DSA Constellation Caucus

We see the historic task of DSA as cohering the varying and at times contradictory social forces into a decisive working class subject able to topple U.S. empire and global capitalism—something parties and organizations on the Left have historically failed to accomplish at scale. 

The fundamental nature of capitalist domination is the ordering of peoples into hierarchies and the dividing of people into borders. Our response is one of solidarity. We must replace the ordering of people and borders with a common understanding that we, the working class, the vast majority of society, are linked in a common project for humanity. As the old IWW saying goes, “an injury to one is an injury to all. All for one, and one for all.” The core of any socialist program must be a recognition of the value of all humanity. We reject the idea of being realistic in order to accommodate existing processes of oppression and exploitation. We are, in Mike Davis’ words, partisans of the necessary, understanding the necessity of no less than the complete remaking of our relations to one another and the world. Ultimately, it is not half measures that will build socialism.

The socialist project requires the adaptation of this universal value of humanity to the everyday lives we live. Centuries of repeated defeat of working class and progressive struggles have left the U.S. working class fragmented both materially and ideologically. We make sense of the world through ideology, which comes out of and reflects the material conditions and circumstances of our lives in all of their specificity. DSA and the socialist project must cohere an ideology that can both unite all of these contradictory social forces into a unitary working class political subject and make a bid for leadership over society as a whole.

The only path to uniting this social class is a dynamic, organized mass party. This party must be able to embed ourselves in all local struggles for progress and articulate those demands inside the halls of power. We must simultaneously develop demands on behalf of the entire class we organize and support the struggles of smaller social forces within our struggle. When speaking of a mass party, we consciously reject the political form of the cadre party based on the correct political line. Instead, we seek to be a party united in unwavering commitment to universal humanity and a strategy of mass politics, in which we are consistently developing both the leaders of our class and the supporters of our movement. In the end, the success of our political project can only be measured by the social base we are able to build. 

If our party is successful, it will entail the transformation of millions of people to see themselves as makers of history and partisans of a new world struggling to be born. We will, through our success, see millions more conceive of the project of universal solidarity as their own project of liberation and freedom.

DSA must quickly build a mass socialist party structure to make significant interventions into U.S. politics, building the momentum of working-class power towards an overthrow of the capitalist system. Despite the former being an agreeable premise to many, we believe DSA must build a robust, central, national core for the party, prioritizing effective socialist leadership and building the bureaucracy. With over a hundred thousand members and growing, and the crises of capitalism ever compounding, we believe that DSA must cohere itself into a unified mass party instead of a loosely-associated federation of chapters.

Centralization must not be reactionarily discarded as a mistake of past projects, but championed and utilized as an effective tool of class struggle and socialist construction. The construction of a central party does not come at the cost of democracy, but instead promotes it. Shared goals, clear priorities, and effective leaders must flow from the democratic mandate of convention, and the weak bureaucracy of DSA is an existential threat to the timely and proper execution of those mandates. The multi-tendency character of DSA is not at odds with centralization because centralization is the only path to make democracy meaningful and grow the party. 

In order to execute a bold vision and agenda, DSA will need more than just confident and effective leadership—it will need a central party undergirding them. Commissions and working bodies must become tools of the party, not sites of ideological struggle, with specialized roles for member-volunteers, large buckets of work being executed by expert organizers on staff, directed by visionary national leaders. At the national level, a fighting mass party will not be built by mediocrity, but must harness the immense talent of our staff and members to build a ruthlessly efficient machine for building socialism. This is the crucial first step to building the central pole: We must build the infrastructure for top-down coordination and collective action.

The primary task of electoral campaigns is to develop party-like infrastructure and a working class constituency that thinks of itself as part of a Democratic Socialist project; following a strategy known as the party surrogate. This requires precision in our electoral work and a number of standards to be met. Campaigns need to have a strong understanding and commitment to volunteer leadership and long-term org building. This is most commonly achieved with cadre candidates and DSA organizers staffing campaigns, but is also possible with candidates and staff developed through unions and other member-led organizations. 

We must also run candidates to win. This judgment must be made on two levels. At the organizational level, DSA must have a critical mass of experienced and skilled organizers that can run a campaign. At the voter level, we must be clear-eyed that we don’t just win votes by talking to people or by articulating a perfect set of demands. Worker’s politics are conditioned by the world around them. DSA must rigorously look at the turnout in previous left contests and the class composition of a given district to calculate tailored and specifically winnable voter universes. In districts where those universes are significantly smaller than our win number, we should refrain from running candidates. 

Our electoral campaigns should build a more durable set of Democratic Socialist voters who rely on our endorsement to inform their voting and political engagement. This includes following already agreed upon DSA practices, like having our logo prominently on campaign literature and running oppositional campaigns where the enemy is named and identified with the ruling class. These campaigns will be successful primarily in the Democratic primary and among Democratic primary voters, where we can build upon our current membership and bring new demographics into our party. 

In conclusion, our electoral campaigns are primarily party-building and party-organizing efforts. Often, more effort is put into conceptualizing the perfect campaign platform, whether social democratic or more radical in nature. Instead, we should prioritize a scalable volunteer operation that develops supporters into members and members into leaders. Campaign communications and platforms should be constructed with this goal in mind, oriented towards widely felt positive demands which build a winning campaign and party.

Socialists in office must work as organizers, using their position to bolster working class power and build a socialist constituency. Powers of elected office can directly support labor and tenant unions, community organizing, and the work of their DSA chapters. As models of socialist leadership, socialists in office must strive to excel at the day-to-day duties of public service, including constituent services, political education, and responsive governance. Ultimately, however, socialists in office will be judged by their results – which is why material gains for the working class must be the highest priority. Victories for our class should be loudly claimed, but they will never be easy. Knowing that many obstacles will come our way, it is crucial that socialists in office develop a robust and modern communications apparatus that clearly identifies who we are fighting for and whom we aim to defeat.

A constructive relationship between our party and electeds can only be built through organization. Socialist in Office Committees (SiOCs) are an essential in managing any disagreement, allowing DSA to proactively communicate our priorities and positions. As materialists, we should strive to express our positions to the public in terms of concrete policies and actions, rather than focus our critique on an individual’s character. In doing so, DSA can maintain our political independence and continue to collaborate with socialists in office to advance the interests of the working class. 

As Democratic Socialism grows in influence, the nature of our electoral project may change. We may encounter opportunists who aim to use our organization, or find new comrades who join our movement and our SiOCs. With a growth in DSA’s power, the contradictions of governing a capitalist society will heighten.  We cannot afford to avoid these struggles by abstaining from electoral action – instead, our moment demands that we confront them. In our analysis and action, our goal must be clear – to wield the power of the state on behalf of the working class, and pursue a socialist transformation of society.

Labor organizing, which focuses on the workplace as a site of struggle, must be at the core of our effort to construct our class as a polity. Today, the U.S. working class is regrettably united primarily through our common exploitation. Our task is to construct a working class that is militant, organized and shares a political vision of Democratic Socialism. Within DSA, we must build out our bureaucracy, in chapters and the National Labor Commission, and empower our thousands of union member comrades to join our democratic socialist labor organizing.

DSA should prioritize labor organizing projects that meet the masses where they are at.The strongest worker-leaders are organically drawn to their careers and plan to stay in them long-term. This is especially true for careers requiring professional training, including teaching and healthcare. Tactics like salting and prioritizing “strategic industries” can have utility, but tend to overemphasize a smaller number of workers who are willing to change their career for organizing. DSA should prioritize projects that reach across the working class, such as the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC), or organize workers under a shared purpose, whether that be for an arms embargo or a 2028 May Day general strike. These projects encourage the depth and breadth of relationship building which will be required to organize more workers and align them with our political objectives.

Shaping the labor movement will require scientific organizing, analyzing and adapting to our conditions to determine the correct course of action. DSA members within unions should be empowered to coordinate and strategize, and members outside of those unions should avoid instructing those workers what to do. Some unions will require reform caucuses, while others will allow for socialist leadership without them. Some staff or elected leadership may be an obstacle for socialists, while others will be allies. Regardless, our goal must be to build larger unions with more organized, militant union membership, who are able to win tangible and material gains for the working class and are able to threaten or use majority or supermajority strikes as their ultimate weapon.

As residents of the U.S. , it is one of our primary tasks to reign in the most destructive military force on the planet. We advocate a revolutionary defeatist position which states that our role as socialists in the imperial core is to oppose all international interventions and weaken the U.S military in any way possible. We hold this responsibility not only to our comrades abroad who suffer under imperialism, but also as an essential piece of the struggle for our own freedom.

We see the primary tasks of anti-imperialists in DSA to integrate the ongoing struggles against empire into the Democratic Socialist working class we are building. We accomplish this by fighting for peace, justice and liberation at the national level, while combatting the scourge of the military industrial complex in each of our communities. Our most effective work will place international solidarity at the forefront in all arenas of struggle, whether in electoral, labor, or community based campaigns. 

In our international work,  diplomatic relations and shared campaigns with progressive forces across the world is an essential strategic priority of DSA. This can include a wide set of organizations from which we can engage in shared work, but should prioritize mass parties of the working class. We must work with parties that maintain deep social organization and hold state power, rather than a narrow ideological orientation. While varying international conditions will  change our approach in each region, we recognize our fundamental task as the taking of state power and the governing of society, and thus have much to learn from socialists already doing so.

The state of our international work highlights the necessity of building DSA into a coherent and organized central pole with meaningful decision-making power. Our enemies—the multinational corporations, the fossil fuel industry, and imperialist military forces—all work internationally, so we must too. We have a world to win, and we need workers all over the world to win it.

Centering the processes of discrimination and oppression requires understanding the whole of society as made up of specific, overdetermined pieces, and that community is built on the basis of shared experience rather than shared identity. Gendering, racializing, and abling/disabling paradigms are processes rather than static identities and all identities are constructs. Solidarity is built from a space of shared goals, struggles, and visions for the future, and our analysis is only possible when we  recognize that identities shape one’s material realities and experiences.

Within DSA, we must strive to expand our membership to reflect the entire working class, and incorporate the diversity of processes and experiences in which workers have gone through into our political strategies. We must approach individuals as they are in their whole beings, not merely through the place they work or the apartment they live in. One’s viewpoints are not separate from their lived experiences and our understanding of the world can only be accurate when creating the inventory of the historical processes that have left us here. DSA must build a compelling and emancipatory space that shows collective struggle always triumphs over sectarianism, all while recognizing the distinct diverse roots and not taking them for granted.

We must also be clear-eyed about the current communities not present within DSA. Chapters should look at what their demographic numbers look like compared to their community and intentionally course correct. This can take a variety of forms. Productive collaboration and communication with identity groups demonstrates that the chapter takes those concerns seriously and can provide a perspective that might not be available in the chapter yet. These efforts should not be merely meetings of leadership but experiences that help to bring together swathes of DSA members with communities not currently represented in DSA. Campaigns should be structured to meaningfully address community needs without centering normative perspectives that might be over represented in the chapter. Working towards a truly representative membership should be treated as part of the main chapter focus on recruitment and development; diversity is not separate from any other chapter priorities.

Our approach to coalitions, caucuses, and fronts can be distilled from three points: First, we understand that the task of building a socialist party willing and able to seize power in the U.S. is an urgent task, not one to be deprioritized. Second, we reject the idea that a mass socialist party can only be built in an artificially-saturated Left political landscape. Third, we believe the multi-tendency and member-led character of DSA is unique and historically significant, incomparable to other contemporary progressive forces.

Generally, we remain skeptical of coalitions, especially ‘permanent’ coalitions which are not rooted in a specific goal or demands, or which do not have a natural way of ending. Coalitions we do participate in must center tangible, material organizing that advances progressive causes. While coalitions can and should be used to bolster the strength of our efforts and bridge into new or underrepresented constituencies, they should not be depended on for these outcomes. Ultimately, the principal task of all of DSA’s work should be strengthening the cause of socialism, with the most effective coalitions being the ones that advance our work. 

On caucuses, DSA must not continue to take its multi-tendency character for granted, and must move towards recognizing and regulating caucuses to ensure fairness in our democracy and the centering of DSA in our organizing, not political factions. Caucuses are an inseparable feature of DSA’s political fabric, but can wield outsized political influence that stymies the dynamism of our democracy and hinders the ability to prioritize effective bureaucracies over politically loyal ones. Recognizing caucuses is a crucial first step to making these institutions transparent and accessible to members, but must not be where DSA’s addressing of caucuses ends. Recognition must be followed by regulation such as spending limits at convention, and restrictions on external organizing projects by caucuses, whether domestic or international. 

Lastly, we must reject fronts as a way to ease the working class into socialism, instead addressing the compounding crises of capitalism as open socialists, allowing the working class the dignity to reject U.S. propaganda and come to socialism on their own terms. All too often, fronts lack the political coherence to build class organization and consciousness and actually take time away from our ability to build DSA. If a project or issue is so important that some might justify a front to advance it, we believe it must instead be enacted within DSA, and prioritized appropriately within the boundaries of our mass member democracy. 
Whether it is coalitions, caucuses, or fronts, we stand firm: DSA First!

We believe that one of the greatest contrasts between our capitalist present and our socialist future is culture and the community that builds it. As a society, capitalism increasingly alienates us not just from our work, but from our families, friends, neighbors, and communities. Thus, a core part of our project to build a mass socialist party is building a vibrant socialist culture that exists independent from our capitalist institutions and is rooted in every aspect of each person’s life.

Socialist culture is not only upheld by monthly socials or DSA members spending time with each other at a bar after a meeting. Rather, building socialist culture must fundamentally be an organizing project. Capitalism has seeped into every part of our society, and to achieve our dream of a socialist society, socialism must do so instead. This requires intentionally building the social infrastructure that will serve as the base of this mass party.  Often we see dedicated organizers get burnt out and have to take a complete step back from DSA; without the social infrastructure to allow the room to take a breath and remain embedded in our project these members are ultimately difficult to retain. Furthermore, in order to truly span the entire working class, we must build this fabric of belonging to the party even when other aspects of life under capitalism may be preventing high participation. 

Internally, we must ask ourselves how we are improving the culture of DSA, making it more accessible to the average worker and building a culture that actively brings in new members rather than drives them away. Investigating and strengthening local grievance structures and having an active code of conduct are just a couple starting points for this kind of work. From there, we can collectively make interventions that help sustain chapters as anchors in the local community. Only by upholding a comradely and proactive effort to resolve issues effectively can DSA be the proper voice of the working class.

Externally, DSA must become more extensively and organically involved in our local communities. Every place where people gather is a potential frontier to lay down more roots for a mass socialist party. From garden clubs to church congregations, local sports leagues to pottery studios, there are opportunities to organize working class people everywhere. If DSA is committed to its mass organizational form it has the responsibility to build these spaces under its own roof. DSA-led social spaces, when built in a healthy and productive manner, can and should be used to on-ramp new members into material, deep organizing work. Recruitment through social spaces allows prospective members to more quickly find the types of organizing work that they are interested in, latching onto DSA and then being organized deeper into the organization by active leadership.

Ultimately, community is a function and a feature of both our socialist politics and of the world we want to build. When we socialize and build community with an intent to organize, we strengthen the foundations on which a mass socialist party can be built.