This text was written as part of the LSC Pamphlet Program. It reflects only the opinions of the author(s) and not the consensus of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus.

Written by: Nikhil S, New York City DSA

For dedicated organizers on the U.S. left, it's an article of faith or even common sense that recurring state intervention and institutional conflict inform our current social atomization, cooptation, and disorganization. But there's a more immediate set of progressive politics–social democracy and populism– that have led to sectarian failures within DSA and political interventions that are neither sustained nor capable of unifying popular forces to defeat the right.

In adopting what are in practice leadership or institutionalist ideologies but failing to consider political conditions and the need for social organization in the form of robust unions or leaders accountable to movements, right elements in DSA and beyond have effectively disempowered members. They have opted, in particular, for inflexible programmatic strategies, purely mobilization tactics, popular front coalitions, and membership polling and engagement methods that are vulnerable to cooptation.

Our current context instead requires a strategy that builds popular power and secures political power as part of a broader project of building democratic institutions outside the state. By adopting modes of municipalist governance as well as strategies of electoral accountability and the united left front, we can sustain socialist institutions and party formations. Only if we respond effectively to historical lessons and organizing conditions in the global north can we be effective in our local and internationalist organizing.

Victories on Unstable Terrain

From Bernie Sanders to AOC, it's true that progressives have scored tactical victories through the election of reform candidates who can secure limited reforms and even some material gains on legislation like tenant protection. But what remains unresolved are two central questions: the form our organizing program should take and whether democratic and popular forms or instrumentalization of movements are the best way to develop and sustain member capacity and popular power.

Mid-20th century social democracy and 21st century left populism continue to provide a false horizon in the global north both to progressive politicians and movement cadre who seek out simple theories of movement victory. They suggest an alternative to deeper organizing, not irrationally, in a country where the spectre and partial collapse of state communism has been employed to propagandize against all forms of popular power. The paths toward victory, especially in the case of left populism, are always obscure. But the popularizers of the twin, off-the-shelf doctrines only offer easy shortcuts and outright wrong directions to a movement desperate for guidance.

These have always been incomplete doctrines. Early social democratic projects such as the pre-Weimar Republic German SDP aimed to unify labor and electoral projects as a project with ostensible goals that are ultimately Marxist and revolutionary even if their battles with their internationalist and anti-corporate left flanks suggested otherwise. But today, it's indisputable that parties like Olaf Scholz's German SDP or Francois Hollande's French Socialist Party are more interested in maintaining productive and private sector forces that generate surpluses useful for funding social welfare programs and the imperial systems–from Francafrique to Palestine–that support them. They do so even if this involves disciplining their own social base and ultimately losing the elections that are their raison d'etre. These transitions don't only reflect the ameliorative and reformist orientation of the parties but also their desire to respond to the logic of neoliberalism and monopoly capitalism following the chaos of the Great Financial Crisis and decades of speculation.

Americans, too, often interpret movements that have proven their effectiveness without attention to their historical and social grounding. In essence, unlike comrades in certain contexts in the global south and even ostensible outliers in wealthy countries like Scandinavia, we lack existing institutions like tenant and workplace unions and communal projects or mass efforts to build and sustain popular and counterpower outside of brief ruptures and mass demonstrations like Occupy.

The common trajectory is for a proto-leadership cadre to insert themselves as political arbiters who rely on the single tactic of mobilizing a voting public in electoral and legislative fights. But without transforming more than a fraction of those individuals into leaders or participants in strategic and institutions decisions, these projects can quickly lose capacity and direction. As in quasi-membership NGOs, this can lead to a series of ad-hoc strategies for “member engagement” that include push polling and campaign mobilizations and demonstrations.

In the example of the Working Families Party, outside movement upsurges, there is a focus on the tactics of the popular front governments and alignment with liberal forces. (The hostility of right factions within the socialist movement to abolitionist, rank-and-file, tenant-led, or internationalist projects suggests an absence of anything other than short-term tactics for achieving occasional electoral and legislative victories.) The reformists within DSA implement the same plans even though they are not operating in the multi-party parliamentary coalitions that are functional if not always long-term or radical vehicles in more genuinely democratic political-economic contexts. What's worse, the popular front governments were not capable of defeating fascism in France and helped destroy the left in the only country where it was victorious: the USA.

Left Populism as Doctrine and Reality

The more complicated arena of left populism requires us to transcend the dogmatic invocation of the term as an all-purpose invective against anti-establishment forces. If we investigate populism's history from the late 19th century, it takes the form of a US movement against corporatism and plantation power. The complicated class and racial politics of the American People's Party reflect the persistence of smallholding farmers and an incomplete unity with workers across lines of racial differences.

In the 21st century, however, the term has been employed by theorists such as Chantal Mouffe and Ernesto Laclau to describe leaders who stand in for the whole people as part of a project of national transformation. In contexts such as Venezuela, collective action and cooperation are fundamental to social and political life. As such, the figure of the leader does not stand alone or entirely independent of the popular base.

As employed in the global north, however, projects such as developing the commune through participatory, proletarian processes that have been essential to movements in places like Venezuela are excluded. This is the case even formations such as Podemos in Spain emerged out of democratic formations such as the post-Financial Crisis Movement of the Squares/Occupy Movement. (The history of Barcelona En Comu and other more radical and municipal parties stand in distinction to this trajectory of leadership domination.)

The result is a politics that augments the autonomy and unaccountable leadership of politicians such as Pablo Iglesias and AOC and the cliques that have developed around them. (We would acknowledge the altered trajectory of the Venezuelan government following the death of Hugo Chavez but emphasize its qualitative distinction from governments in the global north.) The ability of these groups to secure significant ameliorative social welfare programs, let alone conceptually transformative legislation such as the Green New Deal, has been at least partially disproven even as individual politicians retain their popularity. Worse, there is a tendency to rely on digital and highly mediated forms of member polling that can be infiltrated by malicious outsiders or manipulated by leadership. The operatives desire a Bonapartism without an army but can't understand why they're constantly losing.

Both the projects of building popular and electoral power have seen reversals where they have not faltered entirely. Whether the model is US NGO “membership engagement” or “The Digital Party” that both Prof. Paolo Gerbuado and DSA's own Democracy Commission have critiqued, the result is an absent and disempowered membership and autonomous party leadership and elected officials. The 2025 convention proposals by social democratic factions in DSA to use electronic votes and membership polls, for instance, will undermine the power of national conventions and elections for internal representatives (NPC).

Parties that haven't turned toward more open, democratic engagement or ironically traditional party models during the fifteen years since their formation and significant advances during the period following the Great Financial Crisis, Occupy, and the Movement of the Squares have faltered with even charismatic leaders like Spain's Pablo Iglesias, with the Podemos Party, and the leader of the second-wave Left Populist vehicle Sumar, Yolanda Diaz, failing to win electoral victories or sustain party membership and social power. The Italian 5-Star Movement (M5S) is an example of a successful if not radical turn toward long-term political viability that occurred with the transition from a purely digital and potentially unreliable membership voting model. In that case, their trajectory has aligned MS5 in formal coalitions at all levels of government, including key mayoral posts, with the center-left (both post-communist and liberal) Italian Democratic Party.

Contradictions in the U.S. Progressive Coalition Model

The Working Families Party has run into these roadblocks under our exact social conditions. It is an ersatz project of building social democracy with first non-radical unions beholden to state and city executives and then donor-dominated and top-down if effective non-profits. But the project confronts more hostile governmental and corporate factions. As such, the risks of outside cooptation and leadership inflexibility both threaten the viability of the social democratic project and its electoral success. The Working Families Party even shares its General Counsel with a DSA NPC member and principal Socialist Majority Caucus leader, Renee Paradis.

With technofascists and their allies in government intent on intensifying ecological collapse and reversing the entire arc of political-economic developments since Reconstruction, these visions of national champions and win-win cooperation between weak unions and corporate forces–which can't even control the beasts some played a role in summoning–are worse than useless.

As was evident in the primary election of Zohran Mamdani as Democratic Party Candidate for NYC Mayor, WFP has increasingly needed to follow the lead of stronger and more adept organizations like DSA. The cost of hollowing out membership institutions is an inability to adjust or lead popular movements.

Even within DSA, the models of the leader and the coalition party have resulted in chaotic and disorganizing dynamics. First, elected officials such former Congressman Jamaal Bowman or current Federal Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez who have maintained the pretense that they lead the movement rather than engage dialogically with its demands, or better yet, are accountable political representatives have been empowered by social democratic factions. When they've taken bad positions on internal issues such as funding for Israel, Zionist apologism, NATO, housing, abolition, or Democratic Party presidential candidates, the backlash weakens the movement and DSA as an institution.

Second, disempowering members (by limiting discussion forums and voting assemblies, as has been the case in NYC-DSA) and allowing electoral officials freedom to act as they choose tends to disorganize members and the broader movement. It also leads to a reactive amd insular sectarianism (governance by toxic groupchat) that seeks to characterize open exchange of views as actions beyond the scope of legitimate politics (often termed those of “ultras” or “wreckers”).

The Alternate Program for Popular Power through Municipalist & Party Vehicles

These failures and reversals require honesty and accountability for the direction and effectiveness of the movement and DSA, in particular, as an organization. It's essential to consider projects with chances of success under our social conditions rather than turn to idealized or past models: municipalist electoralism and the project of building mass popular institutions.

We must grow not only the membership and elect politicians to office but develop popular power as part of a united front strategy. We have to unify left forces, whether the framework is party or federation of autonomist groups. This would not be a centralist formation of the type that has never been effective in the US. It would create, however, a coherent formation, which some commentators have defined into “The Party As Articulator,” that preserves a degree of tactical autonomy for different groups.

Municipalism offers an alternative to the mechanistic conception of electoral campaigns as independent of their social base and focused on parliamentary tactics and campaigns. As conceived by libertarian socialist scholar Murray Bookchin, the term describes the unity between social forces such as tenant organization and popular assemblies as the basis for waging electoral fights. Bookchin notably helped the middle-aged, perennial activist Bernie Sanders in his very narrow, Reagan-era victory to become Mayor of Burlington, VT. The vision has found success abroad in recent decades as an expression of the Movement of the Squares and building of new parties on a model of popular power rather than institutional unity.

We can build municipalist formations or those more similar to left parties globally while ensuring that parties are negotiating and making decisions to ensure cooperation around the implementation of a shared program. It will also require the even more difficult project of placing the popular classes as protagonists in all forms of democratic institutions and autonomous projects. This will ensure a robust social front that can confront and oppose the inevitable reaction of fascist and systemic forces. These include factions from the nihilistic far-right to corporatists in both systemic parties. They also require us to break from the model of ad-hoc popular fronts and draw clear divides between socialists and the liberal establishment class and those supporters who back their faltering projects of imperialism and domestic counterinsurgency with a human face. Such a sustained effort requires rank-and-file membership openly organizing around socialist goals ranging from Palestine liberation to electoral campaigns in labor unions, tenant unions, mutual aid groups, and other community organizations.

As an essential part of this project, we need to support DSA 2025 convention proposals and ongoing efforts to build a united front with left parties and groups that stretches beyond an accommodation with liberal groups and elected officials. Our resolutions to censure elected officials and to institute clearer mechanisms for electoral accountability are central to developing a less opportunistic and more powerful electoral front. The popular base should not be subordinated in the electoral project but instead integral to its success.

If we fail to build the commune or develop new and democratic institutions and a program for overcoming blockages, as has occurred in Venezuela and during the Pink Tide governments, recent political struggles demonstrate that we will only find ephemeral horizons. They will disappear even as we approach them by securing tactical victories on traditional electoral and organizational terrain.

By developing municipalist and popular political power, we can address the dead ends and failures of social democratic and left populism. Neither politicians nor simple coalitions are an alternative to popular power and left unity. The challenge is deep and requires sustained and democratic organization of the type, whether inside or outside the party, that seasoned left organizers have always known is essential to the project of winning a genuine socialist future.

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