NYC-DSA and the Long March to a Socialist Party

Wage a Principled Fight for Independent Class Politics!

It really never stops, does it? Just over four months into Zohran’s term as Mayor of New York City, NYC-DSA has experienced significant challenges and contradictions. The administration has scored modest victories, from winning millions in restitution for fast-food, retail, and delivery workers to expanded childcare access and establishing an Office of LGBTQ+ Affairs, and now possibly a pied-à-terre tax. Zohran has also worked to establish himself as a competent municipal administrator, leading a well-organized snowstorm response and unleashing a “pothole blitz” road repair drive. And yet the administration has also retained Jessica Tisch as NYPD Commissioner and resumed sweeps of homeless encampments. Zohran endorsed Kathy Hochul for re-election and circumvented NYC-DSA’s endorsement process to back Brad Lander for NY-10 against Alexa Avilés. Last month, Zohran lined up with Governor Hochul and Speaker Julie Menin in refusing to support home care workers on hunger strike outside of City Hall fighting to end 24-hour workdays, and NYC-DSA’s leadership flinched from active solidarity with the workers. These are very real contradictions, and navigating them requires open political debate that activates our mass membership.

There are two fundamental questions faced by NYC-DSA in this political moment, fulfilling our political mandate and advancing the party-building project. There are three key areas of controversy that can be analysed in order to provide revolutionary answers to these challenges: our approach to the state, our approach to the liberals, and our approach to imperialism. Through the lens of these examples we can sketch out both a critique of NYC-DSA’s current approach and, most importantly, the beginnings of an alternative.

Whose Compromise is it, Anyway?

It is entirely possible that there are reasons for each and every compromise made by the Zohran administration as outlined above. But the chapter has historically allowed SIOs to pursue political compromises on their own terms and created a structural environment in which members are discouraged from criticizing the actions of SIOs and aren’t frequently informed as to why these decisions are made. Steps have been made to further cohere NYC-DSA’s electeds into a solid bloc, and in rare cases the chapter has opted to put pressure on them to reaffirm this. The only publicly noteworthy example of this was, famously, to ensure all NYC SIOs endorsed Zohran in the first place. But, as Zohran was poised to enter Gracie Mansion, NYC-DSA’s Steering Committee pushed through a resolution dissuading members from openly criticizing the Mayor and his administration.¹ Why?

The logic of reformism is that winning policy gains for the working class isn’t just good, but the primary aim of the socialist movement. To win material demands for the working class, socialists must make coalitions with outside forces willing to align with us on certain issues. To do so, in this perspective, socialists must be willing to enter government in order to enact positive reforms, and entering government with forces outside the socialist movement for this purpose necessarily requires compromise. In common DSA parlance, this is called “taking state power.” Doubtless, the comrades who adhere to contemporary reformism do so out of a sincere desire to score victories.

“Taking state power” on this basis requires the governing body to manage the interests of the state and the ruling class. “Compromise,” within a reformist approach, begins to mean something different than taking the best settlement when there’s no other option. The reformist politician must “compromise” between the interests of our class and the representatives of the enemy class with which a coalition has been formed. This will, inevitably, cause frustration within the party and the wider class. Failing to navigate these contradictions effectively can create crises of political credibility, as faced by Mayor of Chicago Brandon Johnson. 

Managing compromise and coalition, therefore, requires a party to discipline its members. Members can exercise discipline, discussing the basis of a given compromise and decide whether or not it serves the aims of the movement. Or, members can be disciplined, they can be kept in line by bureaucratic measures and a lack of information. NYC-DSA has chosen the latter. In contrast to most of DSA, the chapter does not operate as a deliberative, participatory democratic body. Branch meetings are overwhelmingly composed of PowerPoint presentations and have no real decision-making power. Real political contestation only happens during internal elections or in delegated bodies, such as the CLC and at City Convention, with the partial exception of electoral endorsements.

How We Got Here

The origins of this system of disciplining the membership has its roots in the wide tactical berth the chapter has historically afforded its SIOs. This has often caused conflict with sections of NYC-DSA’s active core, most notably in 2022 with the Housing Working Group (HWG). 

State Senator Julia Salazar’s support for the NYCHA Trust bill and Tiffany Caban’s support for a developer-backed rezoning proposal in her district sparked opposition that chapter leadership proceeded to try to silence. As a result of the HWG fight, the “Protocol for Public Announcements of Reproach of Elected Officials” was passed at the 2022 Chapter Convention, officially barring chapter bodies from exercising public criticism of NYC-DSA electeds and creating a stringent process for filtering dissent, subordinated entirely to the Steering Committee. Since members of the NYC-DSA Steering Committee are elected seat-by-seat, they exist in a de facto first-past-the-post system. This means that NYC-DSA’s governing majority caucuses, while having ~65% of seats on the Citywide Leadership Committee (CLC), hold near-total control of the Steering Committee.² 

Since all official chapter dissent with the actions of NYC-DSA electeds must be approved by the Steering Committee, and the Steering Committee is composed of comrades who near-invariably defend NYC-DSA electeds against criticism within the chapter, there is essentially no means of public, member-led course correction of decisions made by SIOs. On the surface, controlling what working groups of a chapter can and can’t say makes sense. It’s easy to simply chalk this policy to being extreme, but understandable bureaucratic control.  But Steering’s heavy-handed approach to member democracy isn’t an inexplicable aberration, it’s a consequence of political strategy. NYC-DSA is more than capable of placing a democratic mandate on SIOs to carry out a course of action when it suits the interests of the chapter’s governing coalition, as shown by the successful pressure campaign to ensure all SIOs endorsed Zohran for mayor. When member criticism is perceived as threatening the chapter’s institutional relationships, however, it is dismissed as toxic discourse and met with the set of bureaucratic filters outlined above. 

On Chi, or, “You Can’t Fight Liberalism by Ignoring It”

One of the most democratic and deliberative spaces in NYC-DSA is, in fact, the Electoral Working Group (EWG). Any member can participate in its forums and vote on whether or not to recommend a candidate to the CLC for endorsement, so long as they RSVP to the forum where a particular endorsement is to be debated and discussed. The reason for this is so concrete and obvious it takes the form of a truism: democracy is power. The primary focus of NYC-DSA’s political activity is electoral work, the chapter has a mandate to run campaigns that win, and winning campaigns require member buy-in that can only come from deliberative processes. 

The debate in NYC-DSA over whether or not to endorse Chi Ossé is emblematic of the political tensions the chapter is navigating. Proponents of endorsing Chi, principally Groundwork, emphasized the need to directly confront establishment Democrats, challenge the political machines that dominate Black communities while leaving them behind, and unify DSA’s down-ballot slate under a top-level banner. Opponents had two distinct lines of argument against: Marxist Unity Group argued that Chi was an opportunist decoupled from principled socialist politics, and Socialist Majority argued that running against Hakeem Jeffries was unstrategic and detracted from the fight for Zohran’s platform. 

We found merit in all of these arguments and saw the debate as a rare example of genuine, democratic, strategy-centered discussion in the NYC chapter. What’s interesting is how the narrow defeat of Chi’s endorsement played in wider discourse. Endorsing Chi against Jeffries would’ve been a clear signal that DSA will not pull punches with regards to the Democratic Party leaders just because they endorsed Zohran at the last minute. However, since Zohran himself stacked against endorsing Chi at the Electoral Working Group forum, both the left and bourgeois press perceived the non-endorsement of Chi not as a principled socialist rejection of an “opportunist grifter,” but as DSA joining ranks with the Mayor in pragmatically prioritizing legislative aims over political opposition to pro-genocide Democrats. Chi also quickly asserted that he would remain committed to DSA and has been one of NYC’s most vocal SIOs on City Council. MUG even published a letter³ calling to admit Chi to the City SIO Committee, in contrast to Shahana Hanif (both made it on). The objections of the DSA Left to endorsing Chi ultimately had no distinction in practice from SMC’s reformism. At face, MUG and SMC made very different arguments. MUG rejected an endorsement it saw as liquidationist, and SMC was hesitating to take a big risk on a race that may cause top-level Democrats to obstruct Zohran. But the result was the same: NYC-DSA’s alliance with the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party went unchallenged. The same political logic of “not disrupting our coalition” was used as a weapon against the No More 24 struggle and is deployed to justify major retreats on policing and other key issues.

This misstep demonstrates the danger of an approach which tends to center the assertion of general Marxist and democratic principles rather than articulating those principles into a clear strategy for how DSA should meet the concrete political moment. The NYC-DSA opposition must begin to put forward a distinct conception of what to do with the demands we raise and the campaigns we run in order to win over broad sections of the membership to class-struggle politics.

Here to There

In March, NYC-DSA’s Steering Committee intervened in elections for the chapter’s Anti-War Working Group, forcing a citywide vote after a blank ballot campaign disrupted an uncontested election. The Long Haul slate, composed of existing AWWG leaders and supported by the inter-caucus Brick by Brick (BxB) coalition of which Reform & Revolution is a part, scored a narrow upset victory, winning 5 out of 9 seats on AWWG’s Organizing Committee. This is the first time a slate backed by the opposition has won outright in a citywide one-member-one-vote election and marks a small but significant opening for further political gains to be made. 

Supporters of the Long Haul Slate had set their goal as retaining a 4-seat minority on the AWWG OC and were prepared to win as little as 3 seats. Instead, they won 5. This speaks to a couple of factors: firstly, genuine member disagreement with Steering’s interference, secondly, a clear political message, thirdly, a tight whipping operation. We’ve shown that we can win. The question then becomes, will we win? By what methods and on what terms? 

Just after the AWWG elections, NYC-DSA re-endorsed AOC. R&R took part in a limited cross-caucus intervention wherein we helped to circulate a petition calling to withhold Yes votes on endorsing AOC unless she publicly opposed all military aid to Israel and opposed all attempts to conflate anti-Zionism and antisemitism. We supported this petition alongside the rest of our comrades in BxB because we felt the petition was a worthwhile tool for having conversations about the endorsement question with other DSA members. Member petitions can have a measurable impact on the actions of the chapter even without making their signature targets, as shown by the Special Meeting petition back in October.⁴

Unfortunately, “whipping fatigue” and a compressed timeframe meant that we were unable to reach a wider political audience, although the petition did gather several hundred signatures in just a short period. Further, placing a direct condition on the withholding of votes rather than making a general appeal for members to push AOC to take a firm stance against aid to Israel meant the opposition lost a coherent basis to argue for a No vote on endorsement the moment she made a rhetorical concession. That a concession was made at all was a good thing! However, it created a new obstacle that prevented BxB from attempting to effectively challenge AOC’s endorsement. She was re-endorsed by NYC-DSA with 86% of the votes.

Off the backs of previous defeats, BxB and other oppositional forces have sometimes held a dejected and passive attitude towards the chapter and have opted to focus their energy on the few spaces we’ve been able to carve out where we can more freely do the work we want to do,⁵ such as AWWG and the Community Solidarity Committees. Further, some have held a “wait and see” approach to building out a base for our politics, expressing the sentiment that members will inevitably gravitate to us as they get frustrated with certain decisions made by Groundwork and SMC. This pessimism is understandable but mistaken, and thankfully not universal. If we build up a more effective apparatus for mobilizing and set ourselves to the task of cultivating a political constituency within the chapter, we could seriously increase our ability to pass resolutions and elect comrades to chapter leadership. But doing this requires us to have a clear view of what our shared political perspective is and how we would do things differently. 

Communists in NYC-DSA must contest the terrain of mass politics, openly and consciously. An alternative mass politics, rooted in independent class organization rather than a popular front, is in our view the only real way that the challenges of governance as a terrain of struggle can be met. There are two failures we must avoid: liquidationism and moralizing fragmentation. The present, liquidationist perspective sees us adapt to existing political limitations, subordinate ourselves to our liberal “coalition partners,” and reduce DSA to a cheer squad for Zohran. A reflexive response would be to treat all compromise as betrayal, fostering disillusionment and haterism. The prevalence of this approach is greatly overstated, and only a tiny minority in DSA hold this kind of fixation. It is however true that among the NYC-DSA left, years of what’s often felt like banging our heads against a wall have created a situation where we avoid contesting political space and instead opt to engage in criticism on the literary level, as a voice of conscience rather than an active political agent. 

There are two steps we can take to begin to rectify this situation and make the leap to building an outward-facing, constructive opposition. The first is to develop BxB into a body with a life of its own. Organizing for Power (OFP) in Portland DSA is an important example of a cross-caucus formation that exists as more than just a “banner,” with regular meetings, socials, and members that aren’t also members of a national caucus. As BxB develops and reconstitutes itself, we have to create spaces of contact that enable NYC-DSA members to meaningfully participate as democratic agents. Modeling the practices we want to see in the chapter enables us to build a strong sense of collective buy-in and to lead by example. 

Key to building BxB is also to clarify its shared political basis. We think the main unifying threads of the NYC opposition are as follows: member democracy, independent working-class organization, fighting imperialism and the carceral state, and party-building electoral campaigns. These points were present, in full or in part, in all opposition slate platforms in last year’s chapter leadership elections: BxB, MUG, and Bread & Roses. It is also vital that we weave these threads into a unified critique of the chapter’s existing practice and a corresponding alternative. NYC-DSA is reformist because it’s undemocratic and undemocratic because it’s reformist. Patiently and persistently explaining this fundamental link between practice and structure is key to moving past sporadic, individual responses to each successive outrage. It’s our duty to fuse the fight for member democracy with the fight for a new strategic orientation. 

Members and the wider movement require a political answer to the problems we raise, an answer that moves beyond general principles. A class-struggle, mass-movement approach to winning the Affordability Agenda isn’t just the right thing to do, it’s how we win. The chapter’s current strategy fetishizes the limits of executive office and forces us into the uncomfortable and counterproductive position of being somehow expected to defend broken promises and broken windows. The reality which must be expressed is that the mass movement is our only real source of “political capital.” Our job in fighting to win material victories isn’t just to pass policy, it’s to build power and organization that can both scaffold and outlast this administration. We need a base not just of voters but of the organized masses in order to take on the power of Wall Street, the NYPD, and the Democratic Party. Changes in the composition and consciousness of the working class increase our party’s ability to push the limits imposed by executive office, to fill in the gaps, to do what Zohran can’t do and say what Zohran can’t say, to understand these limits as something to be surpassed rather than accepted. 

This is just a starting point, and we don’t purport to have all the answers. But if revolutionaries in NYC-DSA stay persistent, stick together, make the arguments, and do the work, we think anything is possible. 

Footnotes

1. The resolution as linked in the text was amended after a cross-caucus intervention Reform & Revolution took part in. The original paragraph read as follows: “If we succeed in electing Zohran Mamdani, our priority will not be policing the mayor’s lapses and demanding accountability—orientations the left has adopted in moments of decline and marginality. Our priority in campaigning for a democratic socialist mayor is to expand working-class power and win material improvements in the lives of the working class. Our members must put first the project of moving and shaping a new political landscape, before the task of critique.” [Emphasis in the original.] ↩︎
2. Obviously, Socialist Majority and Groundwork hold a current mandate as the majority caucuses to collectively hold a majority of seats on Steering. The problem is the lack of proportional representation, which discourages other caucuses from running candidates for positions on Steering and by extension limits institutional knowledge to these two caucuses alone, and the added barrier to convening Special Meetings as outlined in Footnote 4. ↩︎
3. The author, part of Springs of Revolution, was described as a “a friend, but not member, of Marxist Unity Group.” ↩︎
4. A Special Meeting, in the NYC-DSA bylaws, is essentially a mini-convention to discuss a specific issue which can be called by a petition of 10% of the General Membership or 40% of the Steering Committee. This is an important check on the power of upper leadership. ↩︎
5. This has been done, generally, by soliciting the tolerance and consent of SMC for specific projects supported by Emerge and others in BxB, namely the Community Solidarity Committees. ↩︎