by Jeremy Gong and Nick French call on Bernie Sanders and the Squad to launch a new “party-like” organization.
It would be a welcome development if Bernie and Squad supporters launched a new mass organization with a membership based democracy. This new left mass organization could push its elected representatives to take harder stances and set up further collisions with the Democratic party and their base.
A mass organization of progressive Bernie supporters might not start as a consciously socialist organization, but despite that it would be a major step forward for workers in the US to fight for an action program that socialists support. It would also help us break out of a certain limited layer of US society.
DSA would benefit from helping create such an organization and appealing to its more radical sections that wanted to break from the Democrats and capitalism. DSA itself can’t create that organization itself but it’s correct to call on the Squad and Bernie to do so. That this isn’t very likely to occur is an effective revelation of those leaders’ reformist weaknesses and limitations. However, DSA would need a strategy to build toward such an organization and toward putting friendly pressure on Sanders and others.
It would be bad if DSA were to dissolve itself into such an organization, silencing its anti-capitalist critiques and positions in order to maintain relationships or false unity, but if it were to instead use it as a platform to demonstrate its program it would potentially be a form of principled mass work.
If Bernie and the Squad were to launch such a formation, reaching a larger mass audience of hundreds of thousands more than DSA can reach, DSA should 100% support it (and before they launch it DSA should demand they do it, and criticize them if they fail to do it).
In the scenario they launch it, DSA should join as an affiliated organization and fight to build support for a socialist program within the broader org. Taken up in such a way it would be a non-sectarian, but also a principled approach.
An opportunist approach would be to just uncritically support the broad formation (but not fight to win support for socialist politics and challenge the political weaknesses of it). An ultra-left approach would be to stand aside and get angry that it is not socialist, it is “competition” with DSA, people should just join DSA, etc.
Unfortunately, DSA had not been clear on such a principled approach toward movements so far: to engage without sectarianism in building a broader force and to argue without opportunism for a rupture with capitalism. This is our role in movements and in such a future, broad formation, socialists in DSA need to educate ourselves in today’s struggles.
A conspicuous weakness is that the article does not deal with DSA and its crisis. It just promotes a new party (not wrong) argues that other forces (Sanders, AOC) are key, that this is a long shot and that DSA can play a role in it. But is DSA playing a role in that direction? Bread & Roses is an important caucus in DSA. Are they promoting the change needed to play that role toward a larger working class party? At the last DSA convention, Gong and others played a generally good role. Now, with this article, our current crisis in DSA is completely side-stepped.
In order for DSA to play that role, it should:
- Return to a bold strategy for a dirty break.
- Urge Sanders, AOC, and DSA reps in Congress to launch a socialist caucus and openly advocate for a new party/criticize the Democrats.
- Argue for a class struggle strategy: We need a working class party because we live in a class society. That doesn’t have to be the basis of a broader party, but it’s a necessary contribution that socialists should advocate: We need a rupture with capitalism.
- In the absence of this new mass organization, keep building DSA!
- We need a relaunch of DSA at the next convention: We need an NPC that leads the organization in a class struggle direction, toward a dirty break, toward labor struggles and movements, toward holding elected officials accountable.
Accountability, democracy, transparency and a focus on labor and movements will not magically happen in a new, broader formation. We need to establish that in DSA and set an example.
If the Marxist left in DSA can work together on those questions and start the discussions this fall toward the national DSA Convention in summer 2023 that could be a real step forward. DSA itself urgently needs a course correction. A call on Sanders, AOC, and others is good, but not good enough if we don’t clean up our own mess.
