A blog by Socialist Majority
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DSA for the Masses: Organizing the Anti-Fascist Majority
Since 2020, the Left has become increasingly fractured. In particular, DSA has spent much of the recent years consumed by internal strife and infighting, which have distracted from unifying mass campaigns. The threat of a strong fascist government—one that is is infringing on civil liberties, illegally detaining and deporting people, and cutting necessary aid to millions of starving people around the world—and the inability of the Democratic Party leadership to effectively counter it increases the necessity of building a united Left to offer an alternative for the multiracial working class.
SMC for Zohran! Profiles and Stories
Zohran won! As we bask in the glow of victory and get ready to campaign hard in the summer and fall, here are why a few of our members got involved in the campaign and how they helped.
Winning as a Socialist on the Democratic Line
NYC-DSA has learned important lessons about building political power for working-class people from our experimentation with third-party candidates, socialist ballot lines, and primary challenges. These lessons inform all the organizing we do today.
Party in the DSA
Reform & Revolution has proposed that DSA jump to forming an independent ballot line, and has laid out steps to do so. In addition to the article penned by their NPC candidate, Sarah Milner, they have introduced a parallel resolution to implement their program at convention. I think the proposal is unworkable, and have listed my reasons at the end of the piece. But arguments about practicality are too often where DSA debates start and end, avoiding discussion about difficult and generative political questions.
Watch What I Do, Not What I Say: A Primer on Caucuses in DSA Leadership, 2023–25
Guides to DSA caucuses tend to tell us, roughly, what each group claims it’s all about. That’s useful, but it’s much more enlightening to look at the track record of the caucuses to understand who’s who in DSA’s national leadership.
Conventions Matter
To paraphrase an old Russian revolutionary: you may not be interested in the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA’s) national convention, but it is interested in you. This upcoming National Convention, like the four before it, will be a test between those in DSA who want to do mass and coalition politics and those who prefer a sectarian approach that takes DSA in a more inward direction.
It’s Still DSA!
Now is the time to join DSA; bolster the forces within the organization who are trying to push us toward mass politics by joining Socialist Majority; and stake out your political home and the political weapon that we need now to fight back against fascism on the march. It's still the best answer we have. It’s still DSA.
Red Star: or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Vanguard
Six months after their official adoption of the Marxist-Leninist label, the Red Star Caucus of DSA released their updated Points of Unity. Examining them reveals a host of contradictions, falsehoods, and vagueness that serve to mask an incomplete theory of politics.
What SPA Leader Norman Thomas Can Teach Today’s DSA
Socialist Party National Secretary Harry Fleischman’s 1964 biography of party leader Norman Thomas offers plenty of insights into the party’s failed efforts to create a mass workers’ party. DSA members today can learn from their predecessor’s party-building experiences.
Trump Will Lose His Working-Class Support
The coalition of right-wing billionaires and working-class voters who elected Trump is unstable. The Left can take advantage of the openings this instability will create.
Political Parties Are Illegal in the United States
A longstanding concern on the US electoral left is the issue of “candidate accountability”—if we elect a left-wing candidate, how can we be sure that he or she will stay true to our politics while in office? It’s a big problem.
Unfortunately, here in the United States, creating a formal political party which exerts this kind of control over candidates is illegal.
No One Is “Politically Independent”
This individualist buzzphrase has a stranglehold on left-wing politics. It makes no sense and distracts us from our real goals: ownership and power.
DSA Must Seize the Moment
The tasks for socialists in the US in this moment are to mobilize popular support and organization against DOGE and the Trump administration, build whatever coalitions are necessary to stop their agenda in its tracks and win working-class people and popular movements over to the socialist cause. Unfortunately, at the national level, DSA is late to the game and failing to meet the moment.
The Final Days and the Struggle Continues
Socialists can be the catalysts in both revolutionary shifts and self-destructive behavior. We know this history—it’s up to us to select the correct path forward.
Upton Sinclair’s EPIC Campaign is a Roadmap for DSA
Upton Sinclair ran for the California governorship in 1934 under the banner of “End Poverty in California.” His campaign — and the response to it — offers many lessons for modern socialist campaigns.
Why Did the Left Misunderstand the Biden Economy?
Now, we enter a second Trump administration riding a wave of global anti-incumbent backlash that stemmed, to a significant extent, from the inflation the left routinely ignored. The challenges before us must be approached by understanding what political actors are doing and not what our own ideology assumes.
To Rally After Trump’s Second Victory, DSA Must Look Past 2016
It is natural to compare the 2024 election to Trump’s first victory — but DSA can learn more from the aftermath of the 2004 presidential race.
Two and a Half Cheers for the Dirty Stay
The dirty stay can be productive or it can be pathological, but it's real and not something we can simply opt out of. We can’t break. We must break. Long live the dirty stay.
Why Hasn't the NPC Changed DSA's Electoral Strategy?
To build a genuine party with a mass constituency, we will need to invest in learning from and replicating our successes, not bringing them to a halt while hoping without evidence that another strategy will materialize.
Stay Dirty
Uncommitted showed that major electoral activity, including electoral activity for socialists, will occur around fights within the Democratic Party.