In their recent article published in the online socialist magazine Tempest, Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members Ashley Smith and Charlie Post (“The U.S. left at a strategic impasse”) make the case that the Left must convince the DSA to turn away from its electoralist and pro- Democratic Party orientation.But the points laid out in the article proceed, fact-by-fact, to refute the thrust of their arguments.
The main points of their argument are as follows: The “new socialist movement,” best exemplified, they argue, by DSA, “our most important organization,” is at a “strategic impasse.” DSA’s strategy of working to elect candidates inside the Democratic Party, has failed to achieve any of DSA’s goals, such as Medicare for All and the Green New Deal. Instead,the organization’s leading figures and fellow-travelers, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), and the rest, have “rallied behind President Biden’s very different agenda.” In spite of this, DSA “appears ready to double down on its failed electoral strategy, wasting its time, money, and energy to back the Democratic Party as the lesser evil in a desperate effort to block the Republicans from taking back governmental power.
The result will be DSA’s return to form as “a social-democratic lobbying operation within a capitalist party.”As the DSA shifts rightward, it has scuttled even its pretense of future independence from the Democratic Party that it sold as the “dirty break”—the idea that the DSA was running candidates inside the party in order to, at some future date, lead people out of the Democrats and into a new socialist party when the time was right. The DSA’s increasing commitment to electoral activity inside the Democratic Party is expressed not only in its abandoning of the “dirty break,” but also in its unwillingness to expel Rep. Jamaal Bowman for his active support to the Israeli state. DSA’s lack of commitment to social struggles is exemplified by its lack of sustained involvement in the Black Lives Matter uprising, its inability to provide national guidance around “striketober,” and the little it has done to mobilize to defend abortion rights or to challenge Biden’s reactionary immigration policies.
“It’s time for a new strategy,” they conclude. “DSA and the Left as a whole must prioritize building, and organization class and social struggle.”
In short, the leopard must change its spots.
The authors make a good case as to why the Democratic Party is an unmovable object for the Left, and that those who put faith in it and get pulled into its orbit are captured by it rather than capturing it. And yet they seem not to realize that the same is basically true for the Democratic Socialists of America. It is an organization committed to an electoral strategy tied closely to the Democratic Party. It will remain so regardless of what leftists inside of it believe.
Who or what then is at a strategic impasse? DSA’s politics—and Bernie Sanders’—have been clear from the beginning: reliance on the Democratic Party to “return” to its liberal, New Deal, ideal self. Sanders has been consistent about this for decades. The DSA has given its wholehearted support him, even if its propaganda tended to justify its presence in the Democratic Party as temporary. In practice, this orientation has been dropped in favor of full-blooded enthusiasm for “changing” the party from within, as the authors point out. The “strategic impasse” of this position was clear from the start. There is no “socialist strategy” of any sort that lies through the Democratic Party, the graveyard of Left and social movements.
The real “strategic impasse” is that of those socialists (some of them former members of the International Socialist Organization and other groups) who, finding themselves adrift and without serious organization, joined DSA in a vain hope that it could be influenced to become something it was never been set up to be.
Where in the history of the international socialist movement have left-wing forces working inside a reformist, social democratic organization, been able to influence that organization to abandon its commitment to reformist, social-democratic politics? And here we aren’t just talking about any social-democratic organization. We are talking about the peculiar American version—right wing social democracy that is openly committed to working inside the world’s oldest capitalist party.
DSA, moreover, has been steadily moving further to the right, as Tempest itself has documented in a number of articles over the past few years, including the one this article is discussing. And yet it is this DSA, “our movement’s most important organization,” that they believe can be convinced to reorient itself “toward building class and social struggle, reconstructing infrastructures of resistance, and running independent campaigns based on our own platform against both the Democrats and Trumpite Republicans.”
The only better example of wishful thinking that DSA can change its spots is putting your faith in the Democratic Party to change its own. It is a sad commentary on the state of the revolutionary left that some of its adherents are reduced to attempting to make urgent appeals to the DSA that it cease to be the DSA.
The belief is based on two illusions: First is the illusion that the DSA can politically shift and become the opposite of what it is—an organization tied to the coattails of the Democratic Party.
Second is the illusion that there is a Left inside the DSA sizable enough and influential enough to reshape its politics. At the organization’s 2021 convention,only about one-fifth of the delegates voted for a resolution calling the organization to prioritize running socialist candidates independent of the Democrats. Only one-third of the delegates supported a mandate that DSA candidates should criticize the capitalist nature of the Democratic Party. The leftists who have joined DSA since its explosive growth in 2016 have done so because it appeared to be the “only game in town.” Now that DSA has fully revealed its nature, they have hit an impasse.
Smith and Post come close to recognizing it. Every argument they make screams that DSA is not the proper vehicle for helping to build an independent Left in the US. And yet they cling to the argument that the DSA, “our most important organization,” (presumably because it is the only sizable organization on the broad Left),must change.
But what must change is the radical and revolutionary Left’s sojourn in the DSA. As long as they cling to its coattails, they are taking a ride in train that’s headed in the wrong direction.
Paul D'Amato is the author of The Meaning of Marxism and was the editor of the International Socialist Review. He is the author of numerous articles on a wide array of topics.
