In July, amid a slew of progressive wins this primary season, the Democratic Socialists of America published a new national program, called “Workers Deserve More.”
It is an attempt to answer blossoming interest in socialism, itself a result of the experience of a working class and a youth who have lived through one compounding crisis after another. This is a political generation that has endured a pandemic that showed workers both that they are the ones running society and the ones who pay for every crisis, to the murder of George Floyd by the police that drove millions into the streets demanding to defund and abolish the police, to the new unionization wave and the UAW strike. These experiences have only been compounded by Israel’s genocide in Gaza, done with the backing of U.S. imperialism, and now Trump’s second term, marked by the immigration offensive and the war on Iran that has gone hand in hand with a sweeping assault on democratic rights. DSA’s program attempts to synthesize the experiences of a generation of working people who are awakening to political life, and it is that aspiration toward a different social order that is ruffling feathers across the political spectrum.
Republican and Democratic politicians alike have flocked to news networks, social media, and op-ed columns to revile the program, each in their own way using red-baiting to rally their bases to the polls and distance themselves from DSA.
More telling, though, is the fire from within the progressive movement itself. Asked about the program by ABC’s Jonathan Karl, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez pivoted to grocery prices and rent and dismissed the whole thing as an “academic debate.” Zohran Mamdani has spent months as mayor of New York explaining that DSA’s positions on the police and prisons are not his positions.
And then there was Eric Blanc. Blanc, a labor scholar, member of Bread & Roses, and a writer for Jacobin, went on the Brian Lehrer show and argued that it was “frankly just a mistake” for national DSA to adopt positions like police and prison abolition, positions that he deems “marginalizing” in the short term and “politically wrong” even in the long term. His argument rests on a particular idea of doing “mass politics” which, for him means saying only what majority opinion already accepts, all to bolster “electability.” It holds that the task of socialists is to find the widest common denominator within existing opinion, as opposed to using the opportunities that shifting tides offer to transform that opinion through struggle. It assumes, in the end, that the problem facing socialists is one of “mass appeal,” of finding a formula that can work for everyone. In effect, it dissolves the reality of class society itself, in which there is no peaceful coexistence between classes, and in which the working class is always the one made to pay for the bosses’ crises.
Against its detractors from the Right, we defend the program, especially where it challenges the most entrenched features of the American regime like the Senate, the Electoral College, and the police, and sets out a long-term goal of an independent party of the working class and a socialist future. But the question still remains, how do the tens of thousands of workers and young people awakening to political life, looking to DSA as a political home and wanting to actually fight for socialism, make that fight a reality? It can’t be tied to the task of winning a place inside the Democratic Party, famously the graveyard of social movements, but has to rely on developing the independent capacity of the working class to organize, mobilize, and confront capitalism and a state that supports it. There is no political calculation that can substitute the task of the development of the working class as a political force.
On the Program Itself
While the program isn’t the entirety of what we believe socialists need to fight for, it marks a serious attempt to speak to the accumulation of experiences of the last years.
From the onset, the program presents a vision of a post-capitalist future — one where our conditions are not beholden to our ability to trade our labor, and where food, housing, healthcare, and more are universal rights. It names the global capitalist and imperialist system as the culprit of our present misery, visible in the destruction wrought by war and in a technological “advance” that, far from easing our lives, has delivered only deeper precarity. It finds both parties responsible, recognizing that both are shaped by “the same criminal class of billionaires and war profiteers.”
Towards an alternative, it gives emphasis on the construction of a different sort of society. It says the enemy is “not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital; not just this or that cop, judge, or president, but the entire anti-democratic structure of our society.” To that end, it puts the important task of construction of an independent working-class party at the center, saying we must work toward “building a party whose goal is a democratic society of the working class.” Per the program, the goal here isn’t to soften the edges of the current order, but to institute new constitution and the formation of a new democratic-socialist republic.
Its demands, for the most part, are consistent with this vision. From universal healthcare to housing for all, the shortening of the work week with no loss of pay, free and public education, and a federal jobs guarantee, the demands listed point towards addressing the worst features of capitalist society.
It takes up the fight against the carceral state, calling to demilitarize the police, disempower police unions, and move “towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.” Under the banner of “Feminism For All,” it treats reproductive and gender-affirming care as universal rights.
Its call to “Finish Reconstruction” — to end the legacy of slavery and colonialism, honor treaties and tribal sovereignty, and pay reparations — points to something crucial. That is, that the democratic tasks at the foundations of the American state that were posed by the American Revolution and the Civil War, and especially with the abolition of slavery, remain unfinished. No wing of the American ruling class has been able to complete them yet.
The section entitled “Working-Class Democracy” especially sent pundits into hysterics. It includes demands to abolish the Senate and the Electoral College and replace the Presidency and the Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary subordinated to an elected assembly which breaks the two-party monopoly and establishes proportional representation. This perspective squarely takes aim at the brazenly undemocratic aspects of the American regime.
Indeed, these are institutions built precisely to curb the influence of the vast majority of working people on the state. The Senate, with two seats per state, essentially gives Wyoming’s roughly 590,000 residents the same weight as California’s 39 million. Until the ratification of the 17th Amendment in 1913, senators weren’t even elected through popular vote. In its very design, the chamber was made to be a brake on the “will” of the masses and as a bulwark for the ruling class. The presidency, furthermore, isn’t determined by popular vote either, but through an Electoral College that acts as a buffer between the electorate and the office. Just in the last three decades, the Electoral College has twice been able to hand the presidency to the loser of the popular vote.
Both the Republican and Democratic parties have built a duopoly around these structures: restricting ballot access, limiting debate participation, allowing unrestricted corporate money in the name of “free speech,” and more. If Citizens United gave the bourgeoisie undue rights to spending and influencing the elections, further restrictions to voting continue to set limits on popular participation. Indeed, at the time of writing, the Supreme Court has cleared the way for Trump’s executive order restricting mail-in voting. It is a “democracy” that is harder and harder to participate in, both in terms of gaining ballot access as well as even participating in the vote. The results lie in the fact that, regularly, barely half of the electorate actually participates, not just because they are kept away from the polls, but because many believe that the process changes nothing. While Warren and Sanders scoff at the suggestion to abolish the Senate or changes to this undemocratic regime, the program points to the truth of a system that is rigged against the working majorities in its very foundation.
Finally, on the question of imperialism and militarism, the program breaks with key aspects of U.S. foreign policy. It calls for the end of arms to Israel and upholding the right of return and to self-determination of the Palestinian people; a closure of all overseas bases; the lifting on all sanctions on Cuba, Venezuela and Iran; and abolishing ICE and amnesty for all immigrants.
Here especially it is essential that socialists go further. The program does not demand the right to self-determination of the people of Puerto Rico or of the other territories the United States still holds, nor does it call for the cancellation of foreign debt administered by U.S. banks and U.S.-controlled institutions like the IMF who bleed the Global South. On the question of immigration, it stops at demanding amnesty for all immigrants, which is distinctly different from demanding full rights and citizenship for all that would challenge the two-tier system that immigrants live under and that constantly denies them basic democratic rights.
As socialists in the United States, the fight against imperialism has to be at the center of our struggles. It matters now more than ever, especially as increased confrontation between great powers that has opened a new cycle of crises and wars that threatens to drag the working class behind it. Despite their differences, both parties agree that the answer is to make American capital undeniably dominant again — a project that will be paid for by workers at home and abroad. This colors the progressive movement too: Sanders dismissed open borders in 2015 as “a Koch brothers proposal”; a decade later he still insists that without borders there is no nation. Blanc, in a more careful register, treats abolishing ICE as something negotiable that can’t overshadow supposedly more relevant concerns like “affordability.” The defense of the “nation” that underscores both approaches belies that America was built through centuries of continental conquest and consolidation in the twentieth century. Everything native-born workers have been granted by the state — or even seen taken away — has been underwritten by that expansion. Capital itself has no borders. It moves, exploits, and discards without compunction, and the bosses who squeeze workers here are the same ones bleeding workers abroad while setting the two against each other. We don’t need a more humane version of that arrangement, but the destruction of a system that divides our class in order to rule it.
What the Program Leaves Out
If the demands in large part point to key aspects that address the immiseration of our class, they also then pose a decisive question: how do we actually get there? It is here that the program falls quiet.
It tells us that some demands may be achieved under the current system, while “complete victory will require building a new society from the ground up.” It says that DSA will push these demands to their “furthest extent” today in order to fight for their “fullest realization in a socialist future.” How the organization intends to fight for any of it — the demands, the independent working-class party it deems necessary, or the socialist future it describes — is left open to interpretation. In essence, the document functions as a broad set of ideas to be drawn on at will by different wings of the big tent that is DSA.
This is the classic division social democracy makes between a minimum program and a maximum program: of small reforms that are to be accumulated in the conjuncture now through electoral and parliamentary work, while the task of socialism is deferred to an indeterminate future. Between the two, there is no bridge, only the assumption that the gradual accumulation of small victories will eventually give way to larger struggles, as if capital will stand idly by while its own power is legislated away.
This gap between the minimum and maximum goals is constantly being filled in practice. Here, DSA has produced a program that raises far-reaching democratic demands and names the construction of a socialist society as its goal, all while some of its most prominent elected officials and intellectuals like AOC, Mamdani, and Blanc distance themselves from it, treating it as an intellectual exercise with little to offer the struggles of today. Under the steady pressure of capitalist reality, the boldest commitments are stripped of their power little by little. Without clarity on how we actually win our immediate and our long-term demands, socialism becomes a horizon permanently receding into the future, sacrificed for partial “victories” in the here and now.
It is this that underscores the popular front logic of DSA. Once socialism is pushed off the map, everything else falls to the fulfilment of this minimum program, achieved not through building independent class power, but through the strengthening of the coalition with the Democratic party. The program’s radicalism, then, serves to hold the organization’s most militant wings — including the aspirations of the tens of thousands who are being drawn to DSA precisely because they want to fight for socialism — all while it builds an operation to revive the Democratic Party. And the more successful that operation becomes, the less DSA remains relevant as a political project of its own. Every political advance it makes within the Democratic Party increases its dependency on that very apparatus, subsuming the radical energy that produced it and strengthening a capitalist party instead.
This returns us to a central idea that the program says it fights for, which is “a party whose goal is a democratic society of the working class.” Such a party will not be born on what Michael Harrington, DSA’s founder, called the “left wing of the possible,” which has only ever meant occupying the leftmost edge of what the Democratic coalition would tolerate. Blanc’s advice to pivot toward the “deliverable” and strip our struggle for socialism of the rest is that same formula for a new generation.
Indeed, decades of trying this very formula has only put the prospect of an independent, working-class party further away. A party of our own can only emerge through the development of the independent power of a united working class, breaking with the parties of capital and fighting against this putrid regime.
Class Struggle and the Fight for Self-Organization
It is in the dynamics of class struggle where every program is set in motion, and the terrain on which every victory worth its name has been won. From the struggle for the eight-hour work day, to the expansion of unions in the United States, to the end of Jim Crow and the expansion of civil rights, our victories have all been won by a mobilized working class willing to fight to the end for its demands. Now too, the fight for public housing, healthcare for all, for an end to militarism and war, and full rights will be determined by the ability of the working class to mobilize and fight to impose its demands upon capital.
The struggle for workers’ power is thus inextricably linked to the fight for united front institutions and the self-organization of the working class, where workers themselves discuss and decide the way forward. Such bodies are able to draw and organize the widest sectors of our class and unite them in common struggle against the Right, as well as against capital and the state that serves them. They also pose, in practice, the question of who actually runs society and, developed far enough, can become institutions of dual power.
The struggle for a socialist future is predicated on one where “every cook can govern.” The goal, indeed, is to use every struggle to develop the capacity of our class to be the one running society itself. The fight for these institutions — from bodies of self-organization to a party of our own — cannot be deferred to a later stage. It has to advance in the heat of the struggle and in the shifts in thinking already underway, especially at a time when the bourgeoisie is conspiring to find ways to offload its crises onto the backs of the working class.
In December, writing for Jacobin, Bhaskar Sunkara and Gabriel Hetland argued that Mamdani should make popular assemblies central to his governing strategy as a way to build a force that could face off against the interests of landlords, Big Capital and an establishment that protects them. While nothing came of said proposal, it posed an important question. Of course, the development of assemblies that could discuss and decide on the way forward would mark a significant advance in the situation. But would they exist to be a pressure campaign on City Hall for wings of the Democratic coalition, or could they be the cells to develop the independent power of the working class? The distinction is everything, and is what determines the development of the capacity of the working class to fight, instead of waiting for a future, utopian moment when the conditions are just right to do so.
Indeed, despite class struggle being more passive it this moment and largely being expressed in the municipal arena, it would be a mistake to miss the seeds of such struggle that do exist. Minneapolis showed a working class willing to mobilize and fight to defend itself. DSA’s own leadership credits this primary season’s victories not to its candidates but to its volunteer armies, the tens of thousands who have canvassed, phone banked, and knocked on hundreds of thousands of doors for their candidates as they campaigned on promises to tax the rich. And then there’s the massive shifts underway in ways of thinking, with many growing increasingly critical of capitalism and imperialism. To organize that discontent means taking up the fight for self-organization with precisely these sectors, those who want to make the rich pay for their crises, who despise Trump and the Far Right and want to fight them, and who want a different future.
Once Again, On Party and the Working Class
Toward this horizon of a socialist society, which DSA’s program outlines as its ultimate goal, there is no substitute for the role of the working class. It is not simply a question of having a government that rules on behalf of the working class by winning some concessions that marginally improve lives, but of the working class becoming able to rule itself, realizing its own agency as a class to shape society. The realization of that power has to be the very aim of socialists.
It is here that the question of the party arises, because a party of our own can only emerge out of that process, of the self-activity of the working class entering into political life. Any working-class party worth the name would be an instrument to advance that fight in every arena — in our workplaces, in our schools and universities, and in the streets. It would participate in elections and take up positions within the state not to govern from above, but to transform each victory into a platform from which to strengthen the struggle from below.
The experience unfolding in Argentina — largely ignored by Jacobin and the Left in the United States — is instructive here. Amid the crisis of Javier Milei’s far-right government and the decline of Peronism, the political figure with the best positive image in the entire country is Myriam Bregman, a revolutionary socialist, human rights lawyer, deputy of the Left and Workers’ Front (FIT-U), and a member of our sister organization, the Party of Socialist Workers (PTS). The enthusiasm behind her in this moment has been made possible not by softening her politics to court the “center,” but by being an intransigent fighter against the Far Right, imperialism, and every attack of the bosses. She uses her position to bolster the struggles of the working class.
The question now is what to do with that authority at a moment when class struggle is relatively passive. The answer is not to treat it as electoral capital and organize only those already won to the FIT-U, but to turn sympathy into an active force. That is the significance of the committees the PTS has begun to build around Myriam. They are conceived not as the “get-out-the vote” machinery for elections that are over a year away, but as bodies meant to organize existing support into something that can draw in broader sectors — workers, youth, the unorganized — to fight Milei and the Far Right, the bosses, and imperialism. The emergence of a party of the new working class, representative of our class in all its diversity, is directly tied to its ability to take up the fight for its own program, and with its own methods.
A genuine party of the working class will have to be far larger than anything that exists on the Left today — larger than the FIT-U in Argentina, and larger than DSA here. But in each case socialists have a decisive role to play in organizing toward this goal.
DSA stands before a rare opening, with tens of thousands of new members, a genuine audience for socialist ideas, and a program that indicts the entire capitalist and imperialist order as the enemy. The question is whether it will use that opening to wage a real fight or fold it back, once again, into the Democratic Party. To actually fight for the socialist future they outline in the program, DSA can use the resources it has built in this socialist revival to run candidates independent of the Democratic party, especially in the run up to the 2028 presidential race; these candidates would take up the program’s demands instead of distancing themselves from them. Such a campaign could be an opportunity to organize the working class more broadly, instead of being an end in itself.
In order to put up an actual fight for the key demands outlined in DSA’s manifesto, it would be immeasurably more valuable for DSA to use its vast resources toward organizing committees of action and assemblies across the country — of union members and the unorganized, of immigrants, students, and the unemployed — where people could discuss such an independent campaign and how to fight for it. It would be a fight to shape the political terrain on our own terms, with the potential to drag new sectors into the struggle, and to become the experience out of which a party of the working class, one capable of coordinating our struggles, could emerge.
DSA is right: workers do deserve more. Organized into their own independent force, they also have the power to take it.
The post Workers Do Deserve More. But How Do We Actually Win It? appeared first on Left Voice.
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