Liberation condemns Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez’s continued retreat from socialist politics and rejects any effort to present her as the future presidential standard-bearer for DSA, or for the broader socialist movement. AOC’s record demonstrates a consistent pattern of opportunism. In 2024, DSA’s National Political Committee withdrew its conditional endorsement, after determining that she had failed to meet conditions concerning Palestine solidarity, including:

Commitment to opposition to Israeli military funding;

Support for BDS and firm anti-Zionism;

Participation in DSA’s Federal Socialists in Office work.

Instead of holding their elected accountable, the rightist clique in NYC-DSA leadership has chosen instead to defend and shield her on multiple occasions, even going so far as to hint as splitting away from the national organization when they do not get their way. This is not the behavior of socialist cadres.

Her recent comments deepen her political retreat ever further into opportunism and co-optation by the bourgeoisie. She has dismissed the mass radicalization around policing and abolition as part of the supposed excesses of “Woke 1”, seeking to reduce the historic Black-led uprising of 2020 to an embarrassing political phase. Ironically, her first electoral victory came in the heat of “Woke 1”, where she trafficked in the language of abolition. Now that she feels that she no longer needs it, she condemns it. This is the action of an opportunist dilettante, devoid of any principles whatsoever, not a socialist.

We need to respond to the defeat and retreat of mass movements through investigation and summation: identifying what advanced the struggle, what failed, and what must be carried forward. We do not and will not adopt the bourgeoisie’s retrospective contempt for a movement once its most radical demands become unpopular. AOC has publicly distanced herself from DSA’s democratically adopted program on national television, where she claimed that she belongs specifically to NYC-DSA, rather than national DSA. NYC-DSA is a chapter of DSA, subject to the national organization and its concentrated will, expressed in its highest form by our national convention, held every two years. If AOC disagrees with our national program, she has the same political right as every other member to struggle within the organization to change it. What no elected official possesses, however, is a personal exemption from a collective, democratically determined line.

For Liberation, electoral struggle is only one terrain of class struggle. Revolution will never come through the ballot box, and the ruling class will never allow an actual socialist to capture the White House. We see how the bourgeoisie foists social democracy, which is amenable to their continued class rule, in front of the people as “socialism”. Socialism is the dictatorship of the proletariat, not a series of gradual reforms and tweaks to capitalism. Opportunists willingly conflate socialism with social democracy, tailing shamelessly behind the bourgeoisie.

We must go where the masses are active, including campaigns, but our participation must strengthen independent working-class organization, develop socialist consciousness, produce well-rounded organizers, and advance the struggle for working-class conquest of power. The whole of the organization must guide and lead its electoral interventions, and not tail the careers of its elected officials. This is why the current rumblings for and prospects of an AOC presidential campaign should be met with a clear answer from the socialist left: No. We will not endorse or give succor to a campaign to put a social democrat at the head of an empire, where she will make even more capitulations to the imperialists, and drag our organization into antagonistic contradiction after antagonistic contradiction.

We are committed to DSA as our political home because we believe in its potential as a mass socialist organization capable of developing independent working-class politics. Our revolutionary loyalty belongs to that project, to our democratically organized membership, and ultimately to the working masses whose struggles give socialism its purpose.

DSA must be capable of supporting its elected officials when they are correct, but also of criticizing them, correcting them through open political struggle, and moving beyond them when they reject our line and discipline. No elected official can be allowed to be bigger than the organization. The movement and the Party must lead; electeds must follow.

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