DSA and the Blueprint for a New Party

R&R member Diego Pajuelo revisits Seth Ackerman’s classic “Blueprint for a New Party” in the light of recent victories for socialists at and beyond the ballot box.

DSA’s electoral project has scored incredible back-to-back victories this year. They have happened everywhere from city councils to congressional seats, from Oregon to New York, and we haven’t even seen the last of the congressional primary wins! This has generated tons of excitement and mass recruitment. DSA has grown immensely to 120,000 members and continues to grow with every passing day.

Since so much of our growth has emerged from electoral victories (in part due to considerable media attention), it is important that we evaluate our current strategy. What’s the reason for it? What has been done, and what needs to be improved?

The rationale for DSA’s current electoral strategy largely originates in the article published in Jacobin in the Fall of 2016, “A Blueprint for a New Party,” written by Seth Ackerman. It is important to evaluate the article, its strengths and weaknesses, as well as where DSA is currently in relation to party-building.

Ackerman’s article has dominated discussions of DSA’s electoral strategy for the past decade for good reason. Prior to this, there were really only two roads to go down, there were the proponents of Michael Harrington’s “realignment,” who emphasized the need to take over Democratic Party structures such as internal leadership and meetings, and then there were the sects who proclaimed the need for a new workers party in the abstract, without much elaboration on the actual implications of establishing a new party or the method by which it could  be built.

As it currently stands, the strategy pursued by DSA is fairly different from the original strategy proposed by Harrington. There is no longer a major push for DSA members to be actively implanted in the Democratic Party’s internal structures, or to make the Democratic Party as a whole adopt socialist policies. The attempts to do this in Nevada proved this a meaningless endeavor. Instead, DSA has shifted its focus to building our own structure, membership lists, electoral infrastructure, and distinct political program. It is a substantial break from Harrington’s strategy, but it is not quite a break from the Democratic Party.

The Blueprint

At the time, the article was a breath of fresh air. It brought forward an approach to party-building without relying on stale truisms. To this day, it remains one of the best analyses of how political parties work in the United States and why the American electoral system is different even from other two-party dominated systems like the United Kingdom and Canada.

The article stresses the importance of program, political education, and deliberative membership democracy. Crucially, these are expressed not as “good ideas” but as the mutually-binding forces which can form, in effect, a political party. It also points out how the Democratic Party itself has very little influence on how Democratic primaries function, and so wherever the Democratic Party has neglected its base, socialists can fill in the gaps and run in Democratic primaries.

…a national political organization that would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a leadership accountable to its members, and electoral candidates nominated at all levels throughout the country.

As a nationwide organization, it would have a national educational apparatus, recognized leaders and spokespeople at the national level, and its candidates and other activities would come under a single, nationally recognized label. And, of course, all candidates would be required to adhere to the national platform.

This is a piece of serious, worthwhile political analysis. However, over the years certain deficiencies in the article have been revealed, but they often do  not come up in conversations about the article within DSA. For instance, while Ackerman writes at length about how the Democratic Party doesn’t actually have any input on how Democratic primaries are run, he gives little attention to the Democratic caucuses within city councils, state legislatures, or more importantly in Congress and the Senate. These are some of the biggest ways in which the Democratic Party can exert a considerable amount of direct control over elected officials, and undermine the accountability Socialists In Office are supposed to have to our organization.

Probably the most high-profile instance of this happening was in Indianapolis, where the city council’s Democratic caucus purged an at-the-time DSA city councilor, Jesse Brown. While the Democratic caucus did not explain his expulsion, councilor Brown would clarify in his first interview after his expulsion that he believed it was related to his opposition to the Democratic Party’s plan to privatize public schools.

On the congressional level, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) has been notable for being one of the few congresspersons to pay dues to the Democratic Party. This is not at all a requirement: many congresspersons and even other DSA members have never paid dues. However, AOC is able to get better committee assignments with the payment of dues. This relationship between her and the Democratic Party has resulted in many seeing AOC as more aligned with the Democratic Party than she is with DSA.

Crucially, the article leaves out important details when it describes the downfall of a major attempt at a third party prior to DSA, the Labor Party during the 1990’s. The article makes the argument that the Labor Party (LP) failed due to the implications of building a third-party ballot-line. This narrative of alternative ballot-lines always leading to the same outcome for many becomes a sort of secret law, where all third-party ballot-lines are doomed to reproduce the marginality of the Green Party. Conveniently, this means that the question of political strategy never comes up in these conversations.

In a 2002 article in Socialist Alternative’s newspaper, Justice, “Labor Party’s 3rd National Convention”, comrade Ramy Khalil published his experience as a participant in the Labor Party. In “Blueprint for a New Party,” Ackerman mentions that the Labor Party was scared to set up challenges to Democratic politicians who might be in favor of labor, but does little to critique this, and this observation is eclipsed by the arguments on the ballot-line question.

The assumption gave rise to an intractable dilemma: if the party took a separate line and ran candidates against incumbent Democrats, it would destroy relationships with Democratic officeholders who might otherwise be sympathetic to unions, and thus lose the support of the unions that depended on those officeholders. 

Khalil offers a more comprehensive critique of the LP leadership’s strategy, citing key events such as  the forceful disbandment of the Labor Party’s New York Metro chapter:

A key turning point was the shutting down of the New York Metropolitan chapter — the largest, most vibrant chapter in the country with over 1,000 members. The LP Interim National Council turned a blind eye when the NY State LP body disbanded the local chapter because Socialist Alternative members had been elected into the leadership of the chapter and were preparing to run local LP candidates.

Khalil also places emphasis on the Labor Party’s weakness when confronted with the war on Afghanistan,  as well as a political inability to initiate a broad, open discussion when confronted with the need for the  LP to take a different approach from the AFL-CIO tops:

The LP should have taken a principled stand by condemning the horrific terrorist attacks of 9/11 but also explaining how Bush’s war in no way represents the interests of workers and will only exacerbate terrorism. A fighting workers’ party would win support by standing in elections and opposing the two parties’ identical agenda of budget cuts, attacks on democratic rights, racism, and war.

If the Labor Party is unable to maintain an independent working-class position in times of war, then it wouldn’t be able to withstand the enormous pressures to compromise with big business if it were to get candidates elected to office.

On the AFL-CIO leaders and the LP’s dependence on them,

Many left-wing union officials endorsed or affiliated to the LP on paper. Yet they refused to allow the LP to run candidates because if it did, they knew AFL-CIO President John Sweeney would have declared war on the LP and the union officials who supported it.

A Labor Party would have to seize this opportunity to open up a debate in the labor movement, from the rank-and-file on up, on why the AFL-CIO continues to waste members’ dues on the same Democratic Party that gave us NAFTA, the WTO, and other attacks on labor. As LP polls have indicated, there is more support for a labor party than the Democrats or Republicans.

Instead, LP leader Tony Mazzocchi’s strategy was to avoid this inevitable clash with the AFL-CIO leaders by getting a significant number of labor leaders to endorse the LP before running candidates.

With this account in mind, it becomes clear that the narrative around the ballot-line question does not cover the entire story of the Labor Party. It also shines a light on how DSA itself has been able to avoid certain pitfalls that the Labor Party failed to navigate. DSA’s democratic character and relative independence from the existing trade union leaders enabled its transformation through the mass influx of new political layers during and after the Sanders campaign of 2016. This shift was signified by the 2017 National Convention’s break with the Socialist International and declared support for the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions campaign against Israeli oppression of the Palestinian people. The LP, on the other hand, did not take the political initiative to run candidates (on any ballot-line) that could capture the energy of the anti-globalization or anti-war movements of its time, and was instead eclipsed by Ralph Nader’s presidential campaign in 2000. DSA’s organizational strengths, independent message, and prolonged electoral efforts have enabled it to put a crack in the influence of the long-dominant nonprofit and labor-liberal left, as evidenced by DSA member Claire Valdez’s victory over Working Families Party candidate Antonio Reynoso in the New York City’s congressional primary elections.

Overall, while Ackerman’s article has many strengths in emphasizing the party-like structures of program and education, deliberative membership democracy, and elected accountability as crucial to a political party even without the official legal recognition of a political party, its evasion of wider strategic debates and lack of emphasis on direct means ofDemocratic Party control are important weaknesses. The fight for working-class political independence today requires socialists to take steps beyond the party-surrogate model.

The Modern Party-Surrogate Strategy

Today, advocates of the party surrogate within DSA such as the Groundwork (GW) and Socialist Majority (SMC) caucuses claim to carry on the strategy advocated by Ackerman. In spite of this, their work in practice has entailed important departures from the more radically independent vision laid out in “Blueprint for a New Party.”

Within SMC for instance, two articles were published with competing views on the so-called “dirty stay,” the notion that DSA can or should utilize the party surrogate tactic indefinitely. Both articles ultimately come to the conclusion that DSA as a political force must put its weight towards an alliance with the “progressive” wing of the Democratic Party, manifested in the nonprofit left and labor liberalism. SMC member David Duhalde wrote explicitly in his post-election article “Stay Dirty”:

For DSA, I especially want us to stop pretending we are building a third-party when a better and more honest orientation already exists, one in which we are fostering a left-wing faction within the Democratic Party, the party which most members will gravitate towards anyways.

In another article, Genevieve R writes that it is not possible to be politically independent and states outright: 

Speaking as someone with years of experience working with New York’s Socialists in Office, that description could not possibly be more wrong. SIOs—virtually always a small minority of a given legislature—spend nearly all their time either coordinating to get enough Democrats to vote with them to win legislative battles, or responding to corporate Democrats with opposition in news cycles and elections.

While indeed, Socialists in Office would communicate in some manner with others in their legislatures, attempting to win support for our legislative priorities does not imply that DSA does not exercise political independence. NYC-DSA has made use of movement pressure in numerous campaigns, and Zohran and others have spoken to the Democratic Party leaders’ hostility to the NY State bloc of SIOs. However, the logic of the left-labor-liberal alliance presents major problems for NYC-DSA’s strategy. Orienting towards such a cross-class or “popular front” style bloc has entailed major limits to deliberative democracy within the chapter and an unwillingness to allow membership critique of electeds. The chapter also often struggles to articulate a wider political vision beyond the demands in its immediate campaigns.

NYC-DSA has no local platform or program, and a major disconnect exists between the chapter and the national organization. This is the consequence of a pragmatist and reformist strategy that holds winning the aforementioned immediate demands as the primary aim of the socialist movement. As R&R NYC member April Miller wrote:

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”…

… “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…

The obstacles to member democracy in NYC-DSA are the necessary outgrowth of this strategic orientation. This approach has also meant that working-class people are seen as a constituency to be mobilized rather than a social force capable of acting in their own name. The popular demands in Zohran’s program could serve as a powerful catalyst for independent class organization that could not only help to win those demands but persist beyond this administration and effectively defend them. Unfortunately, NYC-DSA’s incredible advances on the electoral field are not being matched with a strengthening of popular power. In fact, the chapter’s current approach has sometimes caused rifts between SIOs and class organizations, including militant sections of the tenant movement. These points of controversy present an obstacle to DSA’s lasting political aims.

The chapter’s orientation towards legislative negotiations rather than building independent working-class power has had many other consequences. Zohran, along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) have expressed support for House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries, an avatar of the Democratic Party establishment. Zohran also endorsed Kathy Hochul, the Democratic incumbent Governor of New York who took a side against the nurses’ strike earlier this year. NYC-DSA and its electeds also refused to take a side with home healthcare workers during the No More 24 struggle. This is what the popular front means in practice! It results in a politics of preemptive compromise, where the socialist movement makes concessions not on our terms but on those of the ruling class. This crosses the line from tactical use of the Democratic ballot-line towards an alliance with the Democratic Party as a hostile institution.

If the goal of the party surrogate as laid out in “Blueprint for a New Party” is to increase the socialist movement’s capacity for political action, a reformist approach runs counter to it. Ackerman’s original vision, in the context of the Bernie moment, was to build a democratic organization capable of supporting a cohesive and visible bloc of socialist electeds counterposed to the Democratic Party establishment not just in intention but in practice. Accountability to a consciously organized base was seen as the main dividing line between socialists and self-declared progressives. To subordinate the interests of the members to political expedience is to repudiate what made the party surrogate a necessary step in the socialist movement’s revival. 

The Road Ahead

While Ackerman’s article was an important analysis of the possibilities for socialists within Democratic primaries, the reality of the situation is that the Democratic Party is not nearly as powerless over elected officials as the original article makes out. Democratic Party ‘membership’ is more or less disempowered from any sort of rank-and-file democracy, and once in office, electeds are subject to a very authoritarian system of controls, even at times getting kicked out of committee assignments or legislative caucuses for stepping out of line. As such, socialists  cannot deny that our electoral project’s continued focus on Democratic primaries can pose very real limitations on our wider political aims.

Democrats are already making their decisions known at the local level, expelling socialist electeds from their caucuses like in Indianapolis, or in the case of Omar Fateh, utilizing bureaucratic methods to remove their endorsement (for more see Michael LeGore’s article, “Contradictions of the Party Surrogate.”). At the congressional level, roughly a dozen right-wing Democrats have signed the “Promise to America” pledge to fight DSA. Whether or not they attempt to utilize the House Democratic rule that allows for the expellation of caucus members by 2/3rds vote remains to be seen. Still, it is clear that the Democratic Party establishment will fight DSA more intensely after each of our successive victories. We will not be able to use existing electoral infrastructure indefinitely.

It must also be said that “third parties always fail” is not an automatic rule. In cases like the Green Party and the Labor Party it is clear the problem is not just the ballot line but a question of program and strategy. The Labor Party’s conservative approach to elections and fear of angering establishment Democrats and trade union leaders was a major part of its downfall. It also failed to facilitate the rank-and-file democracy that was needed for a viable, self-sustaining organization.

The Green Party has itself always been a politically weak party, with candidates ranging anywhere from genuine socialists to eco-liberals and conspiracy theorists. While longtime union organizer and socialist Howie Hawkins was the Green Party presidential candidate in 2020, the Greens have more frequently run “progressive” populists like perennial candidate Jill Stein, endorsed by bourgeois economist Jeffrey Sachs. On top of this, they wage no meaningful struggles in the labor movement and are largely absent from non-electoral activity in general. They do not present a serious challenge to the Democratic Party.

Socialists need a strategy which is able to fight consistently against both the Democrats and Republicans, not one which limits itself to compromises with them in favor of certain reforms. Such an approach must be built not on personalities but by working-class people on the ground, especially organized workers who can shut down the workplace. We saw this with the labor-backed mass protests in Minneapolis against ICE raids, which dealt an important blow to Trump’s “Operation Metro Surge.” Every time a DSA chapter mobilizes its members, the labor movement, and the wider community to city council meetings, picket lines, and mass protests, it’s building that same power from the ground-up.

In Portland in particular, our strategy has allowed us to pass a ban on police and ICE agents concealing their identities, even though DSA only has 1/3rd of the seats on city council. We did not need to trade resistance against ICE for defending pre-school for all, we actively fought the governor and defended pre-school for all ourselves. Our effectiveness is rooted in our strong deliberative democracy and empowerment of the rank-and-file, especially in the unions. Rather than keeping decisions behind closed doors, our electoral program is built around empowering the working class to win our demands. As such, our decisions aren’t calibrated to fit within the interests of the Democratic Party.

In Rhode Island, DSA members endorsed Brittany Kubicek as an independent candidate for the state General Assembly, one of the few DSA candidates to not run on the Democratic ballot-line. While her campaign and chapter hold a notable emphasis on the ballot-line question, the clean break isn’t the whole story. Rhode Island DSA has written its own chapter program and established its own process for recruiting and running candidates, based on its adopted electoral strategy document. The campaign is trying to apply the “DSA Difference” to independent campaigns. Kubicek’s campaign has made impressive steps, and raised $5,000 within 24 hours of launching. While it is indeterminate whether or not she will win,  it will be important for DSA members to keep an eye on Rhode Island. 

On the national level, DSA’s electoral successes can often feel haphazard, and while our independent identity and approach have gotten more prominent with time, the line is still often blurred between us and progressive liberals like Brad Lander. Without a coordinated national strategy and a centralized structure, our electeds have often struggled to resist major institutional pressures, weakening DSA’s political credibility. To strengthen our ability to act independently, members of the National Political Committee have recently established a Federal Socialists in Office Committee and congressional Democratic Socialist caucus; however DSA must still work to build a bold, consistent presence in the public eye. As 2028 approaches, we must build off of the success of the National Electoral Committee’s “Socialist Cash” fundraising campaigns, ensuring our financial independence from the Democrats. It will also be important to develop clear expectations for candidates around campaign messaging and the central role of DSA.

There is a long road ahead of us in the fight for a mass socialist party. DSA has taken tremendous strides, but the work remains. As the size of the socialist bloc in Congress expands, our ability to act independently of and opposed to the Democratic Party leadership must be protected and expanded. Furthermore, we cannot substitute alliances with sections of the ruling class for our movement’s limitations. To do so in pursuit of short-term aims demonstrably harms our ability to organize, win the support of, and represent working-class people. We need a real strategy of patience rooted in the difficult work of building our party from the ground up. 

This article was written with the editorial input of April Miller and Darren C.