by This statement was approved by the Steering Committee of Reform & Revolution.
The conflict between national DSA and Los Angeles DSA (DSA-LA) over the chapter’s endorsement of Nithya Raman reflects a failure of organizational unity and leadership that one resolution cannot fix. Still, we cannot fix it by never taking action. Reform & Revolution co-authored “On Nithya Raman,” the resolution brought to the DSA’s National Political Committee with comrades in Bread & Roses.
This resolution affirms that DSA-LA’s endorsement was not made in compliance with R22, as the chapter never asked Raman about her support for BDS, and outlines how her record on Palestine is not in line with DSA. It asks NPC members to work with DSA-LA’s leadership on a members-only meeting by October 25th (preferably with Raman present) where she will be asked the four questions on Palestine from the national endorsement questionnaire. If the NPC then finds her to still be out of line with DSA’s anti-Zionist principles, it will vote on expelling her. Whatever the outcome, the NPC will keep assisting the chapter in supporting DSA-LA’s locally endorsed members of LA city council.
Raman’s record on Palestine
The resolution documents Raman’s record in detail. In brief:
- She sought the endorsement of Democrats for Israel–Los Angeles in 2020, telling them she does not support BDS and believes in Israel’s right to exist, and accepted it in 2023 (DSA-LA censured her for this).
- In 2021 she co-authored a city resolution backing an anti-Palestinian Los Angeles Unified School District resolution, which was used to shut down a proposal by members of United Teachers Los Angeles on BDS.
- In 2022 she voted for Los Angeles to adopt the IHRA definition of antisemitism, which is used to attack criticisms of Zionism and Israel.
- She publicly rejected national DSA’s public statement after October 7th, 2023. In addition, this year on October 7th, she posted a statement condemning the attacks with no mention of the genocide in Gaza.
- This year in September, when asked at a Jewish Federation forum on where she differs from DSA on BDS, she said it was not part of her platform and that she has “been vocal about places where I’ve disagreed with the DSA on a range of issues.”
These are Zionist positions, and they are what R22 was written to address. Not only is Raman in technical violation of R22, she is actively opposed to DSA’s positions and goals. Agreement with BDS does not even fully encompass DSA’s own positions on this matter; that Raman cannot publicly support BDS beyond not supporting prosecution for it goes below even our most basic expectations of any candidate.
Nithya Raman is not a socialist candidate
This resolution deliberately keeps to R22 and Palestine. This is her most specific violation, and the one for which DSA has a clear convention mandate. However, Raman’s endorsement is opportunistic for many reasons beyond her positions on Palestine. The question underlying the national debate around Nithya Raman is not solely about whether national DSA must discipline Raman and DSA-LA due to a convention resolution (though that is, of course, part of it). The important question is does Raman represent DSA and our democratic socialist politics. Even if we understand that DSA may endorse candidates that do not fully represent our positions to grow the workers’ movement, Raman’s shortcomings are more likely to disorient people outside of DSA about the character and positions we hold – and harm our ability to be credible partners in the movement against Israel’s genocide against the Palestinian people.
Raman is not a socialist, and from an objective standpoint she has always had a tenuous relationship with DSA-LA at best. She does not publicly call herself a socialist or advocate for socialism. Apart from DSA-LA’s endorsement, neither socialism nor DSA appear in her campaign’s material. In fact, when the chapter endorsed her, she welcomed DSA-LA as “joining our broad coalition of Angelenos,” and when asked directly whether she is a capitalist on CNN, responded with only: “We are in a capitalist system. It’s a city government.”
At least outside of LA, this largely flew under the radar of top concerns when her office was smaller. Now she is making national headlines. We need to consider and be very clear about what it would mean for her independent “progressive” message to be the leading voice of DSA, especially in California and particularly as we approach the terrain of the 2027-2028 presidential election cycle. A candidate this far out of line with our program (by her own admission) carrying DSA-LA’s full-throated endorsement would be alarming even if the red lines of R22 had never been adopted.
Cohering around our program and red lines
In response to these concerns, comrades in DSA may argue that other candidates endorsed by their chapters may also be out of line with our program or not publicly message as socialists. We acknowledge this – but this isn’t an answer to the problem in front of us. That there are issues with candidates representing DSA does not in any way mean that we can simply ignore a candidate of Raman’s notoriety and egregious opposition to our political program and goals. Still, we should build an organization whose candidates represent us properly, not just those who have a large enough platform or are in dramatic opposition. In order to do this, the NPC must take the plunge and provide the leadership needed to cohere our national project, not to ignore the most obvious and public violators because of the precedent that might be set by acting.
Despite Raman’s violations of our policies being clear, nothing in the decision of how to proceed is obvious, especially if we wish to center not only what is best for DSA, but what is best for the socialist movement as a whole. The difficult situation we are in is the result of indecisive leadership and the broader underdevelopment of DSA as a party. Enforcing R22 here is necessary from a moral and political standpoint: there is a genocide being perpetrated in Palestine, and we do not want people supporting the state responsible for it to be representing our organization. But enforcement is also purely punitive. This conversation, by definition, is only happening because an endorsement has already been made – one almost entirely unaccountable to the rest of the organization. By the time a chapter has endorsed a candidate with a record of Zionist positions and we need to invoke R22, we have already lost some trust from our allies in the Palestinian liberation movement and we have to contend with reversing a vote by a chapter’s membership.
The strength of political red lines is not in our ability to enforce them, but in our ability to cohere around them to have a strong, inspiring, and unified message to working people. This not only grows our ability to publicly advocate our political positions with consistency, but also can itself be inspiring to the millions of working people entering political struggle and consciousness.
Coherence around our principles is not won by simply utilizing red lines as a hammer. For instance, Zohran Mamdani’s success in campaigning as an anti-Zionist did not come from a red line being enforced on NYC-DSA. It came from a chapter that was able to politically, organizationally, and structurally unite behind his campaign in the face of reactionary forces attempting to discredit him for his views on Palestine and his alignment with DSA. To build that political and organizational capacity, we must prioritize cadre development, candidates and campaigns accountable to DSA (not just the whims of a candidate), independent electoral and organizing infrastructure separate from the Democratic Party, and nationally centralized and democratically decided endorsement standards. Bodies like the NPC and the National Electoral Committee must be able to integrate chapters into our broader national political apparatus.
The development of our electoral apparatus will not happen all at once. Inevitably, chapters who are beginning their electoral work or who have generally had lax endorsement standards will exist. We can differentiate between imperfect DSA cadre candidates (candidates who view DSA as their primary constituency and want to represent our politics, but who may struggle with doing so properly) and candidates who view DSA as simply a part of their progressive coalition and do not meaningfully intend to represent us. That first group may fail to become “great” DSA electeds, but at least part of the blame will be ours. How could we expect them to succeed without a coherent political leadership and campaigning mass party to support them? The latter should be avoided, and assisting chapters in developing the ability and political will to avoid the short-term benefits of these endorsements is incumbent on the national organization as much as it is on the members across the country.
Towards this, an important material step will be the ongoing establishment of Federal Socialists In Office structures. More than being just for accountability, however, an FSIO committee must be designed to integrate our electoral projects into DSA’s national campaigns and movements, especially as they relate to our relationship to unions and organized labor. We need to develop the structures that allow electeds to support each other, for the NPC and national committees to support electeds, and for rank-and-file DSA members to have a democratic voice in our electoral project at a national scale. In that sense, our work going forward needs to be oriented less towards reactively bringing candidates in line and more towards proactively uniting DSA behind a national, democratically-directed electoral strategy. Candidates and endorsed campaigns, though an important part of that strategy, should not be individually so important that any critique of those candidates or campaigns feels like it may potentially destabilize and collapse DSA’s project as a whole.
In order to actually turn DSA into a mass party of the working class with this level of unity around our political goals and campaigns, we need to acknowledge that these deficiencies are not just the result of organizational underdevelopment. US politics heavily centers the desires and programs of individual candidates, and most organizations give political endorsements liberally on vague political alignment. Naturally, those new to the socialist movement may wonder why we need to hold firm on this or that red line or standard when faced with the excitement of a campaign, with the membership growth driven by them, and with the prospect of defeating this or that terrible politician. Even if comrades agree theoretically or morally with red lines or other standards, they will not immediately see the positive reasons for having a strictly defined political program uniting campaigns unless we can demonstrate the power that a unified and credible message gives us. Without this, as we’ve seen throughout Biden’s term in office, the temptation of effecting short-term change and being a part of the “governing coalition” will lead to our inability to fight for a working class platform in a way that excites our own members and those entering political consciousness. If we wish not to squander our 2025 and 2026 growth, we must seriously contend with what it takes to actually build – not just wish for – the lasting institutions and structures that would allow us to flex our collective power in the long, permanent term.
Members are invested in DSA as a big socialist tent. We can only build party-like accountability structures under this big tent by bringing it together proactively, before we encounter difficult situations like this one. Opportunistic pressure is often agnostic to professed political positions, and it can only be combated through actual mass work and party-building. Therefore, R22 may be the necessary thing to invoke now, at this stage, but it is difficult to say that this situation is not of our own making in key respects.
Why this resolution, and why expulsion
R22 mandates that members who consistently and publicly oppose BDS and the Palestinian cause are subject to expulsion by a two-thirds vote of the NPC, regardless of their endorsement status. In practice, that only really matters for members endorsed for or elected to office, and R22’s red lines have always been understood as red lines for candidates.
The NPC already sent a letter to DSA-LA asking about the political positions of Raman and concerns they have about her endorsement. In response, DSA-LA sent a letter that argues that Raman, despite previous violation of our standards, is in line with R22. The claims are dubious at best. Frankly, the actual political positions Raman publicly holds have not changed, and the arguments DSA-LA’s leadership make do not actually address the clear-cut violations of R22, though they point out some less bad positions she now has, such as being opposed to prosecuting BDS. Nithya Raman is still obviously not in alignment with the positions mandated by our National Convention, the highest decision-making body of our organization, and is subject to discipline under that mandate. We are not “excited” in any capacity to be forced to potentially expel a member of DSA, especially when there was an opportunity to come together under our program and fight for socialist politics in a city as large as Los Angeles. Beyond that, we do not believe that it is proper to immediately begin with expulsion for someone who does not align with a policy – even one as important as R22. That is why the NPC proposal we support does not immediately expel Raman. It starts with a conversation among DSA-LA’s members, and it gives Raman a fair chance to either argue that she is in agreement with our positions on Palestine, or to come into alignment with our politics.
What would it take to come into alignment with DSA and rectify these concerns? In such a conversation, it should be noted that part of the issue came from DSA-LA’s own failure to adequately prepare Raman on our policies. R22 does not just require candidates to not say they are Zionists. It requires that they be asked about BDS and Palestinian liberation during the endorsement process, and expects them to positively promote anti-Zionist positions when asked. Regarding the claims by DSA-LA on Raman’s current positions on BDS: she may be willing to not actively attack BDS or our positions, but she is not willing to positively advocate for them either. Because of her previous positions and associations with Zionist organizations, a public, positive declaration of a change in position, of support for the BDS movement and for Palestinian liberation, is needed in order to assuage rightful concerns. A declaration of support for BDS made only in internal DSA spaces will not resolve the core issue.
Our position as a caucus is that we are in favor of enforcing red lines after an exhaustive process has been attempted in good faith. This resolution continues and officially defines that process.
What we want for DSA-LA
Any situation that requires the NPC to enforce standards on chapters will necessarily put the national organization against a chapter’s majority. In this case, the national organization is not just the elected leadership, but the highest decision-making body of DSA: its National Convention, with representatives from every chapter in the country. In order to effectively enforce the standards that we have collectively set as an organization, and after exhausting attempts to work with the comrades in a given chapter in good faith and genuine dialogue, national must be able to contradict and even overturn the errant decisions of a chapter majority. Some may worry about a split, but we believe this misses an obvious fact: if an ideological split has already happened, and a chapter is using the name of DSA in a way that contradicts our democratically adopted program, it is better to rebuke them than to let them operate independently, hoping to avoid a split that has already happened.
We doubt that most DSA-LA members who voted to endorse Raman are Zionists. Ideally, we would like to help them (and any other chapters in a similar predicament) in whatever ways are necessary to build their chapter as an important arm of a national party. Part of that involves thinking about how to best push for and promote our program in their local context and political terrain while maintaining political and organizational independence from forces who do not support it. Chapters such as Portland, for instance, have experimented with endorsement tiers. In regards to the potential of an AOC run for President, we have proposed an independent endorsement campaign, with our own canvasses, data-collection, literature, scripts, and so on – this could be another way to handle the contradictions of exciting and important but external electoral campaigns that are attracting the attention of the working class. Both are ways that non-DSA or non-socialist candidates can be supported for the aspects of their campaigns that connect to and energize the working class while still maintaining our program, mandate, and principles.
The leadership this moment requires
None of this can be fixed by one resolution. The debacle around Nithya Raman is in part caused by the broader crisis of organization in the working class. While difficult, many of these issues are necessary and normal to confront in the historical development of a working class movement. However, the “left” NPC majority (ourselves included) has so far failed to deliver the decisive Marxist leadership necessary to navigate this complicated situation, both out of caution and disorientation. In an ideologically diverse and de facto federal organization like DSA, the prospect of taking the unprecedented step to discipline a candidate that has been endorsed by the majority of one of our largest chapters is daunting. There are real costs to this course of action, even if we believe it is necessary and for the long-term health of our movement.
But hesitation has costs too, and caution is not neutral. Trotsky described the task of revolutionaries as overcoming “the contradiction between the maturity of the objective revolutionary conditions and the immaturity of the proletariat and its vanguard.” The Raman endorsement is a zoom-in on that contradiction: conditions now exist for DSA to contest mayoral elections in the largest cities in the country, but our organization is not yet mature enough to ensure that those candidates, or campaigns, are our own. Closing that gap will take more than a Marxist majority on the NPC. It will take thousands of Marxists engaged in mass work, united in one democratic party of the working class. Getting there will inevitably involve learning from many mistakes. It is up to Marxist leadership to guide the “party” through those mistakes with stern patience, and that includes making hard decisions before they are made for us. That is why we co-authored this resolution, and why we will keep fighting for a DSA that will make the next one unnecessary.
