We Have a Mass Organization at Home
DSA is stronger than ever - but some long-term members want to pivot. What gives?
In their article published in Jacobin, Jeremy Gong and Nick French laid out their case that socialists should call on Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Cori Bush, and Ilhan Omar to found a non-socialist ‘mass organization’ to combat the far right and defend basic liberal guarantees. David Duhalde and Jared Abbott responded to argue that the idea of a new organization is impractical, but noted that socialists should be active on the margins in helping liberal politics to dig itself out of its mass quiescence.
There’s a shadow looming over the argument: here are four members of Democratic Socialists of America - the closest thing we have had to a non-labor, mass political organization on the broad left in our lifetimes - negotiating over whether we could play a large role in bringing about a new organization, or a small role in helping other organizations merge. What’s up with that?
Gong and French argue that a non-socialist organization would be able to mobilize a hypothetical base - mass in number and proliferated through the entire working class - that is currently unready for explicit anti-capitalism, but is open to progressive politics led by Democratic Socialist politicians. They also claim that DSA is not positioned to fight for liberal guarantees given that it has the long term goal of displacing capitalism. This analysis is misguided on both counts. In response, Duhalde and Abbott argue that our ability to bring about this coalition group would be marginal, and that we should instead focus on repairing the splintered American social fabric that prevents mass society in the first place. This is correct, but given the urgency of the moment, what can we do in the meantime?
But beneath it all, particularly in the Gong and French article, there’s a sense of exhaustion. Their article isolates a commonly shared pessimism and demoralization about the state of DSA. It’s true that even if materially we’re stronger now than we were in 2019, 2021-2022 has been a hard time. Both articles correctly note the necessity of broad front politics. But the path forward is not to declare a new organization in the hopes that it will change our fortunes, nor is it to pin our hopes on political coalitions we can only marginally affect in the short term. It is to build the mass organization we have, in all of its quirks and imperfections, to the best of our ability.
Mass Involvement is a Material Problem:
Duhalde and Abbott do an excellent job highlighting a lot of the practical concerns with Gong and French’s proposal, to which I can only add a point they imply but do not state outright: the reason that a new progressive organization could reach a broader sector of the activist class, but not a broad swathe of the working class, has to do with the difficulties inherent in mass organizing. In a world where Gong and French’s organization found purchase and cohered the broad left, the members would likely be wage or salary earners, and thus members of the working class. But it would not be meaningfully different sectors of the working class than are already involved in politics. Gong and French, correctly, want mass institutions to mobilize people who have all sorts of jobs, who work night shifts, who have wildly diverse levels of background knowledge about politics and ideology. In other words, to achieve genuine social density. The solution to that, however, is not found in ideological positioning.
Here in Philadelphia DSA, we work quite successfully with Reclaim Philadelphia, its statewide federation PA Stands Up, and its national affiliate, People’s Action. They’re quite similar to what Gong and French would want - they’re not explicitly socialist, they are member governed, and they fight for liberal guarantees. They’re essential partners in the Philadelphian broad left. Reclaim Philadelphia was even founded by socialists seeking a broad front in 2016 - the exact strategy Gong and French propose. But their membership is roughly equal to ours, we have roughly equal capacity, and our members each come from the sector of the working class with free time to organize.
The problem, in my view, is a material one. Abstract politics - either socialism or reform progressivism - is something that takes a lot of uncompensated free time to get involved in. Even in a mass organization that does not require every member to be an organizer, taking two hours out of your weekend (if you have a weekend) to go canvassing, to attend a public meeting to bird dog an elected official, to assist union organizing, are all big asks to make of someone. We shouldn’t be surprised that participation in secular organizations outside of the workplace, absent vigorous and intentional recruitment, is somewhat self-selecting. I have seen members of our chapter who are not in the white collar working class go to extraordinary lengths to participate - parenting during meetings and reading groups, Zooming from the shop floor, calling out sick from work to attend actions. But their extraordinary dedication is extraordinary, and the basis of mass politics is assembling large groups of people as they are. True solutions to this are difficult, but workarounds lie not in branding decisions but instead in making it easier to be a low involvement member, or relying on organizing within the workplace (historically the most successful solution - the trade union movement.)
With that in mind, DSA’s anti-capitalist horizon may not make it so imperfect a vehicle for broad left mass politics as Gong and French suppose. I am skeptical that DSA has hit a cap on its size or potency imposed by ideology. There is at least a potential mass base for explicitly anti-capitalist politics. While polling varies and ‘socialism’ is a protean term, the number of people who approve of socialism in some form when asked is many, many, times larger than the size of the group French and Gong desire. Fully 17% of the population appears to both approve of socialism and disapprove of capitalism - fifty five and a quarter million people. 12% of self identified Democrats per a recent survey affirmatively self defined as Democratic Socialists - or 15.21 million people. The question of why DSA is not a massive mass organization, then, is not because too few people agree with us. Even assuming that people rigidly follow their stated ideological preferences and we were ‘capped’ at some fraction of 17% or 5% (12% of 39% of IDed Dems in the survey) of the US population, there seems to be plenty of strategic runway. DSA has only conducted one national intentional recruitment campaign since the 2016 renaissance, and it was mostly one oriented around the social networks of members. We have mostly grown by bad things happening in the news, and publicity around high profile wins (ie: good things happening in the news.) While the organizational hurdles are real, we at least need not concern ourselves with the ideological character of the organization in figuring out how to secure mass membership.
DSA is Viable!
Beyond the potential for growth, DSA has demonstrated a nascent ability to contest the strategic terrain asked for by the previous pieces. Both articles correctly argue that any long term political solution will emerge from a broad left coalition engaged in mass organizing. DSA, while not perfect, nevertheless has positive attributes that lend itself to this task. Gong and French want an organization that is democratic and member run, an organization that mobilizes the working class, and an organization that fights to defend liberal democracy against the authoritarian right. Our structure is similar to what they want, and we engage in a lot of the fights they would like their new organization to engage in. Duhalde and Abbot, meanwhile, want us to put our shoulders to the wheel in the long, slow work of rebuilding mass society. DSA can serve these purposes.
One reason is what members know already - DSA is a mass organization. The hypothetical organization Gong and French propose is, structurally, DSA in all but name. This is not a criticism of their argument - the resemblance is clearly intentional - but it’s useful to spell out. DSA is member funded and member governed. DSA has chapters in every state. DSA conducts year-round mobilizing and organizing on key fights. DSA elects endorsed candidates both on and off the Democratic ballot line. DSA, at least structurally, has a mass membership. We have many more casual members than cadre, and anyone is free to join and participate. DSA also draws overwhelmingly from the (college educated subsection of) the working class.
Second, DSA already fights the fights declared necessary in both articles - we are engaged in the fight to preserve liberal rights, and often are so engaged in partnership with ideologically nonsocialist organizations. Gong and French present the long-term goal of a socialist society and the short term goal of defending liberal rights as existing in tension. They are not, and they are not viewed as such by the vast majority of DSA members of all ideologies. Democratic Socialists in the classical sense view them as a necessary precondition and component of a socialist society, but everyone else agrees on at least surpassing them. All agree on not taking one step back. Lawrence and Wichita DSA were just a key part of a coalition that conducted massive voter mobilization efforts in the successful defeat of a measure stripping abortion rights from the Kansas Constitution. The mood of 2020-2022 has been dark, but we have never had more member-elected officials than at present, been more involved in labor organizing, or been more present on issue fights from environmental rights to racial justice.
But DSA is Imperfect:
However, all four are broadly correct that DSA is not a perfect vehicle for this political project. Gong and French make a strong argument by implication about DSA’s faults - an organization positioned to lead in this moment would have involvement from the most prominent progressive politicians of our age, could intervene directly in federal politics, have a potentially hegemonic coalition, and fight for liberal guarantees. In supposing this organization must be a third party, it cannot be DSA.
Though I have argued against the last point, at present they are correct about the rest. The Squad and Bernie are not interested in taking leadership in DSA, nor would we be ready to receive them. In fact, their interest would provoke a number of institutional and political questions that we are not ready to answer. Gong and French also point out that we are not ready to intervene substantively in federal politics. Early attempts by DSA to make a national splash - campaigning for Bernie’s presidential campaigns and engaging in grassroots lobbying to pass the PRO Act - had both highly specific strategic contexts and, while impressive mobilizations, foundered against the federated and idiosyncratic structure of the American state. In the former, mobilization in the large states at the rear of the primary calendar (New York, Pennsylvania, etc) had minimal effects, and in the latter our power was greatly diminished because we were mobilizing to mobilize others. If we were able to mobilize a membership of thousands to call their senators in each state that would be one thing, but instead we had to mobilize thousands to call others in strategic states to call their senators, diluting the effects. DSA currently resides in a particular sector of the working class that, while able to punch well above its weight, is not a majority in waiting. Gong and French are correct to point out that the current class coalition of DSA is at the moment insufficient.
Duhalde and Abbot, meanwhile, are correct to emphasize that a broad front will necessarily involve a wide array of organizational models and specific missions. Repairing the American social fabric is a task that by its very nature cannot be contained entirely within an ideological organization, even in the extremely long term. Even if DSA were to somehow become the political vehicle for the American left, building the social muscle necessary for true mobilization of the vast majority would require a network of civic organizations - from unions, to churches, to amateur sports leagues - that could not possibly be housed within DSA.
But with that said - we all agree on the urgency of this political moment, and the necessity to produce a facsimile of true mass mobilization to defend democracy in the near to mid term. There is only one organization that A) exists B) is governed and can be governed by socialists, and C) has a ghost of a chance of even partial success: DSA. This raises a profound set of questions regarding DSA as it is now and DSA as it could be.
Gong, French, Abbott and Duhalde ask us - what does it mean for a socialist organization to engage in the knockdown, drag-out fight for liberal guarantees while preserving its ideological character? What role do coalition partners play in our program? How do we expand to include substantial membership of all sectors of the working class, and how do we grow to where we can influence national politics? What role should outside leaders - politicians, academics, union leaders - play in the moral and political guidance of the organization? If we agree that we do need such outside leaders, how can we create institutional space in the organization to accommodate them, and how do we invite them in? How does our political strategy interact with the fractured structure of the American state?
We need to find politically workable answers to these questions, and we need to find them soon. This is a common sentiment I have heard from people of all political persuasions within the organization, and I hope we can do it. I would urge anyone moved by French, Gong, Abbot, and Duhalde’s compelling and correct analysis of American politics to think seriously about how DSA needs to change to fight better in this terrain. I hope that they would see that DSA is member governed and needs their material input if those changes are going to happen. If you agree and are not a member, now is the time to join. If you have been a member but have not taken internal politics seriously, now is the time to pay attention. If you are a long-time member who has been exhausted by the last few years, I am right there with you - but we must support each other in creating an organization where we have room to be exhausted. It is crucial to realize that this is the task, rather than pivot to other organizations.
Fighting the Blues:
Given the near insurmountable challenges to the task of building a new mass organization, why did Gong and French call for it? Simply put - because we all feel terrible. Gong and French cite the feeling that, “we could change the world” in 2020 and cannot now. At the core of their intervention is the desire not merely to attempt to intervene on the federal level, but to win, and to win right now. The desire for federal intervention is connected to the scale of our long national crisis, but also to the emotional desire to feel like socialism is on the march, with high profile victories celebrated in mainstream discourse.
But DSA, while riven by mercurial internal politics as ever, has not gotten weaker since the winter of 2019. Since the end of the Sanders campaign, we have doubled our membership and had our best electoral cycle to date - and are poised to have a great one this year too. We continue to fight in and on behalf of the cause of labor, win competitive primaries and nonpartisan general elections, conduct base building and advocacy campaigns on any number of terrains. It is also important to note here that, on the strategic scale, even an expansive definition of the current period - 2008-2022 - is a blink of an eye: a blink in which we have achieved fantastic success. Though 2021-2022 may be a demoralizing period of stagnation, we still need to place it in the context of the wholesale resurrection of American democratic socialism.
It is true that the zeitgeist has departed us. National news networks no longer hint with fear in their voices that every state legislative victory we score is the heralding of a red spring. Reporters seeking a titillating story about youth ideological radicalism flock to the twenty trust fund kids in Lower Manhattan attempting to develop Math Rock Francoism rather than our boring, old Brooklyn Social Democracy. Poignantly, the Verso Loft has closed.
I can’t respond to the emotional tenor of Gong and French’s article with anything but profound sympathy and fellow feeling. Being caught in the long, obscure struggle for the dignity of the vast majority is hard, and it has broken many stronger than me - than all of us. In a very real sense, a tremendous amount of our work will go unrecognized and unremarked on, and there is a solid chance that we will lose. The flickers of the spotlight, when they happened, were invigorating.
However I would respond to the expression of that sentiment in Gong and French’s piece - that in order for the left to respond to the present moment we need a non socialist non DSA organization - that there is no bureaucratic fix to our lack of power, nor will calling on others to fix it for us dig us out of the struggle we are in. Early 2020 and 2016 were not sustainable highs, but instead tantalizing mirages of a shortcut to national power. If the spotlight was invigorating, it was also blinding. But we are not weakened because the spotlight has moved on, because those mirages have evaporated in the desert sun just as we reach out to them. We retain every bit of material strength we always had - and perhaps we can be more realistic about just what that strength is and what we can do with it.
I would gently suggest that, in between the riotous high of believing that DSA will be a hegemony shaping Party by 2036, and the hangover-low of consigning DSA to be a marginal contributor to a broader progressive movement, there is a middle course that was always more true than either extreme. One in which DSA can work in coalition with liberal organizations on defending essential liberties, build a mass movement, and maybe even build a coherent community of federal elected officials interested in our future. It will take institutional maturation, perhaps towards a party in all but name, perhaps towards a popular front coalition, perhaps towards something else entirely. But unlike wishing the liberal left into mass organization, it is something we can affect if we work for it.