is “not running from ‘the left,’” but “from the bottom,” corresponding to the progressive political approach of delivering reforms for workers through horse-trades and committee assignments, not organizing the working class as a class which would require building the socialist movement identified with “the left.” An AOC or any other progressive presidential campaign and its organization will only serve to reflect this strategy, which is fundamentally at odds with the partyist direction of DSA. Regardless of what popularity AOC or other progressives may possess, they are not candidates that will build the organization or expectations of the working class and develop it into a political actor.
On the back of our electoral program and the direction MUG will fight to take in the next four years, we believe DSA must organize to put forward a presidential candidate that can accomplish the same energizing effect as Bernie. However, this campaign must revolve around a program that connects a mass organizing impulse to the tasks of the American working class: winning a democratic republic, expropriating the commanding heights of the economy, and ending U.S. imperialism. DSA should never seek to win the presidency or miseducate the working class by seeing the administration of the capitalist state as a desirable goal. DSA should not be a loyal opposition member of a president’s ruling coalition that acts as “consistent progressives,” as liquidationists may have thought when championing Biden’s “progressive” promises such as the PRO Act or Build Back Better. A DSA intervention in any non-DSA-led presidential run must strictly be “without illusions,” meaning against the hallucinations of being the influential progressive wing. The success of a DSA presidential run will be determined by its ability to activate layers of the working class around a revolutionary democratic socialist program and bring in these layers of the workers’ movement into DSA’s party democracy.
We must disseminate our tasks and intra-party struggles during the campaign for the entire workers’ movement to see. Our candidate must not only be a committed organizer in DSA but also be able to penetrate the bourgeois media sphere with provocative arguments around anti-presidentialism, anti-militarism, open borders, and breaking the popular reliance on petty-bourgeois “antitrust” rhetoric. This entails a long path to 2028 that involves discerning a hierarchy of qualities based on what DSA electoral can organize around in developing a presidential cadre candidate.
Furthermore, any presidential run would be subject to a wide range of finance and coordination rules. We would need an abundance of PACs and specialized knowledge to maintain and disperse funds. This is already a challenge for DSA: premier party surrogate NYC DSA's "For the Many" PAC has been sued by the State of New York for activating a selectively enforced campaign finance tripwire. Then, the question of how we put DSA on the ballot remains. Running as an independent or third party, primary campaigning is replaced by signature collection and figuring out the myriad ways each state may remove our candidate from the ballot. And even if these arbitrary thresholds are met, particularly litigious states may still challenge our candidates' status, forcing us to face lengthy, expensive court battles or leaving rulings unchallenged to agitate around. If we take on the Democratic primary, then we must examine the challenges we will likely face when running in it. Qualifying for a primary debate is determined by the Democratic National Committee, which sets polling and funding thresholds.
Organizing around any of these paths and their respective challenges will require money and staff time (which in turn boils down to money). DSA needs to establish systematic fundraising to make a partyist intervention in the presidential election. To provide the organizing muscle for a presidential campaign, the NEC must develop chapter training programs that provide materials, canvass preparations, and staff resources. The NEC will need to bring chapters—including ones skeptical of electoral work and others focused only on parochial local electoral interests—into recurring discussions about openings for participation and campaign updates.

The Path to the 2025 Convention
Since the 2023 Convention, DSA has struggled to find a positive, nationwide political orientation. The beginning of the term focused on the movement for a ceasefire in Gaza, where chapters played key roles in local protest movements, but the national organization struggled to intervene beyond phonebanking to pressure elected officials. In the new year, the budget crisis swallowed almost all of the National Political Committee’s energy, leaving the organization virtually leaderless.
Once the budget crisis began to subside, Palestine returned to the forefront, with the Uncommitted movement challenging the sanctity of the Democratic Presidential primary, and the student encampments temporarily reviving a flagging protest movement. DSA members played a key role in both movements, but in the former, our intervention was soon split. Sections of Uncommitted moved toward a soft endorsement of Harris to prevent Trump from taking office, while the more radical wing launched a second wave of protest under the slogans “no votes for genocide” and “ceasefire first, votes next,” attempting to leverage votes in the general election to demand an arms embargo and ceasefire. DSA mirrored this divide, with MUG seeking endorsement for No Votes for Genocide on the NPC, and Socialist Majority and Groundwork launching the “Socialism Beats Fascism” campaign in support of Harris. With neither side able to win a majority on the NPC, DSA was left without a stance on the election.
In the aftermath of the election, DSA has seen growth in its membership for the first time in years, and renewed energy for the next phase of struggle as the broader liberal activist milieu flounders. It is now our responsibility to lead the struggle against the Trump administration, training members to take leadership, finding paths to keep the Palestinian solidarity movement alive over a year into the genocide, and fighting for sanctuary legislation to defend trans and reproductive healthcare, freedom of movement across borders, universal residence suffrage, self-government of the municipalities, freedom of speech, and the right to strike. However, we should avoid a reactive stance that exhausts the movement through constant protest without building the institutions of a durable party. Our next foreseeable openings at the national level are the 2028 Presidential election and the May Day strike wave proclaimed by the UAW. All of our work should be conducted toward the end of seizing those openings and using them to bring class struggle and socialist politics back onto the national stage, woven together by a clear political program.
The question of a unifying program for DSA has been murky in the past. The 2021 convention voted to adopt a platform, but the bylaws amendment to add acceptance of the platform as a criterion for DSA membership failed. A resolution from the 2023 convention mandated the production of an action program in opposition to the Democrats and Republicans for the 2024 election. This evolved into Workers Deserve More (WDM), DSA’s program established by the NPC to last us through at least 2025. While more limited in scope than what a permanent party program would entail, WDM was a positive step on several fronts. It declared that DSA’s mission is to unite workers into a powerful political movement to win the battle for democracy and change the world. Importantly, it was received well by many DSA members who used the pamphlet and other materials for organizing in their chapters.
Following the success of WDM, there have been discussions around pushing for an adapted version to be adopted as DSA’s permanent program. However, as it stands, WDM’s political content is lacking. The demand for a democratic constitution is relegated to the preamble rather than as a demand. The democratic demands more broadly fall short of revolutionizing the state. There is no mention of guaranteed self-determination of colonial dependencies such as Hawai’i, Puerto Rico, or the numerous Indigenous nations trapped within American borders. The democratic demands that exist are located in the last section of the program. As a party looking to develop class independence, we must place central emphasis on democracy. Additionally, the question of organizational adherence to a unifying vision remains unresolved. Members still see a DSA program as something voluntary rather than a document that outlines the political basis for party unity.
Our draft program is organized into two sections: minimum and maximum. The maximum section describes capitalist development with reference to American history, the democratic nature of working class organization and politics, our vision for a future communist society, and the challenges we face on the road to conquering political power at home. The minimum program describes the demands necessary to achieve the political rule of the working class and internationalist unity: a democratic republic, a seizure of the commanding heights of the economy, covering fundamental needs for any individual and group, an end to U.S. imperialism, and measures to address the ecological crisis.
Unlike WDM, our draft program places the political section at the forefront. The social revolution requires a working class that is empowered through its organization, combining economic and local political struggles. This unity is only built by targeting the political divisions that the state forces upon the working class, developing the awareness that any one of the problems the working class faces can only be overcome through a form of government built on working class protagonism. To this end, we cover problems that WDM either doesn’t, or only addresses in half-measures. Examples include a consistently democratic treatment of national self-determination as well as democratic treaties with Indigenous nations; abolition of the police and the standing army for a democratic people’s militia; and the elimination of federalism and judicial review. We list demands to address the roots of U.S. imperialism and a domestic economy that has increasingly shackled the working class in the United States.
The most important intervention to make in the program debates is ensuring that the acceptance of any DSA program is a criterion for membership. Following from our draft, we will fight for a DSA program to at minimum give political democracy the centrality needed for DSA to grow into an alternative for the working class. The appetite for this orientation within DSA is growing. Cleveland and San Diego DSA chapters have passed resolutions authored by MUG members decrying the Constitution's denial of democracy, calling for a new and radically democratic constitution drafted through a constituent assembly elected by direct, universal, and equal suffrage. These resolutions complement YDSA’s calls for all DSA members in and out of office to advance the struggle for a democratic republic. Meanwhile, virtually every tendency in DSA has referenced WDM in their vastly different orientations towards the presidential election, marking a significant shift in DSA towards understanding programmatic politics as a practical necessity.
While there remains much to be done within DSA, it also cannot be overstated how far the organization has come. We have a semi-mass party with freedom of criticism and the ability to form factions, a limited level of discipline over municipal and state socialists in office, and roots in the labor, tenant and social movements. Now, our task is to unify the working class around a revolutionary program, build the capacity to run principled socialists for federal office, and defeat the tide of global reaction.

Marxist Unity

MUG Tasks & Perspectives 2025

Our task is to merge socialism and the workers’ movement.

PREAMBLE

International

BUILDING THE PARTY

Electoral Strategy

Independent Working Class Organization

Labor Strategy

The Trump Administration

Preparing for 2028

The Path to the 2025 Convention

A Draft Program for DSA