by R&R’s newly-elected NPC members draw lessons from 2025 convention and lay out what should come next for DSA
Victory In Chicago
Over a thousand delegates gathered in Chicago from August 8 to August 10 for the 2025 DSA National Convention. It is here, at our biennial conventions, that DSA decides our strategy and priorities for the next two years, and elects our national leadership.
It has been a brutal two years for socialists, and for DSA. The worsening genocide in Gaza and the increasing attacks from the Trump administration both cast shadows over the deliberation. Yet the DSA delegates assembled were full of hope and optimism, rejuvenated by a recent surge in membership, and high profile victories such as Zohran Mamdani’s historic victory in the Democratic Primary of the NYC Mayoral election.
DSA conventions are a unique, special thing. Members from hundreds of cities across the country, meeting or seeing one another for the first time in years, clash in debates, swap ideas over drinks after sessions, talking late into the night, and trade endless sheets of articles, magazines, campaign literature, and resolution descriptions. Well over a hundred proposals were submitted for consideration, running the full breadth of socialist strategy and analysis, from Palestine Solidarity, electoral strategy, to fighting the right, labor organizing, ecosocialism, and transgender liberation.
DSA convention was a major step forward for our organization. The votes broke through the previous paradigm to open up a new course for DSA. While the past several conventions have struggled to chart a course towards political independence and party building, resulting in gridlock and a stalemate on national leadership, this convention was instead a marked victory for the left and a break with the status quo of DSA.
The incoming 2025-2027 NPC (expanded to 27 seats by the Democracy Commission Proposal) includes representatives of 9 different caucuses and tendencies as well as independents. The NPC includes 4 members of Socialist Majority Caucus, 5 members of Groundwork, 1 member aligned with the Carnation Program, 3 members of Bread & Roses, 2 members of Reform & Revolution, 3 members of Marxist Unity Group, 1 member of Libertarian Socialist Caucus, 3 members of Red Star, and 4 members of Springs of Revolution (plus 1 YDSA Independent who was endorsed by Springs of Revolution).
This expanded NPC is tasked with picking up where the previous term left off, working across DSA’s big tent, implementing the decisions of convention, and leading thousands of socialists into the struggle for a better world.
A decisive victory for R&R
This year’s conventions, YDSA and DSA, marked a major step forward for Reform & Revolution. We ran four candidates, 2 for YDSA NCC, 1 for YDSA co-chair, and 1 for NPC, and elected each of them.
For the first time in the history of our caucus, we have the honor of serving on the NPC. We intend to use our position to fight for the principles on which we campaigned: party-building, supporting chapters, and ambitious mass campaigns to recruit members, grow DSA, and fight the right.
And we were amazed to see our NPC candidate win in the first round with the second highest total of first-preference votes, as well as one of the highest totals across high-preference votes. Similarly, Daniel, Eli and Sofia, our YDSA elected leaders, are the largest caucus on the NCC.
Together, these results show the growing interest in mass, revolutionary politics, and in building a socialist party. Our caucus gained ground in every part of the country, and won dozens of votes from members who had never met an R&R member before this year. To us, these strong results indicate a mandate to move forward with our ambitions of uniting forces across both DSA and YDSA on the basis of waging ambitious campaigns.
Towards a Partyist DSA?
Since 2016, DSA has been locked in a debate on the Partyist question – should DSA develop into its own political party, and if so, how?
The results of the convention indicate the positive development of DSA towards political independence and a Partyist horizon. However, these wins remained partial and limited. It is clear we have much work to do to unite around a clear conception of these aims.
Delegates overwhelmingly passed the NEC Consensus Resolution, which established a committee to run non-partisan and independent electoral campaigns and set high standards for national endorsements (including candidates running as open socialists and recruiting through their campaign, upholding DSA’s platform, and caucusing with other DSA electeds). Also passed was amendment R20-A01 which emphasized the importance of running labor candidates as open socialists. The debate around this latter resolution highlighted growing clarity on the need to openly articulate our socialist positions when running electoral campaigns.
R&R put forward two resolutions alongside our comrades in Marxist Unity Group: A Fighting Socialist Program For DSA, and A Partyist Labor Strategy. These resolutions faced an uphill battle. We sought to clearly articulate positions on decisive issues of the moment, to prompt debate and to take a clear decision on the essential political questions that we believe will be determinative of the success of the socialist movement.
While neither of these proposals passed (with our program receiving 45% yes votes and Partyist Labor Strategy receiving 48%) the fact that they were each within 5 percent of passing shows the strength and ascendancy of the revolutionary left in DSA. Our program divided DSA on questions of overarching socialist politics. Perhaps even more so, our Partyist Labor Strategy opened up a new field of debate in our strategy to confront ‘economism’ in our rank-and-file work.
However, it is important to view these outcomes not with triumphalism or arrogance, but rather as modest, positive steps forward for our collective project of party-building. Our caucus’ cornerstone party building proposal (R4: For A Socialist Party in Years, Not Decades) did not receive enough support in the delegate survey to be highly agendized, and while Marxist Unity Group’s proposal R7: Principles for Party-Building passed with 54% yes votes, it includes a codification of the party-surrogate strategy, a fact which in our view made the resolution insufficient for the task of building a party. Our organization has much to clarify if we actually hope to build political independence and construct a socialist party. What building party would actually look like is still an open question in our DSA, even if our move towards those goals in general is clear.
A Convention Defined By Palestine
One important, if unsurprising, take away is that this convention was overwhelmingly shaped by the debates around Palestine.
From Rashida’s keynote speech, to the NPC results, to the most hotly contested resolutions on the floor, the ongoing genocide weighed heavily on the results of convention. Questions which have long gone unanswered by past conventions, like our ability to hold to account public electeds who break with DSA’s core principles, were pushed forward and resolved on the basis of how they related to the fight against the ongoing genocide.
Convention decisively passed R22, For a Fighting Anti-Zionist DSA. This resolution affirmed our commitment to defend the Palestinian right to resistance and right of return, and established clear membership standards for committing to anti-Zionism. It also put forward a bold campaigning approach, which strengthened the underlying resolution and committed us to a strategy of mass organizing for Palestine, with a number of key campaigns identified for DSA to take up. Most controversially, it laid out the possibility of censuring or removing members, including elected officials, who support Zionism.
Many other resolutions were also informed by the debate around Palestine. The success and near passage of the Partyist Labor Strategy resolution was no-doubt fueled by ongoing debates in the labor movement around how DSA union members should engage in pro-Palestinian activism, most notably in the UAWD reform caucus which was controversially dissolved earlier this year.
The fight against genocide also fueled the success of the Palestine-focused slate Springs of Revolution, which made significant gains to become one of the largest forces on the left of DSA.
It is crucial that the incoming NPC provide clear leadership which implements the principles and fighting tasks laid out in R22, in order to unite the various forces within DSA in practical struggle which delivers material gains for Palestinian Liberation. Any hesitance and absence of bold action and urgency from the NPC will create a vacuum which is inevitably filled by internal battles and recriminations which do little to help the people of Gaza.
Now It Is Time To Work Together
The day after the convention, before many delegates had even arrived home, Donald Trump declared a state of emergency in the nation’s capital, and began deploying National Guard troops through the city. This is just the latest in the string of authoritarian escalations from Trump which underline the need for a mass socialist organization which can lead resistance to his attacks on all of us. It makes clear the urgent need for DSA, having met at convention to sort out our internal affairs, to turn back towards mass movements and the class struggle.
What role can we play in Reform & Revolution in this work?
On the NPC, we will be working to execute the political mandates that we were elected on, to move DSA towards a mass, campaigning approach to fight the far right, and to push towards programmatic unity and political independence.
But we also see a role to play by organizing in good faith alongside our fellow NPC members from the 8 other caucuses and tendencies who have different priorities and ideas. As the potential swing vote on the 2025-2027 NPC, we have a unique ability and responsibility to bring comrades together across DSA’s internal divisions. We will work to advance our politics, and to collaborate with others in a principled way to find areas of compromise and build majorities for clear plans of action in an effort to break through the gridlock of the last term.
Fortunately, the expansion of the NPC and the outcome of the election have led to what in our view, is a more dynamic body. The number of different tendencies and larger number of seats have the possibility of leading to more complex and evolving majorities, in contrast to more static and entrenched blocks. With comrades in Socialist Majority Caucus, Groundwork, Carnation, and Bread & Roses making up 13 seats, and comrades in Springs of Revolution, Red Star, Libertarian Socialist Caucus, and Marxist Unity Group making up 12 seats, it is possible that the two of us will occupy a “swing vote” position.. This is a challenging position to be in for our first term on the NPC, and it is a role we do not take lightly. We want to move DSA towards a strategy of nationally coordinated mass struggle with revolutionary politics at the core of our work, and we believe we can do so by collaborating with other tendencies in a principled manner.
Our convention was unifying in some respects, but also exposed profound divisions in our organization that we will have to navigate as national leaders. The passage of the Democracy Commission package indicates some level of consensus on key steps forward. In contrast, the defeat of the moderate’s 1 Member 1 Vote and Red Star’s failed move to break up the Democracy Commission package both showed that neither the “moderate right” nor the “hard left” have the support needed to carry out organizational-reforms unilaterally. It would be naive to think that these divisions will go away in this NPC term or in the long run.
Additionally, there were many resolutions that did not make it to the floor, so many issues which did not receive the attention they were due. In the coming months we intend to spend time actively engaging with the challenges facing comrades in rural areas, the need to engage in ecosocialist organizing and discuss the degrowth framework, and coordinating with YDSA to build the strength of our socialist youth wing.
What We Aim To Accomplish
As leaders, we aspire to help build an NPC that can work together in a comradely and productive fashion, that can spearhead mass campaigns against Trump and the right wing that deepen class struggle and grow our ranks by the thousands, that can build political independence and move towards a partyist horizon, that can organize for anti-imperialist and revolutionary politics in our workplaces, on the doors, and in the streets in every city and town. We’ve been energized by the dozens of conversations we’ve had with caucuses and NPC members across DSA in just the last week, and are excited to continue this work for the next two years. We are honored by the trust that comrades in DSA and YDSA have placed in us to lead, and we look forward to maintaining open and transparent lines of communication with everyone throughout the term. We want to carry your feedback, your experiences, and your advice with us as we attempt to navigate the challenges of our moment, fight back, and win.
Yours in revolutionary struggle,
Sarah M and Daniel S-C
If our campaigns and the ideas outlined in this article resonate with you, there is no better way to get involved than to join us.
Daniel Salup-Cid
Daniel Salup-Cid (he/him) is a co-chair of YDSA's National Coordinating Committee and a member of DSA's National Political Committee. He is a former member of the YDSA chapter at Florida International University. He is a member of the Reform & Revolution caucus.
Sarah Milner
Sarah Milner, she/her, is member of DSA's National Political Committee. She is a rank and file union organizer and member of Portland DSA. She serves as the national Communications Co-Chair for DSA, and formerly co-chaired the Trans Rights and Bodily Autonomy Campaign. She has previously been the co-chair of PSU YDSA and of Portland DSA’s Electoral Working Group. She spent two terms on the chapter Steering Committee. She is a member of the Reform & Revolution caucus.
