I thought the article made its case pretty clearly and what they are asking of the DSA. From the first paragraph:

It is in this climate that Left Voice has called on the DSA to break from the reactionary capitalist graveyard of social movements that is the Democratic Party [emphasis mine]. It’s vital in this disruptive moment to keep a clear analysis of what is happening, what we want to happen, and what history tells us could happen.

The second section lays out what is at stake using a historical reference: fascist rule for 50 years. It could be longer, but it could also be shorter. They highlight that socialists’ (in this context, that means “Democratic Socialists”) attempts to work within existing systems of power ultimately lead to their destruction at the hands of that same system. In the case of the DSA, their current strategy of hitching a ride on the Democratic ticket binds them to a much more powerful system that ultimately corrupts and shapes their candidates, blunting their success.

In simple terms, history categorically condemns the social democratic strategy put forward by people like Karl Kautsky and adopted by those like Matteotti. In the wake of the Bolsheviks’ momentous seizure of power in Russia, these so-called “socialists” oriented themselves to a conciliatory strategy based on electoral gains. Lenin dissected this flawed logic with masterful prescience, but we can at least afford them the benefit of hindsight; they didn’t realize just how wrong they were as they hadn’t seen how bad things could get [emphasis mine]. All over the world, in Germany as in Italy, reformists not only failed to stop the rise of fascism within the halls of polite politics — losing at their own game — but also helped inform an atmosphere of non-confrontation in the streets.

It seems clear that the DSA (or at least, the DSA-NYC) has not learned these lessons of the past, even though they have every opportunity to do so. There are many competing worldviews within the broader DSA (don’t let the name fool you), and there is a path forward for the DSA that could help build a larger, more effective working-class party and movement.

The article does present a real solution also; it is the headline of the second section: “Build a Working-Class Party to Defeat the Far-Right”

“OK but what does this mean?” You probably wonder. To your credit, I’ll say they really could have done a better job of explaining what they mean when they say, “It is in this spirit that rank-and-file DSA members should reorient their organization away from the reformist strategy condemned by history.” They mean that the DSA needs to end this policy of Democratic Party entryism, which has clearly not yielded any results and ultimately defanged most of their candidates and officials in the process. The Democrats obviously are not interested in cultivating these DSA candidates and incorporating them and their ideas into the party. Instead, they are clearly more interested in molding and shaping these DSA candidates to support Democratic Party ideas and filing down their more “radical” positions so that they can masquerade as anti-capitalists upholding working-class interests.

Instead of running on the Democratic Party ticket, they should be unifying their chapters, building out a structure that can support their members electorally, and building a working-class political party instead of a political organization. The fact that they are currently an organization and not a party means that they are not making any efforts to get themselves recognized by the states as a legitimate political party. Doing so would show that they will be met with pushback from Democrats, and this can be leveraged as rhetoric to pull Democratic voters who also support DSA ideas to the DSA. The PSL made many efforts in the past national election to be a registered party in many states. The Democrats in some of those states went so far as to spend money litigating against their petition in an attempt to keep them off the ballet. Part of the role of a working-class political party is to use the platforms given to you by the state to show the masses just how disfunctional and combative the existing state is to the ideas they support. Instead of just washing their hands of the failures as a win for bipartiteship, they would instead highlight how much people actually stand to lose by turning to the right under this system.

You were given a taste of this with the Mamdani campaign. The Democratic establishment turned against Mamdani, was outwardly hostile to their candidate, and pumped money into the campaigns of two independent candidates who changed their affiliations just to run against him. This is just a short list of the kind of tactics that show you what the Democrats are really about. Turning these attacks into political agitation against the Democrats is fully lacking in all the DSA’s electoral efforts. So building a working-class political party out of the DSA and running against the establishment would be much more effective in educating the masses on just how much resistance there is to their ideas. That’s what must be done here, alongside building a coalition with other leftist parties and leftist organizations.

One thing that should be kept in mind as well is the way the US political environment uses the words “left” or “leftist.” Leftism starts at anti-capitalism; it has always and historically been an anti-capitalist movement, and to say otherwise is dealing in revisionist history. In the US, however, they have framed the “left” strictly around social issues, and social issues only. This lops off a massive history of thought and also leaves no room for a clear distinction between the policies of the Democrats and parties like the DSA. For all intents and purposes, that is all counted as “the left” and that means that phrases like “purity testing” allow the establishment to continue to stifle true leftism in the country, that being the anti-capitalist left. This is something both the Democrats and Republicans engage in and both find useful. The Democrats engage in it because it prevents people from seeking parties and candidates within the anti-capitalist left, claiming we can’t let “perfect be the enemy of good” and that we should “be realistic”, leading people back to candidates that are not anti-capitalist. The Republicans engage in it because it means they can attack both anti-capitalists and pro-capitalists and reformists together as if they were both the same threat, regardless of how many Democrats would take their side over the anti-capitalists. This is simply historically true.

It’s like the poem by Pastor Marin Niemöller, states, “First they came for the communists”. Why did they come for the communists first? Because the Social Democrats and the Fascists agreed on one thing: the preservation of capitalism. This is also the reason the poem draws a distinction between Communists and Socialists. “Then they came for the Socialists.” it continues. Instead of moving to the left and uniting with the Communists, the Socialists fed them to the wolves, only to be eaten themselves.