{"id":1253,"date":"2020-08-16T10:43:41","date_gmt":"2020-08-16T15:43:41","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/v01_2020\/staging\/?p=1253"},"modified":"2022-11-07T17:22:14","modified_gmt":"2022-11-07T22:22:14","slug":"dsa-at-a-crossroads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/tempestmag.org\/test02\/2020\/08\/dsa-at-a-crossroads\/","title":{"rendered":"At a crossroads"},"content":{"rendered":"

2020<\/span> is a year that no one was prepared for<\/a>. The sudden shift from an electoral season<\/a> that dominated political life to pandemic and Black rebellion<\/a> has drastically upended our expectations of how politics would play out in the first year of the new decade and forced us to acclimate to a new normal. Crossing these dramatically different rhythms of political time (election campaigning and mass protest; organization building and movement support) hasn\u2019t been particularly easy for activists. For socialists who have committed to an orientation based on an assessment of a period that is rapidly closing, it\u2019s been disorienting.<\/p>\n

I\u2019ve written a lot in the last year about the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), analyzing the organization and covering its internal life, particularly the decisions of DSA leaders. Now that the organization has grown to 70,000 members, accumulated experience on campaigns, and encountered a radically different situation, we need to make a balance sheet of what DSA has done as a socialist organization and start to think through the new challenges that emerge.<\/p>\n

A very brief history of DSA<\/h3>\n

Although the organization was originally formed in 1982, DSA was essentially refounded in 2016\u201317 as new, mostly young members joined the organization\u2019s ranks following the 2016 Bernie Sanders campaign and the election of Donald Trump. By 2017, DSA had expanded to more than 25,000 members, up from only a few thousand mostly paper members years earlier. With so many new young socialists, DSA effectively became a new organization in 2017, pushing away from its old social democratic leanings inherited from the previous era.<\/p>\n

We can think of the refounded DSA up to 2019 as being in a formative period. The activity of DSA members from 2016 through 2018 was a mix of organization building and political experimentation. Chapters were created in every state in the country, most of them with no historic link to DSA as it previously existed.<\/p>\n

While there were some general guidelines about how to structure a chapter, the politics of organization building by necessity became a central feature of the new DSA: how could chapters effectively relate to so many new members joining? The socialist left before 2016 was largely built around tight cadre organizations, with careful selection and deep commitment to politics. DSA\u2019s broad appeal meant that organization questions would have to deal with various levels of interest, experience, and involvement. Chapters had to figure out communication methods that struck the right balance of open access and useful points of entry for democratic participation. This might seem mundane or like it \u201cisn\u2019t politics\u201d, but political activity in DSA is mediated through chapters, and figuring out how new socialists would organize themselves to do work became a primary issue in this early period.<\/p>\n

Politically, DSA chapters experimented with its common activity through the end of 2018. For an organization that generally marked Bernie Sanders as its origin point, there would be roughly three years before the next election where Sanders could run again, which meant that chapters had to figure out what socialist activism meant in the meantime\u2014\u201clet\u2019s throw everything at the wall and see what sticks\u201d. Beginning in 2017, DSA chapters mobilized at airports against the Muslim-ban; disrupted figures in the Trump cabinet as they dined out; rallied against Immigrant and Customs Enforcement (ICE); formed socialist-feminist groups; demonstrated outside of Brett Kavanaugh\u2019s confirmation hearing; organized brake light clinics; hosted socials; confronted fascists in Charlottesville; and pressured politicians to support Medicare for All.<\/p>\n

Two events had an outsized role in changing the tenor of DSA\u2019s activity. The first was the 2018 teachers\u2019 strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona, and Kentucky. These illegal strikes involving some DSA members also raised consciousness about the power of organized labor to combat neoliberalism. They showed that teachers in red states could strike and win demands against state governments that were decidedly anti-labor, offering another path to deliver change in the United States. Chapters inspired by the \u201cred state revolt\u201d were eager to support the Los Angeles and Chicago teachers, Stop and Shop workers and United Auto Workers strikes soon after.<\/p>\n

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Chicago teachers on strike.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

The second was the surprise upset election of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) to U.S. Congress in 2018. AOC, who at the time was not a professional politician but a bartender recruited by Justice Democrats, secured an electoral win with the help of New York DSA that suggested electoral efforts could be fielded locally while still raising the banner of democratic socialism. AOC\u2019s (loose) association with DSA created buzz around the organization and encouraged DSA chapters to invest more in electoral efforts.<\/p>\n

2019: International uprisings in an election season<\/h3>\n

In 2019, things start to shift. Objectively, the level of struggle in the United States wasn\u2019t what it was the previous two years. As the election season closed in, attention became much more narrowly focused on high politics, including a never-ending series of scandals, the ongoing horror of the Trump administration, and impeachment proceedings. Movement activism declined. The teachers\u2019 strike wave closed with a last battle in Oakland. The United Auto Workers had their first major auto strike in decades, but it coincided with corruption charges for union officials; ultimately the strike was unable to beat back General Motors\u2019 attacks.<\/p>\n

DSA\u2019s larger policy campaigns (Medicare for All, Green New Deal) were at an impasse \u2013 years of canvassing and lobbying did not find many openings to actualize these important and popular political policies; unable to make inroads, the efforts often faded away or dissolved into electoral efforts. While politics in the United States seemed to be changing for the worse, internationally there were historic uprisings in Hong Kong, Puerto Rico, Sudan, Chile, and France.<\/p>\n