Against the Right and the Center:
A Democratic Socialist Strategy for Working Class Power
Following the 2020 election, many of us hoped that the defeat of Donald Trump would create an opening for the left to move a significant progressive agenda nationally. Instead, it is the right that has taken the initiative, from the January 6 insurrection and attempted coup, to attacks on the rights of Queer people in Republican-controlled states, to the recent slew of Supreme Court decisions undermining any kind of government action to address gun violence or climate catastrophe, to, most notably, overturning Roe v. Wade.
In light of these conditions, millions of working-class people who are open to socialist politics are currently preoccupied with the goal of beating back the right’s move towards fascism. To build a broader and more deeply rooted working-class base, DSA should adopt a strategy that builds solidarity with these working-class communities by joining in what they view as far and away the most important political fight of the present moment. Put another way: in order to advance the politics of socialism, we cannot afford to sit out the fight against the right.
In this context, DSA needs a strategy to resist attacks from the right, win reforms that meet the immediate needs of working people, and move us closer to the revolutionary transformation of society that is our ultimate goal. With the shift from a Trump administration to a Biden administration, DSA has seen our membership growth plateau and does not have clear projects like Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaign and the winning congressional elections of the “Squad” that brought thousands of new members to the organization organically. Meanwhile, the Democratic agenda at the national level remains constrained by a neoliberal establishment largely committed to the same politics and policies that have brought us to the current political moment.
Our perspective, based on the analysis below, is that in the present moment democratic socialists need to lead in the fight against the right and the fight against the center, that we can connect those struggles to the project of building and rebuilding working-class organization outside of the electoral arena, and that we can and must maintain our organizational independence and democracy even as we operate within a broad coalition against the right for the time being.
Our Analysis
In the United States today, most people, including most working people, understand the primary conflict in American society in partisan terms. Instead of the conflict we want between a self-conscious working-class majority and the ruling class, the lines are drawn between the increasingly authoritarian Republican Party coalition and everyone else. The opposition to GOP politics, expressed electorally through the Democratic Party, ranges from liberal capitalists to unions to the unorganized majority of the U.S. working class.
Anti-Black racism and white supremacy are a central part of this conflict. The Republican base is a cross-class alliance of primarily white voters mobilized by their capitalist leadership through “right-wing populist” appeals to racial hierarchy, xenophobia, and patriarchy. Democratic Party politics are dominated by an establishment of career politicians and wealthy donors, most of whom are committed to neoliberal political goals. However, their voting coalition also contains the majority of working people and the vast majority of people of color, especially Black Americans. Socialists must confront racism and white supremacy head on in order to build a united working-class movement that can defeat the right.
Over the last decade, layers of the working class, especially younger workers, have become increasingly radicalized through mass mobilizations, growing social movements, and promising new developments in the labor movement. Demands for economic justice, equity for historically marginalized communities, climate action, voting rights, reproductive and Queer rights, and many more are being advanced by new formations and existing organizations. This upswing creates a major opportunity for the left to contest for leadership of a working-class majority, and for power. Yet the left has struggled to successfully cohere social movement activity into an organizational force at the scale that is needed, and has struggled to organize or politicize the substantial part of the working class that remains disconnected from politics entirely.
The electoral manifestation of these movements was best seen in the Bernie Sanders presidential campaigns. In choosing to contest for the presidency in the Democratic Party primaries, Sanders brought the language of socialism and class struggle to the mainstream of American politics. These presidential campaigns demonstrated that socialists must contest power in Democratic primaries, where large segments of the working class are already engaged and are ready for a democratic socialist alternative to neoliberalism.
One obstacle to the Sanders challenges was that as long as working people see their primary threat coming from the right and view the Democratic Party leadership as their primary defense, that leadership will retain significant legitimacy. The Republican Party seeks to establish minority rule, dispense with basic democratic liberties, and escalate horrific attacks on reproductive rights, Queer people, Black people, and immigrants. Working people who are voting to defend union rights, abortion rights, voting rights and the rights to protest consistently vote for Democrats. A left that cannot offer a clear path to defeating the right and preventing these outcomes will remain marginal, even as the working class mobilizes and organizes against these attacks.
At the same time, the leadership of the broad front against the right, represented most clearly by President Joe Biden, have politics that are wholly inadequate to effectively defend even our limited democracy, and are uninterested in mobilizing working people in its defense. This leadership is materially and ideologically opposed to our broad vision as well as many of our immediate aims, and their failure to deliver for working-class voters has been a major driver of the political disengagement and demobilization among working people that created an opening for right-wing populist politics. Transforming the U.S. into a genuine multi-racial democracy capable of meeting the demands of the working class will depend on operating for the time being in a broad coalition against the right, but also defeating this failed neoliberal politics and winning leadership of a majoritarian working-class movement.
Our Strategic Orientation in the Electoral Arena
The dilemmas posed by this analysis require that DSA wage two distinct struggles in the electoral arena, one as part of a broad front against the forces of the far right represented by the Republican Party, and another within that front against the neoliberal and capitalist leadership of the Democratic Party coalition.
As part of the struggle against the right, DSA should fight against restrictions of the franchise, gerrymandering, the criminalization of dissent, and attacks on the integrity of democratic elections. We should be clear that the election of Republican majorities that will pursue that anti-democratic agenda is a major threat to the left, and we should oppose the election of Republicans even when the opposition is still led by class enemies such as corporate Democrats. We can also lead on the issues that broadly unite working-class forces against the right — especially the ones Democratic leaders claim to support but often fail to deliver on — like the fights for abortion rights and working-class economic demands.
Simultaneously and equally importantly, DSA should take the lead in driving class conflict within the Democratic coalition, especially through Democratic primary challenges. DSA’s recent growth is rooted partly in our participation in the 2016 and 2020 Sanders campaigns, which posed the most serious challenge from the left yet to neoliberal hegemony. We should continue to prioritize this work, where we have had some of our biggest successes, and be unrestrained in our goal of building an independent, democratic, working-class organization that can defeat the capitalist leadership and neoliberal politics of the Democratic Party.
DSA must take the task of winning governing power seriously so that we can transcend the dilemmas and limitations of the current political situation. We need a strategy to pass transformational reforms that build the confidence of the working class and shift the balance of forces in our favor. Reforms like the PRO Act, a Green New Deal with a jobs guarantee, expanded voting rights, citizenship for undocumented people, decarceration, and Medicare for All are essential to transitioning U.S. politics into the new political conflict that we want — replacing the current partisan divide with one polarized along class lines between the ruling class and a united, multiracial, working-class majority. Winning these reforms will likely require a broad front that can decisively defeat Republicans in the electoral arena, engage in mass mobilization, organization, and disruption, and win electoral victories from the left against centrist and neoliberal forces in the Democratic coalition.
Beyond Electoral Politics — Building a Mass Base for Socialism
Our project is to defeat the right and the neoliberal leadership of the Democratic Party, implement a program that can substantially shift the balance of forces in our society, and lead a working-class majority in the struggle to end the capitalist system. Each of these tasks requires organization and struggle outside of formal politics. DSA must transform itself into an organization that is deeply rooted in working-class communities and working-class organizations, and must become an engine for the independent organization of the working class. In workplaces, communities, schools, social movements, and moments of mass mobilization, socialists have a key role to play. The profound lack of organization of the U.S. working class at present is our biggest challenge, and provides the biggest opportunity for right-wing populist ideology to make further inroads.
Building and transforming the labor movement is a key task for DSA members, particularly in this moment when workers across the country — most notably but not exclusively at Amazon and Starbucks — are forming worker-led unions and winning recognition through worker-led campaigns. This means organizing unions and supporting workers who are organizing, it means engaging with internal union politics to build more effective, democratic, militant and politically active unions, and it means DSA chapters acting in solidarity with workers who are taking action and striking. The labor movement and the left have long histories of deploying skilled organizers to strategic workplaces, which should continue to be part of our strategy. DSA should also focus on recruiting members from the organic leadership of unions and other working-class organizations, and training and supporting DSA members to organize where they live and work.
Union membership is at its lowest in nearly a century. With just around 10 percent of the workforce belonging to a union, organizing millions of new workers into militant and democratic unions must be central to our vision. At a time when the vast majority of Americans and especially young people approve of unions, DSA has the opportunity to play a significant role in organizing the remaining 90 percent. Working with allies in the labor movement, DSA should be providing support and allocate resources for projects aiming to organize the unorganized. Projects like the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) and the Labor Notes Organizing Training Schools, among others, have shown tremendous success in assisting those who wish to organize their workplaces.
While most of the existing U.S. labor movement falls short of the militant, democratic, and politically-independent movement we need, in our labor work we must remain focused on doing the work of uniting the membership to take on the boss in actual workplaces. As in our electoral work, we should always seek to demonstrate through actions and results, not simply through theory, that militancy is the most effective instrument for workers to defeat the boss and achieve concrete goals.
Many DSA chapters are initiating and experimenting with base-building projects outside of workplaces, including mutual aid, immigrant solidarity, and other community organizing efforts. Tenant organizing projects are especially promising as a housing affordability crisis sweeps working-class communities across the nation, affecting DSA’s current membership as well as a major segment of the working class we need to organize. Like our work in the labor movement, these projects require long term investment, skilled organizing, and operate on a different cycle than electoral and legislative campaigns. DSA must prioritize investing in this long-term organizing work, and engage in rigorous organizing and evaluation of how these projects can build our power. We believe that these efforts should not be isolated or siloed projects, but that we can develop models to integrate base-building efforts into our democratic socialist strategy in tandem with work in other areas.
The last decade in the U.S. and around the world has been characterized by largely spontaneous mass mobilizations of historic proportions expressing outrage against racial and gendered oppression, and advancing economic and democratic demands. The unprecedented mass protests in the summer of 2020 in response to the state-sanctioned murder of George Floyd represent a major and vital development in the struggle against white supremacy in the U.S.. While we should expect these mass mobilizations to have a heterogeneous political character, DSA members and chapters should participate in them, bring a democratic socialist perspective to the struggle and push them forward where we can, and see them as important opportunities for millions of working-class people to develop their political analysis and take the first steps towards building the mass organizations we need.
As democratic socialists we know that our base-building work in and out of workplaces and our participation in mass movements and social movements are not in conflict with our strategy in the electoral and legislative arena. We should work in all these areas to build independent organizations that are politicized and strategic, in pursuit of developing a mass working-class base united around a transformational political strategy.
Maintaining Organizational Independence Against the Risk of Demobilization
Participating in a broad front against the right is essential to preventing catastrophic right-wing victory, and operating within a victorious governing coalition is essential for advancing the aims of the left, but we are not unaware of the risks that an organized working-class base could be demobilized or co-opted by class enemies. This risk is less a present risk that class enemies will seek to infiltrate DSA or co-opt what little power we currently have than it is a future challenge based on how we navigate the contradictions of working within a governing bloc to advance democratic socialism. In order to prevent cooptation of our organization or demobilization of our base, we need clear strategies to maintain our independence and initiative.
We can maintain our independence and initiative by being honest and clear about our strategy with our membership. Our base should understand our ultimate goal of wholesale social transformation, our strategy for achieving it, and why defeating the right is essential, even if it means that we have temporary, tactical alignment with some class enemies in the Democratic Party when it comes to defeating the right. We should reject any illusions within our organization about those capitalist forces, their politics or interests, and oppose any political alliance that goes beyond the contingent, temporary, and tactical agreement on defeating Republicans. We should focus our organizing and message on our reasons for participating in the front — both the urgent need to defeat the right and prevent a victory for anti-democratic reaction, and the absolute necessity of doing so if we hope to win transformational change.
We must also retain our commitment to building a fully independent organization. We should in every instance be considering how to strengthen our own independent organizational capacity, and how to strengthen our own connections to working-class people at the expense of Democratic party leadership. We should reject coalitions purely for the sake of coalition, and make our own tactical and strategic decisions about the extent and nature of our participation in the broad front against the right, in each instance understanding that other elements within the front have their own interests, distinct from ours. We should remain vigilant about maintaining DSA as a fully democratic and dues-funded organization accountable first and foremost to its members and to the working class.
Most of all, we have to take initiative to lead the working class. If we sit out struggles that are urgently important to working-class people we will never be in a position to lead the transition to socialism. We should seek a leadership role in the simultaneous struggles against the right and against the center, we should drive class struggle forward by taking the fight to the landlords and bosses, and we should always seek to demonstrate through our actions that socialist organization is the most effective instrument for working-class people to defeat their enemies and achieve their aims.