Overview
If the last decade featured historic gains for the left in places even the most ardent partisans had abandoned, it has also been an era of crisis and repression that has fostered increasingly general political confusion. Today, socialists have achieved breakthroughs inside and outside the state from Rojava to Barcelona to Chiapas to New York City. DSA-endorsed elected officials are among leading political actors in the U.S. and leftists have advanced an abolitionist program and secured union and community leadership as well as national elected office in countries like Colombia and Bolivia. But these transformations have occurred even as the climate crisis and imperial conflict intensify and fascism and the erosion of the limited gains of liberal representation and social democracy have been normalized in western states and the global south alike.
There have been sure victories in electoral campaigns and legislative fights for climate legislation along with tenant and worker militancy and self-organization. (These have happened in part through DSA’s Emergency Tenant Organizing Committee and Emergency Worker Organizing Committee as well as the assistance of the United Electrical Workers and Autonomous Tenant Union Network.) At the same time, within DSA, repeated defeats, self-generated crises, and displays of incompetence and ideological hostility to multi-tendency debate and member self-organization inside and outside our own organization threaten further member attrition and a downward spiral in finances and capacity. These factors, taken together, threaten the possibility of even conventional social democratic victories.
LSC has learned from this uneven landscape of failures and achievements along with other formations on the organizational left. As we began to articulate prior to the 2021 DSA convention, our strategy and program honestly confronts the conditions we face in a wealthy, atomized, and historically exclusionary society and the limitations of bureaucratic NGO-style formations with their self-declared experts and unaccountable leaders. We also aim to avoid the reliance on staff and factionalization that have undermined successful projects, intensified members’ drift from the organization, and led to ideological and tactical inflexibility. By securing a transformative program that transcends electoral and legislative battles, structural reforms, training and empowering members, and electing accountable and competent leadership that includes our NPC slate, we can ensure a militant but inclusive trajectory responsive to the novel conditions that will confront an organization critical to the success of the emerging U.S. left. We will be putting forward a full set of recommendations on the DSA 2023 Convention.
Our NPC candidates, C.S. Jackson (San Diego DSA) and Tom Julstrom (Duluth, MN DSA) both have experience as chapter leaders and Julstrom in YDSA. They have been principled advocates for a functional and democracy multi-tendency organization.
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The emerging challenges suggest the difficulty of relying mechanically on past organizing frameworks even as they call for revolutionary analysis and action. We therefore will be putting forward a set of recommendations on constitutional and bylaws proposals and resolutions at the 2023 national convention.
As a caucus that unites tendencies such as autonomist communists, municipalist organizers, platformists, syndicalists, and anarchists, our program overlaps and aligns in part with Marxist tendencies. Our program, we propose, emphasizes the best aspects of the theory and praxis associated with those tendencies. An emblematic example of tactical and strategic nimbleness is the campaign to Stop Cop City–which has brought together occupations, coordinated street protests, pressure on legislators, a progressive front with environmental, civil rights, and abolitionist groups, news collectives, political education, and a bottom-up referendum campaign. We aim to ensure that such efforts can not only involve DSA but be led by an organization that has credibility in these fights. We support developing, as part of this broader strategy, accountable and popular municipal and state electoral efforts, referendums, popular assemblies, affinity groups, cooperatives, mutual aid programs, social institutions, militant/rank-and-file worker and tenant union organizing, anti-fascist counter-actions, as well as disruptive direct actions and occupations.
We center efforts grounded in current revolutionary projects such as the drive in AANES/Rojava and Zapatista territories in Chiapas to transcend the patriarchy and social hierarchy that over millennia have been associated with coercive state structures. As Marxists and Anarchists confronting deep social and political crises, we need to secure material gains for our members but have to plan for concurrent ruptures rather than state collapse. We need to respond to the crisis of legitimacy that confronts a liberal state built on oppression, stolen bodies, and stolen land not only through critique or mechanically applying past models. In doing so, we aim to comprehend changing material conditions and to develop new and robust modes of revolutionary, democratic strategy.
As a key part of our program, we have always supported direct member participation and decision-making, as set out in our Democratize Everything statement, that build internal cohesion and power. It is critical that we have, for these reasons, member control of working groups and commissions and intermediate organization in the form of a National Delegates Council as critical. We recognize that electoral power is meaningless or even demobilizing if representatives are not accountable to organizational structures. In this context, we recognize the necessity that we not only build projects outside of the electoral, legislative, and policy systems; we also aim to transform DSA and develop autonomous institutions that can secure class independence as well as transforming existing ones through our efforts into revolutionary vehicles. Freedom may not be an endless meeting, but it’s also not a revolving cycle of top-down campaigns and procedural and structural features that prevent member power over organizational control, structure, and strategy.
We hope to win that vision of empowered organizers and revolutionary strategy with you. If you’re interested in joining, please reach out us at dsa-lsc.org and lsc.dsa.lux@gmail.com.
