“Groundwork Thought” Library

Written By Astra Allen

This is a list of books and articles that our members draw on when developing our response to extant political events. This list is a work in progress, and we do not endorse everything in each reading. Our tasks and perspectives reflect the democratically agreed-upon principles of the caucus. 

We have gathered these documents to clarify our perspectives, provide political education resources for Groundwork members, and use them as a tool to advance mass-politics in our chapters. 

Points of Unity

  • DSA Will Be the Party 

  • We Are Fighting the Clock 

  • Build to Win, Win To Build

  • Seize State Power 

  • Class Struggle Unionism for Socialism in Our Lifetime

  • Socialism Beats Fascism 

  • State Power, Street Power, Strike Power 

  • The Party Leads 

  • Mass Party, Mass Democracy

What is Groundwork?

Groundwork is a Caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America. We are 21st-century Marxists and Ecosocialists committed to organizing our way down the militant Democratic Road to Socialism through the practice of mass politics. Our project is to utilize mutually reinforcing state, street, and strike power to align the working class around its shared interests and win Socialism. When recruiting, we prioritize organization over ideology; when picking battles, we prioritize victory over purity; and when making decisions, we prize decisive mass participation over endless deliberation. We are committed to building DSA into the mass party of the working class through engaging in the real struggles of the day, the struggle to defend and expand multiracial democracy, to counter the rise of the fascist far right, to prevent catastrophic climate change, and to win the dignity and security working people need to begin to consider transforming the system as a whole.

For More on What We Believe

Theory

The following pieces are a selection of interventions that are useful in developing a nuanced analysis of the balance of forces between capital and the popular masses. This collection is aimed at giving a new Groundwork member an understanding of how Marx analyzed contemporary political situations and how later thinkers like Lenin, Gramsci, Camejo, Poluntazas, and Hall oriented towards cohering a mass movement against Capital, Race, and Empire, especially in the post-industrial western context. Overall, our goal is to chart a course between Marxist traditions characterized by substitutionism and those characterized by liquidationism. Essential works such as Capital are not included on the assumption that they would be part of regular, rather than caucus, DSA political education. 

The 18th Brumaire, Marx’s breakdown of the destruction of the French Second Republic and the Rise of the Second Empire, serves as an example of Marx applying his methods of political analysis to a living situation. It shows how class factions jockey for power and lays out a link between vulgar day-to-day politics and an overarching class analysis. 

The Civil War in France is another vital piece in Marx’s analysis of politics. We highlight Marx’s emphasis on the vital role that seizing state power plays in making “expropriating the expropriators” possible, and the lessons we can learn from the Commune about the limits of the insurrectionary strategy. 

In his 1902 pamphlet, Lenin presents a vision for advancing the Russian working class to power. This text is often viewed as a standalone work, independent of the context of Russian Social Democracy. However, it is an important theoretical task for socialists to grasp what in this text is relevant to their struggle, while avoiding dogmatism and book worship. More than anything else, What Is to Be Done? provides a vital example of how to apply the Marxist method to develop a practical set of goals and tactics for a specific situation.

This polemic critiques certain ultraleftist tendencies (including left communism, council communism, and anarchism) in the Soviet Union following the successful Russian Revolution. Its defense of electoral politics, criticism of maximalist phrasemongering, and orientation towards the conquest of political power make it especially important to our current orientation. 

The Modern Prince is a section of the prison writings of the Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci. Gramsci’s central concern is the dialectic between the state, civil society, and the proletarian revolution. He draws on Renaissance political theorist Niccolò Machiavelli’s concept of the Prince to argue that the political party is not merely an organization, but rather a cultural force for cohering a counter-hegemonic bloc against capitalist society. 

This Communique from Guinean independence activist Amilcar Cabral identifies an overall personal orientation that party organizers intent on overthrowing capital should take up in our collective work. Though we are not fighting a guerrilla war against Portuguese occupation, it is important to “dedicate ourselves seriously to study… and take life [and the struggle] seriously” to tell no lies, take no easy victories, and to remember that “none of this is incompatible with the Joy of living.” 

This piece from Peter Camejo proposes three major orientations for effectuating political change. Liberalism depends on negotiation between elite factions and a deep cynicism towards workers as a group capable of taking independent political action. Ultraleftism is based on a similar political logic as liberalism, but is combined with a reflexive opposition to political discipline, as well as labor and electoral organizing. Ultraleftism prioritizes radical-sounding rhetoric and incoherent isolated actions meant more to establish moral superiority among those already radicalized than to wield power. Finally, mass action is a political tactic centered on constructing a movement that coheres people with different priors around transformative demands legible to the broad masses. We consider mass action the only viable route to Socialism. 

Hal Draper wrote this piece in a period where the Sino-Soviet split, divisions between the old and New Left, and state repression had caused the collapse of almost all mass anti-capitalist organizations in the United States into a constellation of warring ultraleftist sects composed of SDS veterans. Hal Draper uses this piece to trace the political development of Marxist thought on organizational forms in order to advocate for an ideological “center” as an alternative to a microsect. This center is to create a body of doctrine, build cadre, and establish a presence in left politics. We believe that DSA itself, rather than being an incubator for ideologically warring centers, must cohere the unity necessary to act as a center for the class as a whole on the road to becoming the class’s party. 

In this piece, British Democratic Socialist Ralph Miliband writes a postmortem on the Allende government and the fascist coup that overthrew him. Rejecting out of hand that moderation would have protected Allende, he declares that “The problem [of the democratic road] was to deny it [the right] the opportunity; or, failing this, to make sure that the confrontation would occur on the most favourable possible terms.” He identifies the constellation of the conservative forces that will oppose any transition to Socialism as the following: the upper and reactionary middle classes as a whole, foreign conservative intervention, conservative political parties, Fascist street gangs, judicial and administrative sabotage, and the military. However, recognizing that “opponents of the ‘electoral road’ do not have much to offer by way of an alternative, in relation to bourgeois democracies in advanced capitalist societies; and such alternatives as they do offer have so far proved entirely unattractive to the bulk of the people on whose support the realization of these alternatives precisely depends” he does not advocate abandoning the democratic road to socialism. Instead, he proposes moving quickly once that road is taken to utilize state power to disarticulate conservative opposition and empower popular institutions to meet right-wing escalations with escalations of our own. 

In Tyranny of Structurelessness Left-Wing Feminist Jo Freeman criticizes the prevailing tendency in the women’s liberation movement of the time to organize within purposefully “structureless” groups. She claims, correctly, that structureless groups do not exist and that a "laissez-faire" group is about as realistic as a "laissez-faire" society; the idea becomes a smokescreen for the strong or the lucky to establish unquestioned hegemony over others. This hegemony can be so easily established because the idea of ‘structurelessness’ does not prevent the formation of informal structures, only formal ones.” Belief in structureless groups is actively dangerous, as supposedly “structureless” groups are both ineffective in carrying out basic political tasks and are deeply susceptible to wrecking, abuse, and the cynical weaponization of personal disputes for political reasons. These structureless groups actually operate as a dictatorship of the popular and articulate. For this reason, we generally oppose working groups with nebulous structures and mandates that do not answer chapter leadership or membership as a whole. 

In Anatomy of a Microsect, Hal Draper, a veteran of the Mid-Century Trotskyite movement, with its constellation of warring sects and splinter committees, lays out his diagnosis of what is wrong with the American socialist movement and what is to be done to right it. Defining a sect as a group “presenting itself as the embodiment of the socialist movement, though it is a membership organization whose boundary is set more or less rigidly by points in its political program rather than its relation to social struggle” we agree with Draper that the life of an organization must be “based on the real social struggles in which it is engaged” and that both a unification of disparate sects and the broadening of a single sect are not a road towards a mass socialist party. We also agree that phrasemongering in the trade unions or skepticism of the union movement is deeply counterproductive. However, this piece must be read critically, both because his criticism of mainline Communism in the United States precludes him from seeing the successful engagement of the Communist party with the trade unions in the interwar period as a model, and because he dismisses out of hand a pluralistic model of Socialist organization not based around a rigid program, citing one of the organizations that formed DSA, the New American Movement, as a dead end. 

Marxism and Politics is a defining piece of Groundwork thought. Recognizing that Classical Marxism largely engaged with political economy rather than politics as such, Miliband traces the fragmentary and contradictory positions on politics taken by Marx and Engels to develop a theoretical framework centered on class, conflict, and the democratic road to socialism. While he makes urgent and subtle interventions into the nature of class and hegemony, there are three distinct ideas that are immediately relevant for our theory of change. First, his concept of the “relative autonomy of the state” which argues that separate bourgeois class factions interact with each other and popular power in ways which force the state to act as a mediator between class factions and classes in order to maintain stability and class society itself. This endows the state and the constellation of class factions warring to influence it at any given moment with their own distinct interests. Interests that can be leveraged by the modern prince to transform the state into a site of struggle between the popular masses and the ruling class. Second, his critique of the Bolshevik Revolution argues that the institutions of popular power (for example, the Soviets), which emerge spontaneously during periods of revolutionary upheaval, are incredibly difficult to systematize into organs of formal democracy in the best of circumstances and are actively disarticulated by the social struggles and civil war that upheaval brings about. This points towards his third and most significant intervention, a theory of social transformation in the global north based around a “strong reformism” that welds together state, street, and strike power to effectuate a rapid and aggressive transformation towards Socialism once the popular masses have taken political power through the democratic road.

In this piece, English Marxist Stuart Hall articulates a new understanding of the relationship between the economic base and the political, cultural, racial, and gendered superstructures that codetermine the nature of a social formation alongside it. Hall charts a course between economic reductionism and relativism, arguing for a conception of capitalism as a “complex unity structured in dominance” in which the economic base is “determinative in the last instance” but is engaged in an ensemble of mutually determining relationships with the cultural, political, racial, and gendered superstructures. This reconceptualization also allows for more precise language to describe the base and superstructure, namely, social reality and social consciousness. This reconception of the relationship between social reality and consciousness informs Groundwork’s thinking on a variety of issues. 

In Towards Democratic Socialism, Greek Marxist Nicos Poulantzas identifies the “state-worship” shared by Stalinists and Right-Wing Social Democrats, and critiques the tendency of dual power as a route to “smashing the state” to decay into dictatorship. Similar to Miliband, Poulantzas advocates a democratic road to Socialism that maintains political freedoms, representative democracy, universal suffrage, and multiparty elections, while simultaneously building directly democratic organs, popular institutions, and working-class self-management as part of a dialectic between direct and representative, spontaneous and deliberative democracy. This vision of a transformation towards democratic socialism sees the “institutions of representative democracy—not as unfortunate relics to be tolerated for as long as necessary, but as an essential condition of democratic socialism” these institutions are to be transformed as part of a wider transformation of the State as a whole and the gradual unfurling of direct, rank-and-file democratic organs to complement institutions of representative democracy, institutions which themselves will be transformed both organizationally, and in the character of their occupants, by the social transformation in which they will participate. 

In “Beyond Social Democracy,” Miliband identifies a variety of problems with the historical role of the Social Democratic right in the Global North. Namely, its role in limiting the scope of its own reforms, its role in stifling grassroots activism in favor of parliamentary and bureaucratic cretinism, and its cynical use of anti-Stalinism to repress forces to its left at home and to justify the complete abandonment of Socialist Internationalism abroad. Miliband then identifies the failure of Marxist-Leninist vanguardist formations in the global North to provide a viable alternative due to their lack of internal democracy, sectarianism, use of “incantations and sloganeering” rather than mass politics, and their wholesale rejection of elections due to "anti-parliamentary cretinism.” He offers an alternative, a “revolutionary-reformism” which “involves intervention in class struggle at all points of conflict in society.” arguing that:

 “social democracy does not offer any reasonable hope of turning itself into such an agency; that Communist parties carry burdens from the past which make it very difficult for them to undergo the process of transformation which required for the purpose [of revolutionary reformism]; and that ‘Marxist-Leninist’ groupings to the left of Communist parties operate in far too narrow an ideological and political framework to make it possible for them to turn themselves from small sects into substantial parties.”

Instead what is needed is a new mass party of the working class, capable of reconstituting the class as a force capable of intervening in politics and transforming society.  

In this essay, from the beginning of his masterwork, Prisoners of the American Dream, California Marxist Mike Davis writes extensively on the historical reasons for the absence of a nationwide political party capable of representing the interests of the American working class. He identifies the absence of this political party as the result of a series of defeats and accommodations, which, according to Marxist Scholar Gabriel Winant, gave it a “distinctive, contradictory, battered and lumpy form that could not be evened out by appeals to abstraction.” These defeats were both organic and contingent, coming in the form of both state repression and long-term compositions and recompositions of the working class itself. First, at the birth of the United States, a Bourgeois Democratic-Republicanism emerged, which ameliorated class distinctions and prevented the formation of a Jacobin-style political formation through western expansion. Second, the failure of “Labor-Abolitionism,” “Labor-Populism,” and Debsian Socialism to cohere a working-class politics, and third, the compromised détente signed between capital and labor which defined the Keynesian consensus. Connecting all of these failures is the variegation of the American working class based on immigration status, gender, and race, and the lack of a consistent strategy of class coherence. 

In this piece, Ralph Miliband illustrates the ways in which the hegemonic bourgeoisie logic, which underpins modern society, is destabilized by immiseration and alienation. He argues for the possibility of “A radical alternative,’... a cooperative, egalitarian, democratic, and ultimately classless society, to be replicated in due course throughout the world.”, one “based on the premise that ‘ordinary people’ are capable of ruling themselves and of ensuring the viability of a cooperative, humane, and rational social order.” He sees the route to this society as a series of “counter-hegemonic struggles” in which the left argues forcefully that a better world is possible. His vision of a Democratic Socialist society is defined by institutional pluralism, where a democratized economy “can and must assume many different forms, from state ownership of the commanding heights of the economy to municipal and cooperative ownership.” To build this society, socialism must become “the common sense of the epoch.” He argues Socialists must articulate a vision of a society that moves beyond both Marxism-Leninism and Social Democracy through articulating a vision of a system in which “Popular power and state power..  complement each other.” 

This study guide uses a 1970s organizing handbook developed by the Communist Party to ask questions about multiracial coalition-building, party organization, and cadre-building that offer useful points for comparison and analysis. We recommend using this study guide critically, both as a point of comparison to determine what DSA could learn from the Communist Party, and to determine what DSA has improved in comparison to it.

In this piece, Ramsin Canon identifies a dominant (but luckily rapidly diminishing) political orientation within the American Left, Ultraliberalism. Ultraliberalism is a political tendency defined by a half-remembered Alinskyite “Community organizing” tradition and the nonprofit industrial complex that emerged during the New Left’s rightward drift. Ultraliberalism is skeptical of mass organizations, democratic accountability, and structure; it is more concerned with standpoint epistemology, individual morality, and “consciousness-raising slogans, right-thinking, and demonstrations of moral conviction.” Ultraliberalism refuses to recognize that “The pathway to equity requires coercive state power to tear down institutions, set public priorities, eliminate the exploitative forms of social power, and redistribute commodities and wealth.” It is isolated from organized labor, and cynically leverages identity politics to “find some reason to disqualify somebody else but excuse themselves. The internal contradiction here is that ultraliberals will often be the loudest voices insisting on focusing on or centering some segment of the working class, while at the same time reserving the right to qualify or define political agency. They have to jealously guard their exclusive right to bestow political agency, to rate authenticity.” Ultraliberalism is a dead end, incapable of contesting for power, and actively detrimental to the construction of a socialist formation able to cohere a multiracial mass movement against Capital, Race, and Empire. 

In this article, Marzia Maccaferri identifies the failures of the Eurocommunist tradition, a Marxist political movement in Western European countries that sought to align mainline communist parties with the democratic road to socialism by reinterpreting Gramsci through the lens of humanist Western Marxism (sound familiar?). This article identifies the failures of the Eurocommunists in their “struggle to construct a dialogue with the new social subjects on the one hand, and the “cartelization” of the workers’ movement within the state apparatus on the other.” Fundamentally, the question for Marxists in the 21st century is how to articulate a politics that coheres a majority in favor of a fundamental social transformation during a period where the working class is increasingly divided by occupation, race, and immigration status. The Eurocommunists, despite their vital innovations, were unable to develop this politics.

In this book, Vincent Bevins surveys the protest movements of the 2010s, from Occupy to the Arab Spring to the 2020 BLM uprising, to identify the reason for a “missing revolution.” Generally, Bevins identifies the failures of these movements in their inherent flaws of horizontalism.

In this article for Geese Magazine, Scottie O. argues against “appealing to the abstract ideal of socialism in an attempt to negate the present juncture of politics” and that Socialists can and must engage in the struggle to defend multiracial democracy. The struggle to defend multiracial democracy and to expand it through popular struggles is “the real movement to abolish the present state of things”; he argues that “the current order is a flexible and open battleground—fertile for the advancement of socialism through the ongoing struggle for democracy.” Scottie claims that it is only through the “exhaustion” of the political struggles implicit in bourgeois democracy that one can transcend it… when democracy advances, it only makes the class struggle more direct, wider, more open and pronounced…” He articulates one of Groundwork’s fundamental priors in this sentence: “Why let the vacillating and opportunist wing of the democrats lead the battle against the far-right when it could be us leading the fight, pushing the bounds of the battle further than the social order can handle?” Communists and Socialists must complete the work of reconstruction, the age of the CIO, and the Civil Rights Movement to banish White Supremacist Christian nationalism from public life and allow a new contradiction between a multiracial bourgeoisie and a multiracial proletariat to become the predominant driving force in the politics of the United States. DSA is becoming a political vehicle capable of articulating the aspirations of the multi-racial working class towards the intermediate demand of a racially egalitarian anti-imperialist Social Democracy. 

In this piece, Kolya Ludwig criticizes the Marxist Unity Group’s conception of a "constitutional revolution.” Just as the previous article argues that the constitution is the battleground on which the current popular struggles are being waged, and the Socialist Left cannot just sidestep it, Kolya argues that: “To interpret, appreciate, and properly articulate the desires of mass movements is not ‘tailism,’ as Mike Macnair suggests in his critique of Bloom. It is rather the starting point for any revolutionary project that aims to transform a society made up of active human beings.” To articulate those desires the working class must maintain hegemony over a cross-class alliance of the popular masses towards a set of “intermediate goals” instead of only seizing power at the point at which we can make a rupture towards a new constitution and economic order. The socialist movement must become acquainted with “wielding political office and fighting for reforms that directly represent the desires of the revolutionary bloc.” to aid in further cohering a popular-democratic mass movement for a social transformation.

Party Surrogacy & Electoral Strategy

The following readings advocate for the party surrogate strategy, which articulates a vision of party building that leverages the advantages of running on the Democratic ballot line while simultaneously developing DSA-specific political institutions and muscle. This orientation takes an agnostic view towards a break vs. realignment. It focuses on how electoral organizing that wins is capable of cohering a Socialist Political constituency and struggle for non-reformist reforms that improve the conditions for labor and street-level organizing. The Party Surrogate strategy, whether or not individual caucuses or chapters explicitly mention it, is, in practice, the hegemonic electoral strategy in DSA today. 

This article lays out the class alignment electoral strategy, Groundwork’s vision of what a successful electoral and SIO program would look like for cities across the country. “Do we elect candidates just to raise the red flag of socialism and propagandize? Are they elected instead to improve material conditions for the working class and demonstrate democratic socialist capacity for governance? Our approach rejects both strategies and synthesizes these ideas into a comprehensive framework for winning socialism that fundamentally abolishes the class system, with practical applications for chapters and their work.” Our goal is to build a left-labor bloc capable of demanding a transformation of society. This bloc is to be rooted in the workers’ mass party, DSA, and its SIOs' primary goals are to pass transformative reforms that allow for more aggressive organizing at the base. We must politicize workers on a mass scale while simultaneously building a disciplined party. These two tasks depend on two kinds of electoral campaigns, Class Struggle Elections and Cadre Elections. Class-struggle candidates polarize the electorate along class lines; they should also seek the chapter’s endorsement and publicly identify as democratic socialists. They might bring coalition partners, political experience, or mass credibility to the table that less-developed chapters can’t find among cadre candidates. We may need to be more proactive in organizing class struggle candidates while they are in office, and we should weigh the effort required to do so against the influence they give the chapter by running. Cadre candidates are what they say on the tin: long-term, committed DSA members, but before we automatically endorse them, we should make sure they are running for non-symbolic offices with a viable path to victory. Ben continues in his next section of the piece by putting these visions for why we run and who we run together into a transformative electoral strategy. 

This electoral strategy is based, first and foremost, on winning; we should not run campaigns we know we will lose. We should be acting as a socialist pole within broad left-wing coalitions, with the long-term goal of building an independent party surrogate. “The crucial difference from previous 'realignment'- based orientations is the absolute focus on building up this party-surrogate, separate from and hostile to the Democratic Party itself. This means building an entirely separate electoral infrastructure — data, communications, field, etc. — financed by this membership organization.”

The eventual result of this project “will depend on how the Democratic Party responds to the growing socialist base. The result will be either: a base big enough to split from the Democratic Party, form a new ballot line dominated by the structures of our party, making endorsement tantamount to victory in the primaries of the new ballot line, and marginalize the Democratic Party entirely; a base big enough to marginalize the Democratic establishment, making our endorsement tantamount to victory in Democratic primaries and permanently hijacking their ballot line; or the marginalization of the Republican Party into a two-party system between socialists and liberals.” 

In “Blueprint for a New Party,” Seth Ackerman lays out the argument for a party that makes tactical use of different ballot lines to advance working-class politics. Drawing from the example of the American Labor Party, and a survey of uniquely repressive American ballot access laws, Ackerman argues that: “when such advocates [of Left-wing Third Parties] speak of creating an independent ‘party,’ what they mean, ironically, is choosing to subject their organization to an elaborate regulatory regime maintained by, and continually manipulated by, the two parties themselves.” and that access to ballot status as a third party is a poison pill that both causes third parties to spend more time trying to maintain ballot access then campaign to win, and attracts activists: “disdainful of practical politics or concrete results; less interested in organizing, or even winning elections, than in bearing witness to the injustice of the two-party system through the symbolic ritual of inscribing a third-party’s name on the ballot.” As an alternative Ackerman offers the idea of “a national political organization that would have chapters at the state and local levels, a binding program, a leadership accountable to its members, and electoral candidates nominated at all levels throughout the country.” This is the path that DSA has taken, leading to the greatest victories for the Socialist Left in seventy years. 

In “A Socialist Party in our time,” Abbot and Guastella argue in favor of an organization modeled on the Socialist mass parties of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. This organization is to be internally democratic, electorally competitive, and capable of mobilizing a mass base. The main goal of this organization is to organize a self-conscious working class political constituency: “Party realignment and exit are better understood as effects of a successful campaign to build a powerful electoral constituency independent of the Democratic Party, and less as strategies toward that end.” The organization tasked with carrying out the construction of this constituency is the party surrogate, a proto-party that uses the democratic ballot tactically to build power. Through a thorough analysis of developments in the ideological orientation of independent and working-class voters, the authors argue that current political conditions are ripe for a party surrogate to articulate working-class politics. Although the author's analysis of the divide between the so-called “PMC” and the working class proper is less convincing in light of the ongoing alliance between downwardly mobile knowledge workers and the multiracial working class, his argument for a party surrogate, on the other hand, represents the core of our orientation towards the “party question.”  

Throughout this interview with Jacobin Radio, Seth Ackerman lays out his vision for “the electoral equivalent of Guerrilla Insurgency.” A mass party that sidesteps the task of securing an independent ballot line, a task made purposefully difficult by uniquely repressive American laws governing ballot access. This mass party surrogate's main tasks would be to project an independent working-class political identity, prevent tailism by individual candidates, contest in all spheres of class struggle, and educate the class on mass democracy and self-governance. DSA is to be a democratically accountable, internally coherent mass party rather than a “party of office holders,” one that invests energy in its own cadre candidates. For Ackerman and Groundwork, electoral reform is a cart-before-the-horse issue, something that will result from a powerful working-class political constituency forming, rather than something that could lead to that constituency's formation. His final, most appealing argument against running as a third party is that focusing on ballot access leads to: “The ritual of inscribing the party’s name on the ballot substituting for the actual political work of talking to people, putting your message out there, organizing people, having meetings, and so on.” 

In this article, Chris Maisano lays out the utility of running campaigns that win to cohering class consciousness and the working class as a political constituency. “Whether we like it or not, election campaigns – and presidential elections above all – are the form of political activity that ordinary Americans engage with the most… any left political project aspiring to mass support needs an ongoing electoral expression if it wants to be successful, and become a reference point for popular struggles outside the electoral arena.” His argument that class consciousness is a product of class organization, not the other way around, provides the basis for a conception of elections as one of the most vital ways to build class organization in an era of low union density: “class politics waged inside and outside the electoral arena can create a mutually beneficial feedback loop” that mobilizes left wing political constituencies into labor and street struggles. We agree with his emphasis on the need for Socialists to consistently contest at the national level when the largest number of people are dialed in politically, and it helped inspire our plan to unite Labor and the Left to run a Socialist for President. 

In this article for DSA Mass, Ben Davis conducts a thorough analysis of the demographics drawn to Bernie Sanders in his two presidential campaigns to sketch the contours of a viable Socialist political constituency. At the time Ben was writing, that constituency was made up of downwardly mobile white millennials, working-class Latinos, Arab immigrants, and a surprising amount of the blue-collar white working class. That constituency has grown as figures like Zohran have been able to appeal to larger sections of the multiracial working class and contest for the working-class African-American vote. The unifying reality bringing together all of these demographics is class, and it is only by building class alignment through a “mass organization uniting common struggles across terrains with a clear program of universal working-class demands” that class can become the cleavage that is “determinative in the last instance” for electoral politics. 

Groundwork is descended from the mass politics wing of the split in the Collective Power Network, a big-tent Marxist Caucus influential at the turn of the 2020s. Our wing of CPN was very influential in developing that short-lived caucus’s electoral strategy, and we stand by much of what it advanced. Including: Rejection of third-partyism; DSA control of DSA electoral campaigns; principled left-labor-progressive coalitions with DSA at their core; running only campaigns that can win; mass canvassing instead of mailers; and rigorous, democratically accountable early endorsement of cadre candidates whenever possible.  

In “breaking bad” Brad C. reiterates many of the arguments made in the Ackerman school of party building arguing that: “ballot lines are state institutions, not the property of political parties” although he builds on previous arguments for the party surrogate by arguing that if we had our own ballot line “Our workers’ party would have no control over who can run in, and more importantly, who can vote in our primary.” He even goes as far as to claim that our campaigns would be made “worse and less effective by focusing the time and energy of electoral organizers on staking out symbolic and rhetorical differences from the Democrats, not on winning elections and growing DSA as a force for working class politics.” While we believe developing a distinct Socialist political identity is vital, that identity should be downstream of our victories. A DSA campaign that wins and delivers for the working class is the most effective way to help them identify with Socialism, rather than making an abstract appeal to their class interests. With that in mind, Brad C. declares correctly that: “Third parties are the playthings of cynics who have opted out of mainstream politics, not a serious vehicle for organization.” and that: “A loyal mass base large enough to allow for a dirty break while avoiding electoral marginalization will necessarily require a majority of Democratic voters and be powerful enough to dominate in Democratic primaries.” To editorialize slightly, if we are to “break” from the democrats under the current election system, we must be powerful enough both to immediately supplant them as the party of the American Left, and have a large, politically educated mass membership capable of fending off Liberal reverse-entryism. 

This article on Andre Gorz’s “Non-Reformist Reforms” lays out the main goals for Socialists in Office, not to be tribunes of the class and not to serve as propagandists. While neither of those roles is inherently negative, an SIO’s main task is to pass legislation that allows the class to better organize for its self-emancipation. The struggle for these reforms is to be an ever-escalating popular mobilization centered on “an exercise of power by people over the conditions of their own lives.” These reforms are aimed at increasing the power and cohesion of the class for struggles further down the line, and are intended to heighten class struggle and working-class self-government, and to expand the realm of the possible. Rather than stabilizing the capitalist mode of production, these reforms are aimed towards an eventual rupture. Non-Reformist reforms are based on the concept that a working class that is well-fed, well-educated, and aware of its own conditions is more capable of contesting for and wielding political power than one that is completely immiserated and vulnerable to substitutionism. Examples of non-reformist reforms can escalate from the state having union workers provide public goods free at the point of service in a realm of the economy long closed off as the private terrain of capitalists, to reforms which make union organizing significantly easier, like sectoral bargaining, to reforms which fundamentally call into question the relationship between labor and capital and begin the gradual process of economic democratization, like the Meidner plan in Sweden, state-subsidized buyer-of-first-refusal for tenants, or card-check expropriation.

In “The Path to Class Independence,” Olivia Merrill lays out a new way to analyze the concept of “class independence.” Olivia lays out the reasons why class independence is important: “Class independence is not desirable because of its moral character. Rather, class independence concerns both the material interests of the people within an organization and who exercises power over it. A class-independent organization is not simply an organization with the right politics. Rather, it is an organization in which the dominant class is the working class, with decision-making that is autonomous from the capitalist class.” Olivia lays out a critique of both Liberation Road’s idea of a multi-racial united front alongside liberals against the neo-confederacy, based on a constellation of Independent Political Organizations (ILO), and Tempest/Socialist Alternative’s critique of the party surrogate strategy. Olivia argues against Liberation Road’s conception by arguing that the class needs a central, internally democratic coordinating organ if it is to successfully contest within a United Front, and against Tempest/Socialist Alternative by reiterating the effectiveness of the party surrogate strategy at immediately contesting for power. Again, the emphasis is on our ability to win for the class, and the party surrogate strategy is the most effective way to gain power and demonstrate that socialists can win. 

“With the deck stacked so thoroughly against workers, we need to change the terrain on which workers battle.” In this sentence, Lyra Spencer lays out Groundwork’s basic argument for taking, exercising, and retaining state power. From Labor laws, to contracts, to environmental and immigration legislation the state has a tremendous ability to influence the outcome of class struggles. The goal of our campaigns isn’t just to agitate; it's to win. At the same time, our elected officials must govern in the interest of the working class and win concessions and demands that speed that class’s victories in the streets and the workplace, reduce immiseration and suffering, and allow breathing room to articulate a new vision of society. Lyra successfully advances Groundwork’s opinion that Socialists in Office must govern in the interests of the class first and foremost, not merely serve as tribunes. Finally, Lyra begins to articulate Groundwork’s perspective on electoral discipline: we neither believe it is impossible nor that censure and expulsion are the only tools in our toolbelt; instead, we believe in relationship-building through Socialists in Office Committees and discipline through the mass-democratic functions of the chapter itself.

This article in the Yale law journal by Anna Akbar lays out a long-form case for non-reformist reforms, arguing that in: “centering productive contradictions between reform and revolution, the heuristic requires engaging with systems as they are, allows one to hold in view bold and radical horizons, and facilitates the identification of strategic battles that might serve as a bridge through popular agitation.” Akbar analyzes multiple DSA campaigns centered on abolition, decommodification, and anti-imperialism as examples of contestation of non-reformist reforms. Most important for our purposes is Akbar’s four distinctions between non-reformist reforms and liberal, neoliberal, and right Social Democratic approaches to reforms. These four distinctions are, rejecting legalism in favor of mass action in support of demands that undermine the fundamental logics of capital rather than reify that logic, politicizing and charging conflict along class lines through contesting the expertise and power of the ruling class, fomenting concrete changes in the balance of forces between the workers and the rulers through altering the terrain on which later struggles will be waged, and finally “ center[ing] collective, democratic mass organization that prepare the poor, working-class, Black, and brown people— now dominated classes—to govern.” Non-reformist reforms are compatible with mass action, escalate conflict along class lines rather than attempt to ameliorate it, shift the balance towards the popular masses, and aid in cohering the class in favor of its own interests.

In this piece, Danny Valdes moves beyond the common rubric of "accountability" to address AOC as an example of DSA’s inability to develop the institutions and infrastructure necessary to buttress our SIOs against compromise and indecision. For Danny:  “This means institutionalizing programs like Socialists in Office, creating a national framework that protects and empowers elected officials, and deepening the bonds between members, campaigns, and elected representatives. It requires us to treat electoral politics not as a series of one-off battles but as part of a long-term strategy to build power and deliver material victories for the working class.” This vision of aligning our electeds towards our projects through collective power, rather than punitive discipline, points towards our wider program, that rigid ideological priors are no substitute for leverage. While running cadre candidates is obviously preferable, our previous popular front electeds who opened the doors for our organizers should not be abandoned, and rather should be brought back into the fold through developing mechanisms capable of keeping our lines of communication with them open, and realigning them towards our goals as our capacity for organization increases.  

Labor Organizing / The Labor Movement

These works point to how a multiplicity of tactics can align the labor movement towards class struggle and develop a labor ethic that goes beyond mere shop-floor militancy, articulating a vision of a new society. These works draw attention to the political significance of the labor movement and how labor organizing can break down prejudice and dovetail with electoral organizing to build majorities capable of transformative change. We consider the rebirth of a class-struggle labor movement to be essential to the recomposition of the working class as a political actor, as well as to the success of a Left Electoral Project, and the only force capable of mobilizing large enough numbers of working-class people to defend the victories won once we take state power. 

This article lays out the Class Alignment Labor Strategy, Groundwork’s alternative to the partyist vision put forward by the Marxist Unity Group and Bread and Roses’s currently hegemonic rank-and-file strategy. The class alignment labor strategy situates the rank and file as the most important, but still one of many vectors of influence that Socialists can utilize to realign labor unions towards class-struggle unionism and affiliation with DSA’s project of Social Transformation. The Class Alignment Labor Strategy recognizes the importance of making unions not just more militant and democratic, but more left-wing. It identifies Union staff and the legal regimes governing collective bargaining as vital levers of influence that Socialists should use to contest for power within the labor movement. Groundwork intends to utilize this theoretical framework to justify a reorientation of DSA’s labor work away from funneling YDSA veterans into union reform caucuses largely unaffiliated with DSA as an organization, towards the creation of DSA sections in unions, municipal left-labor blocs, and an emphasis on bringing unions aside from the UE into the project of building up the Emergency Workers Organizing Committee. 

We all know this one, and we are all Macalevyites. No Shortcuts, Organizing for Power in the New Gilded Age, is a seminal text of the modern labor movement. Drawing on both Jane’s background as a labor organizer and a series of test cases, No Shortcuts advocates for a class-struggle supermajority unionism capable of winning demands that can transform the lives of union members and reinvigorate the labor movement as a whole. Her emphasis on how radical unions can not only bring about change on the shop floor but also present a transformative vision for society as a whole is especially relevant. No Shortcut’s emphasis on community support for union efforts, mass participation, and rank-and-file democracy provides a map out of our new Gilded Age. Its distinction between “three broad types of change processes: advocacy, mobilizing, and organizing” and her vision of organizing specifically inform our vision of change. Groundwork believes that a mass movement of organizers both builds working-class participation in the transformation of their own world and their understanding of how to change it, and, as we know, “people participate to the degree they understand—but they also understand to the degree they participate. It’s dialectical.”

In this article, Michael Reagan elaborates on how the CIO organized the first multiracial, durable, mass industrial unions in the History of the United States. Drawing on books such as Civil Rights Unionism by Robert Korstad, this article elaborates on how the left-led CIO unions used shop-floor anti-racism to break down prejudice and win equal pay, kick-start the civil rights movement, and destabilize the planter class’s control over the politics of the American South. It shows that the most effective campaigns one can undertake against white chauvinism involve organizing Black and White workers together in favor of their common interests. 

The Rank and File Tactic lays out in simple terms Groundwork’s main points of divergence from the rank and file strategy laid out by the Bread and Roses caucus. We believe that shop-floor agitation through reform caucuses, a militant minority, and radicalized stewards is a vital, though not the only, component of any successful labor strategy. The Rank and File Tactic highlights the value of using the state on behalf of the struggle for unionization and the unions on behalf of the struggle for state power, while also highlighting the vital role radicalized union staff can play in transforming their unions. This piece provided the starting point for Groundwork's development of the Class Alignment Labor Strategy.

In this podcast, a team of labor organizers and historians lays out the history of the Congress of Industrial Organizations, the most effective militant union federation in the History of the United States. The podcast traces the development of the CIO, its relationship with the Communist Party, and the factional struggles between its left, right, and center, from the 1934 general strikes, through the golden age of the 1936-1938 sitdowns, into World War II, the Red Scare, and its eventual re-merger with the AFL. Fragile Juggernaut is essential listening, not just for Groundwork Cadre hoping to transform their unions, but for all DSA members. It is vital for understanding the interrelations between political, racial, and social transformations in the interwar period, a set of transformations that we must defend and extend if we are ever to win Socialism in the United States. It also has important lessons on the necessity of coordination among progressive elements in the administrative state, bottom-up labor militancy, and mass disruptions to win concessions. 

This simple article by Kris LaGrange provides recommendations on how DSA chapters and solidarity captains should work alongside ongoing labor struggles. Your three main tasks as a DSA chapter during an ongoing strike are to supply the strikers with provisions, fortify the picket line through organizing consumer boycotts and wider community support, and spread the strike’s demands and messages. As part of the class alignment labor strategy, I would add that DSA members who are themselves engaged in the strike should encourage more militant tactics and broader class-struggle demands, and fortify workers’ resolve against repression. 

Robert Korstead’s Civil Rights Unionism tells the story of the Food, Tobacco, Agricultural, and Allied Workers Union-CIO (FTA-CIO) local 22. Tracing the titanic struggles that this Communist-led union waged against the tobacco manufacturers of Winston-Salem, North Carolina, Civil Rights Unionism lays out the importance of combining rank-and-file militants, radicalized staffers, and concerted electoral offensives to link shop-floor struggles with broader efforts to transform society. 

After mapping the failure of the pre-DSA left to “do organizing,” Alyssa Battistoni uses her article Spadework to lay out a theory of how to win and build power. This theory is a theory of organizing: “the day-to-day work of politics — what Ella Baker called 'spadework,' the hard labor that prepares the ground for dramatic action.” Battisoni lays out the harsh reality that while organizing is immensely rewarding, emotionally cathartic, and transformative, it is also an activity that makes one deeply vulnerable; it requires an organizer to give as much of themselves as of others, to fight the Thatcherite in their own head and in others'. More than a specific set of tactics, Spadework is a deep dive into the emotional and physical experience of organizing, the self doubt, transformative change, and bitter defeats one should expect to experience when you make the beautiful mistake of choosing to become an organizer. 

Climate & Ecosocialism

Much of Groundwork’s DNA comes from the Green New Deal slate, and our prioritization of Ecosocialism reflects that. The following readings argue for the necessity of modifying our way of life towards a sustainable equilibrium with our biosphere and argue for how the profit motive and the capitalist mode of production make that equilibrium impossible. Taken together, these readings argue for the urgent necessity of a Green New Deal, which demands mass state-driven decarbonization based on the municipalization, nationalization, expropriation, and democratization of our power grid, titanic increases in funding for public transportation, and a reorientation away from unsustainable consumption and towards decommodification and production for use. 

In The Case for Letting Malibu Burn, an essay from Mike Davis’s magisterial work, The Ecology of Fear, Mike Davis lays out the radical consequences of thinking critically about our built environment and what will be necessary to make it sustainable. Through ecosocialist analysis, Mike uses the case of Malibu to argue that capitalist land use is inefficient, wasteful, dangerous, and ultimately out of rhythm with both the needs of the vast majority of humanity and the natural world. Believe it or not, if a place keeps catching fire, there is usually a reason, and we probably shouldn't keep rebuilding luxury housing there.  

In The Social Ideology of the Motorcar, André Gorz lays out how the conquest of the built environment by the motorcar, a commodity reliant on the global distribution of petrochemicals, marginalizes those who cannot afford one, provides giveaways to capitalist interests that profit from making car ownership functionally mandatory, and popularizes an individualistic ideology. To Gorz, cars are an ‘antisocial luxury’ one forced on us, and one that the vast majority of Americans would not need to own if the working class were to seize control of our built environment. 

In this wonderful introduction to Eco-Socialist thought, Theo Riofrancos, Robert Shaw, and Will Speck lay out the urgency of a just transition, and the reality that any such transition must rely on building popular power towards the democratization, decommodification, and decarbonization of our energy resources. These interconnected goals rely on us politicizing the grid, organizing with communities impacted at the frontlines of climate change, and building relationships with the trade unions whose workers will be necessary to carry out the transition. 

In Plan, Mood, Battlefield, Thea Riofrancos defends the Green New Deal from its Left-Wing Critics, who accuse it of being a Greenwashing Keynesian Social Democratic project that would rescue capitalism from the climate crisis it has created. As Thea argues in her piece, the Green New Deal, were it to be implemented, would itself be a site of struggle: “We don’t yet know how the politics of the Green New Deal will play out. We can be certain, however, that resignation cloaked in realism is the best way to ensure the least transformative outcome. Waiting for an ever-deferred moment of revolutionary rupture is functionally tantamount to quiescence…. The Green New Deal doesn’t offer a prepackaged solution; it opens up a new terrain of politics. Let’s seize it.”

In Planet to Win, a group of writers and thinkers lay out a long-form vision of the Green New Deal. This vision argues for a pragmatic set of immediate, achievable policy goals that, if achieved, would lay the Groundwork for a broader transformation. 

In Winds of Denial, Matt Haugen politicizes the weather. Haugen traces ongoing trends in climate denial and the inevitable social murder that comes along with it. Weaving analysis of digital pollution and climate denial alike, he connects the deaths of the seven workers at the impact plastics manufacturing plant in East Tennessee, killed by their bosses by not being allowed to leave until the floodwaters were on top of them, to the wider trend of ecological collapse. 

DSA-LA’s climate justice committee platform puts forward an argument for ecosocialism, traces the connections between climate struggles and struggles on other fronts, lays out a brief vision of a municipal Green New Deal, and identifies immediate tasks that utilize state, street, and strike power. For more information on previous successful DSA-LA climate campaigns, look up the Green New Deal for Public Schools. 

In this interview for Jacobin on his new book Electricity for the Public Good, Sandeep Vaheesan lays out both a model for the nationalization/municipalization of the power grid and tells the story of the last time that public power was on the ascent. His struggle to inject popular power into an area where technocratic expertise has made common cause with profit-seeking rentiers has consequences for our vision of a Socialist transition as a whole.

Identity

Groundwork rejects identity politics and class reductionism. We believe in the ability of working people of every color, gender, and sexual orientation to organize together for collective liberation. We identify with Afro-Caribbean Marxist Stuart Hall’s dictum that “race is the way in which class is lived” and the decisive influence of class in “determining in the last instance” how people relate to dominant power structures. The following readings are oriented towards the decisive influence of chattel slavery and its legacies on America’s current social formation, the assault on trans rights and women’s bodily autonomy, and the necessity of cohering a mass organization of the multiracial working class capable of building a society where we live together in peace and dignity. 

In this piece for verso’s blog, Nikhil Pal Singh and Joshua Clover develop on the analytical methods presented by Marxist thinkers like Stuart Hall to argue against both intersectionality/bothandism (the idea that that race and class are distinct social phenomena that can merely be combined, like peanut butter and jelly) and class reductionism, the idea that any social struggles around race or other forms of arbitrary social domination can be reduced to the class struggle. Instead, the pair put forward the position that “Race is a necessary fiction for capitalism, just as is private property” race is a vital constitutive myth for the capitalist world order, one that, according to so-called “Orthodox Marxism” may not be vital for the functioning of theoretical capitalism, but has been vital for its functioning in all historically observed capitalist social formations. We know that to defeat capital, one must defeat race, and it is only politics that engages in a sober analysis of the mutually-constitutive roles of race, class, gender, and sexual orientation that can abolish them. As Stuart Hall says, class may be “determinative in the last instance,” but often, “race is the way in which class is lived.”

In this piece in Hammer and Hope, Michael McCarthy makes a well-written appeal to Socialists, encouraging them to reject class reductionism and to realize that to organize the working class for self-emancipation, our politics must struggle against the variegation of workers along lines of race, gender, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Michael articulates a vision of a rainbow coalition based on Zohran Mamdani’s mayoral run, where unifying appeals on the basis of the cost of living are paired with specific appeals to minority groups on their terms, saying: Mamdani’s campaign shows that working-class politics always relate to the ways people’s particular experiences move them to fight. The idea that workers simply have a one-dimensional set of interchangeable class interests that motivate them and that politicians can activate with the correct message deals in what Stuart Hall termed “low-flying economism masquerading as ‘materialism.”

Emancipatory politics must use class to cohere a working-class majority for mass redistribution, anti-imperialism, and a Green New Deal. Still, this majority will necessarily be composed of a variety of minorities, be they religious, racial, or sexual. Socialists must make a case to each of these groups, in terms they can understand, that our struggle against capital is mutually reinforcing and intimately linked to the struggle against all structures of domination. 

For an example of a work that engages in a sober analysis of race and class’s mutually-constitutive roles, look no further than W.E.B Dubois’s work Black Reconstruction. A vital piece of both the Black Radical Tradition and American Marxism, Black Reconstruction employs materialist analysis to trace the history of Reconstruction and counter Lost Cause narratives of the period. Black Reconstruction highlights the dueling and intersecting histories of the Southern White and Southern Black Proletariat, and how those working classes were variegated along racial lines to assure the supremacy of the white planter class. From its introduction of the concept of the general strike of the enslaved to explain union victory in the civil war to its analysis of the growing postbellum alliance between northern industrialists, insecure white southern petite bourgeois, and southern planters (an alliance that still constitutes a large section of the base for reactionary politics in America) Black Reconstruction lays out a road not travelled, and points towards an emancipatory anti-racist and anti-capitalist politic. 

In his piece “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” Stuart Hall undertakes a theoretical rupture with prior ways of understanding racialized social formations. That is to say, he attempts to develop a new way of understanding the relationship between race and capitalism, given the historical context of specific societies. This attempt quickly evolves into a masterful intervention into the nature of the relationship between capital and other structures of domination. Hall rejects theories which contend that first “social divisions which assume a distinctively racial or ethnic character can be attributed or explained principally with reference to economic structures and processes” what we call “class reductionism” and second, those who argue that “[Race and Ethnicity] exhibit, their own forms of structuration, have their own specific effects, which cannot be explained… by reducing race to the economic level of determination.”, what we call conceptual pluralism. Hall knows, as do we, that these theories have practical, political consequences. Consequences that shape what tasks “The politics of Transformation” our politics must address. 

According to Hall, Marxism maintains several theoretical premises relevant for the study of race. Neither a reductionist nor a pluralist understanding is compatible with these premises. First, the Materialist premise, that “the analysis of political and ideological structures must be grounded in their material conditions," and second, the historical premise, that these structures and relations: “cannot be deduced a priori, from the economic level but must be made historically specific.” To these premises, Hall adds a third and final one, a structural premise, drawn from Marx by a variety of critical theorists, which connects the relatively autonomous elements of a social formation through a variety of structural “articulations” that together form what Marx would call a “totality of distinctions within a unity.”

Taking us to the level of an analysis of a specific social formation, Hall cites Apartheid South Africa as an “industrial capitalist social formation, where race is an articulating principle…. where the capitalist mode is sustained by drawing, simultaneously, on what have been defined as both 'free' and 'forced' labour.” Hall rejects claims that, on one side, racism in South Africa, is:  'nothing more than the specific form of the working class’s fractionalization, common to all capitalist modes of production’ and on the other, that the South African social formation is not defined by “'simply the class struggle engendered by capitalist development, but the "race war" engendered by colonial conquest.” 

Hall offers an alternative, the development of a Marxism capable of “overcome[ing] certain limitations -economism, reductionism, 'a priorism', a lack of historical specificity- which have beset certain traditional appropriations of Marxism, which still disfigure the contributions to this field by otherwise distinguished writers.” An alternative grounded in a set of principles for Marxist analysis of social formations, and implicitly, our conclusions on what ought to be done to change those formations. He gestures towards principles that should inform this type of analysis.‍ ‍First, rigid historical specificity, if, for instance, you talk about racisms you must talk about them as 'a product of historical relations and possess with full validity only for and within those relations', not as segmentations or examples of an immutable transhistorical reality. Second, analyzing the articulations of any one structure within a social formation in relation to other structures, for instance, any analysis of racism historically must be done in reference to corresponding productive and property relations, legal and political regimes, etc. Third, we must analyze how relatively autonomous structures of domination are eroded, preserved, or transformed in relation to one another. These principles for analysis point towards a decisive conclusion, that for large sections of the Black Proletariat, “Race is a modality through which class is lived,” and more importantly, that other articulating elements of a social formation can serve as modalities for expressing class struggle, that capitalism is a complex unity structured in dominance. 

This leads to an important political conclusion for our movement, that we must build solidarity across difference, cohering disparate cultures of resistance, and their superficially isolated but in reality mutually-reinforcing daily struggles for dignity -for lower rents, for legal status, or social acceptance- into a mass movement for revolutionary change. This cohering process will require cadres capable of planning and winning localized counteroffensives against concrete instances of oppression and cohering those counteroffensives with a wider struggle for a social transformation. 

The line “The rich are only defeated when running for their lives” sets the tone for West Indian Trotskyist C.L.R James’s overview of the Haitian revolution. The Black Jacobins provides a masterful overview of the constellation of class forces in Haiti before the revolution, and a nuanced, well-researched summary of the political maneuverings, compromises, purges, class conflicts, and battles that marked the only successful slave uprising in human history. It’s good stuff, and James’s analysis of the complicated relationship between Louis Sonthonax and Toussaint Louverture is of special interest to those attempting to form a multiracial revolutionary coalition today. 

Speaking of a mass movement for revolutionary change, and moving us out of the realm of theory, we find ourselves at Robin D.G. Kelly’s Masterwork, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists in the Great Depression. This work is included in the Groundwork reader as an example of productive engagement between the Black Radical Tradition and the Marxist Left, a primer on multiracial organizing, and a history of Communist organizing in the South. We encourage reading it in its entirety, but several important lessons are immediately apparent. One, organizing the South is vitally important to prevent right-wing forces from regrouping there after defeat elsewhere in the country. Two, parties should utilize a variety of tactics, from electoral organizing to labor organizing to confrontations with the state’s coercive apparatus, to build a multiracial working-class mass movement. Three, any said mass movement in the South will have to deal with clashes between allies with resources from out of state and organizers on the ground, white chauvinism, cynical attempts to weaponize race by both external opponents and internal wreckers, and the absence of left-wing cultural institutions, labor unions, and liberal civil society more generally. 

In Racecraft, Karen and Barbara Fields distinguish between race, racism, and racecraft. Race is a pseudoscientific concept that categorizes people into distinct groups around supposed inborn similarities. The process of defining and demarcating those distinct groups is known as Racecraft, while Racism is the “withholding of the presumption of equal humanity,” based on the aforementioned. Throughout the book, the two Fields make the argument that race is not an extant fact, or even a coherent analytical category, but a sort of mystical totem erected, carved, and refashioned through the process of racecraft to justify racism. 

“The right to modify one’s body in whatever way one chooses is an exercise in self-ownership that stands in direct tension to capitalism’s constant appropriation of bodies that labor.” Socialists oppose every form of arbitrary domination. We oppose bigotry, obscurantism, irrational hatred, and the scapegoating of any sector of the working class for the crises generated by capitalism. The struggle to defend Trans people from a state that wishes to exterminate them as a social group is one of the primary tasks of Socialists during the collapse of America’s flawed multiracial democracy.

A Teach-in on the intersections of Socialism and the Black Radical Tradition put on by DSA-LA’s South-Central Inglewood Branch, originally hosted by a multiracial group of Groundwork Cadre and un-caucused members. Concluding remarks summing up the gist of it: 

“Neither Negotiation with the white power structure nor false separation from it will liberate African Americans from racism, poverty, and police repression. Only mass action by the multiracial working class, with African Americans providing a vital place in the vanguard by virtue of their double repression by class and color, can transform the conditions of the Black Working Class and the entire world.

DSA is not blind to the fact that we are a majority-white organization, and that we are only now articulating our vision of mass politics through a South Central Inglewood branch is a self-inflicted tragedy. However, we are not here looking for tokens or to assuage white guilt; we are looking for Comrades in a collective struggle, comrades who will challenge us and our assumptions, who will speak up for Black workers and for themselves, and who will bring their community’s methods and traditions of resistance to the table. We are inviting each of you to build DSA and a better world together with us.”

Not all so-called black liberation movements are liberatory. Afrocentrism tells the story of right-wing American Black Nationalism, and the imagined pasts that structure the racial essentialism that defines it. Working through the histories of groups such as Robert Karenga’s US organization and the Nation of Islam, this work argues for a morally consistent left-wing Black Liberation movement capable of transforming society. 

Not all so-called feminisms are liberatory: “At once a left transfeminist battlecry against cisness, a decolonial takedown of nationalist womanhoods, and a sex-radical retort to femmephobia in all its guises, Enemy Feminisms is above all a fierce, brilliant love letter to feminism.” Some feminisms are bad: girlboss feminism, white feminism, turn-of-the-century eugenic feminism, TERFs, etc. Only a proletarian feminism engaged in the struggle to win autonomy from both men and capital is capable of liberating all women. 

In What is Socialist Feminism founding DSA member Barbara Ehrenreich both provides a workable introduction to Socialist Feminism and further refines the concept. Saying that: “Marxism rips away the myths about ‘democracy’ and its ‘pluralism’ to reveal a system of class rule that rests on forcible exploitation. Feminism cuts through myths about ‘instinct’and romantic love to expose male rule as a rule of force. Both analyses compel us to look at a fundamental injustice. The choice is to reach for the comfort of the myths or, as Marx put it, to work for a social order that does not require myths to sustain it.” by building a “socialist feminist kind of feminism and a socialist feminist kind of socialism.” She rejects a radical feminism without socialism because it leaves out the possibility of "reconciliation with men on a truly human and egalitarian basis” and a “whole lot of women” who have discovered through the class struggle that “There is a difference between a society in which sexism is expressed in the form of female infanticide and a society in which sexism takes the form of unequal representation on the Central Committee. And the difference is worth dying for.” While rejecting a Marxism without Feminism because it is an expression of a dead “mechanical marxism” which cosigns the so-called ‘superstructure’ of gender relations to play second fiddle to class struggle, rather than playing a vital constitutive role in social consciousness under capitalism, social consciousness which is determined and determines the social reality of economic production. As Barbra puts it, “It follows that there is a fundamental interconnection between women’s struggle and what is traditionally conceived as class struggle.” 

In this article for Soviet magazine Ogonyok, Alexandra Kollontai analyzes the effect that the October Revolution has had on women in the west, arguing that: “If it were not for the October Revolution, it would still be generally believed that the woman earning her own living is a temporary phenomenon, and that the woman's place is in the family, standing at the back of her husband bread-winner.” and that “millions of working women throughout the world are hastening to morally re-arm themselves” with the victories won by the Soviet Union. Although perhaps optimistic about the immediate progressive impacts of women entering the workforce, Kollontai was right that “The enormous shift in the position of women in the Soviet Union has encouraged contending social groups to attempt to draw women onto their side.” and that the October Revolution had helped to create the new women, unfortunately it did not ultimately “ensure victory” for them. 

Olúfémi O. Táíwò’s book Elite Capture is the most effective long-form Marxist critique of liberal identity politics. He rejects the idea of “brown faces in high places” and what he calls “deference politics,” which revolves around a perversion of the Combahee River Collective’s idea of intersectionality to justify different elite members of identity groups speaking for those groups as a whole. Tracing this phenomenon from the Civil Rights Movement and BLM to Corporate Greenwashing and Girlboss Feminism, Olúfémi offers an alternative vision: constructive politics, a politics that builds solidarity across differences to wage a joint struggle of the oppressed against elites of all colors and creeds. 

Internationalism and Anti-Imperialism

Groundwork supports Democratic Socialist Internationalism, which opposes US Imperialism and Militarism, its client states, and the extractivist networks which sustain it through vicious repression across the world. War abroad means poverty at Home. Any transformation towards mass redistribution in the United States must be complemented with a simultaneous drawdown of American military spending and presence, as well as the immediate end of the sanctions regime that punishes states not aligned with American interests. Groundwork supports global integration through freedom of movement, multilateral diplomacy, and international coordination to address the climate crisis. We believe in replacing America’s military-industrial complex with a unionized, state-owned humanitarian-industrial complex, one that addresses the climate crisis, builds desperately needed infrastructure, and meets human needs. We consider one of our most urgent tasks to be the interruption of the continuous process through which US Imperialism creates new enemies and refuses to make peace with old ones to maintain profits for war profiteers and oil companies. We do not believe it is the job of the Socialist movement in the United States to proscribe a system of government for any other nation on earth. Still, we do believe that without the constant threat of American intervention or intervention by other right-wing great powers, space would be opened for organic popular struggles for political, economic, and social rights. We consider our three most urgent international tasks in the present moment to be: 1. Ending the American Embargo on Cuba, 2. Utilizing state power to boycott, divest, and sanction Israeli apartheid, and 3. Ending the nascent Cold War with China through cooperation in facing our shared climate crisis. 

Groundwork believes that strident anti-Imperialism must be paired with an alternative positive vision, Democratic Socialist Internationalism. Claire Valdez’s foreign policy platform is that vision. Written by a Groundworker, this policy platform envisions a world where the United States respects Latin American (including Puerto Rican) sovereignty, places a comprehensive arms embargo on Israel, works with China against climate change, and rejects military force as a tool in international affairs.  

If you are going to read any one book on the history of the occupation of Palestine, it should be this one. Eminently readable, harrowing, and comprehensive, the Hundred Years’ War on Palestine shares the history of Israel’s genocidal war of conquest against the Palestinian people since the Nakba, and how it has been aided and abetted by US Imperialism throughout. 

In this newly released book, Molly Crabapple lays out the history of the Jewish Labor Bund, a radical anti-capitalist alternative to Zionism that swept through Jewish communities in Eastern Europe in the first half of the 20th century. The Bund advocated for Jewish autonomy in the Pale of Settlement, and against the seizure of land in the Levant on behalf of a Jewish state. Eventually destroyed by both the NKVD and the SS, the Bund still stands as an example of what could have been, and as a model for a radical anti-zionist Jewish belonging. 

In this podcast series, Daniel Denvir and Yemeni Scholar Abdel Takriti cover the history of Arab revolutionary movements, from the origins of European Imperialism in the region to the Nakba, Nasser, and the Gaza Genocide. This is an incredible resource that takes the listener through the story of resistance in the region without being bogged down in separate national stories or theoretical prognosticating. It is a must-listen to understand the background to the cataclysms that the United States is inflicting on the region today.

“That domination [American Imperialism], built upon superior military power, upon unfair treaties and upon the shameful collaboration of traitorous governments, has for more than a hundred years made of Our America- the America that Bolivar, Hidalgo, Juarez, San Martin, O'Higgins, Tiradentes, Sucre and Marti wished to see free - a zone of exploitation, a backyard in the financial and political empire of the United States, a reserve supply of votes in international organizations where we of the Latin American countries have always been regarded as beasts of burden to a 'rough and brutal North that despises us.” - Second Havana Declaration

The Havana Declarations were Cuba’s answers to the United States and its puppet, the OAS’s condemnation of the Cuban revolution. Expressing solidarity with Socialist Revolutionaries everywhere, and the struggle against US Imperialism across the global South, the declarations lay out an alternative vision of an independent Socialist Latin America able to choose its own destiny. 

Cuba’s forces were instrumental in the defeat of Apartheid South Africa in Angola. Their struggles in the Angolan civil war on behalf of the MPLA against UNITA and its CIA/South African backers, as well as right-wing mercenary forces across the world, hastened the collapse of the apartheid regime. This article details what the Cuban government called “the return of the slaves” or operation Carlota (named after an Early Modern leader of an Angolan slave uprising) and its effect on Cuban’s perceptions of themselves and the shaping of modern Africa. 

Blowback is an incredible podcast. It traces the history of disastrous US interventions from Cuba, to Iraq, Korea, Afghanistan, Cambodia, and Angola. Extensively researched, high-quality, and consistently in dialogue with experts on the topics it is covering, Blowback is essential listening for students of the US Empire and its crimes. 

Sometimes, union workers build bombs that are used to kill other workers. The problem of Aerospace, arms, and increasingly tech workers actively participating in the construction of weapons and algorithms that are used for murder and monitoring is not a new one. The struggle on how to relate to these workers is as old as the left itself; Bernie himself famously attempted to prevent protesters from disrupting a unionized weapons factory in Burlington. He was wrong to do so. The ongoing genocide in Gaza indicates as much. As Jeff Schuhrke says in this article for Jewish Currents: “For pro-Israel union officials, weapons sector workers offer a convenient rationale for silencing opponents of Israeli apartheid.” Instead, the left must advance a vision of conversion and just transition from production for war to production for peace. Socialists must support demands for bargaining in the common good that unshackle as many livelihoods as possible from the war machine, and openly connect anti-imperialist struggles to struggles on the shop floor. As Sean Fain said, "Corporate America is not going to force us to choose between good jobs and green jobs.” The same should be true of good jobs and moral ones. 

Speaking of Sean Fain, the UAW is providing a model for international solidarity between workers. As our class enemies grow increasingly international and move nodes of production away from organized groups of workers, it is only natural that we should chase them down. As Brandon Mancilla argues in this piece for Labor Notes, facing down bosses and company unions across borders can allow workers to win across them as well. “Rather than thinking of Mexican workers as our adversaries, we need to see each other as partners in the struggle for worker power. No worker benefits from the international race to the bottom that companies like to call ‘global competition.’ Just like we did during the Stand-Up Strike, it’s time to whipsaw the companies against each other—but this time across North America.” Brandon’s article details a new program of coordination between the UAW and the militant Mexican union Sindicato Independiente Nacional de Trabajadores y Trabajadoras de la Industria Automotriz (SINTTIA), in which the UAW is providing material support, staff time, training, and concurrent pressure against auto manufacturers. This program is already bearing fruit. 

“People think that we want to drive all Jews to the sea,” he said. “We don’t believe that.” In this profile on Mahmoud Khalil, Arno Rosenfeld details both Mahmoud Khalil’s intellectual development on Israel-Palestine and the struggles within the Palestinian Liberation movement over rhetorical strategy. Mahmoud’s rhetorical politics, with its focus on a One Democratic State Solution with Right to Return, the internationally recognized right of Palestinians to resist the illegal Israeli occupation by means up to and including armed force, and a simultaneous condemnation of attacks on civilians and antisemitism is one through which we can cohere a Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine in the Imperial Core. 

Discovering Imperialism, a collection of writings on the debates over Imperialism in the Second International, provides a good introduction to the fraught history of organizing on this subject. For example, in in its early pages we learn about the Far Right of the Second International, led by Eduard Bernstein and its support for the creation of a “Socialist Colonial Policy” a contradiction in terms which claimed that Socialist governments would be more effective at managing the colonies and “uplifting the natives” than capitalist ones. Lenin, Kautsky, and the American delegation’s defeat of this resolution represented a victory for Anti-Imperialist critique, one that Lenin clarified and built on in…

In Imperialism the Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin lays out how monopolies in growing industrial economies empower finance capital and how the merging of industrial and finance capital leads to capital surplus which is invested in less developed nations and defended through Empire. Lenin also develops a theory of how Imperialism leads to greater parasitism in core regions, as well as how a portion of Imperialist “Super-Profits” are invested in bribing a labor aristocracy at home. The development of a military-industrial complex in the postwar United States represents a further development of this process of superprofit extraction and imperial plunder. 

The Empire is maintained by mass murder against those who would resist it. Especially those who attempt to build an alternative economic model capable of freeing a people from dependence on the Global North. In Indonesia in the late 1960s the United States, alongside right wing Indonesian militias, orchestrated the mass murder of millions of Communists, trade unionists, ethnic Chinese, and women activists, coupled with the installation of a right wing dictatorship. This ‘Jakarta Method’ named for Indonesia’s capital was employed across the world by the United States over the rest of the 20th century, leading to political massacres of leftists in Chile, Argentina, Greece, Brazil, and many other countries through campaigns such as Operation Condor. 

Nations are not naturally poor. Latin America, for instance, is rich in resources. In The Open Veins of Latin America Eduardo Galeano tells the story of Latin America’s physical, economic and psychological subjugation into a subservient position in the global order where they are required to produce primary goods for consumption in the Global North. From Latin America’s introduction to the world economy, mediated by extreme violence and the creation of a racial caste system and set of subservient diplomatic relationships with outside Imperial Powers, to modern struggles over sovereignty, Galeano lays out a brutal critique of Imperialism. 

In How Europe Underdeveloped Africa Walter Rodney describes the economic, social and political processes through which Europe was enriched and Africa impoverished. From resource extraction to mental subordination, from the creation of colonial elites and ethnic divisions to foreign loans, Walter Rodney lays out the history of Africa’s subordination to the rest of the world system. 

Penny Von Eschen’s work Race Against Empire details the struggles undertaken by African American radicals in the mid-twentieth century against Imperialism, both the old European Empires and the increasingly global American one. Race against Empire explains how African American organizers worked to cohere the struggle for the independence of the colonies and the struggle for legal racial equality in the Imperial Core, a dangerous combination that threatened attempts by the dominant classes to build an Anti-Communist Black Liberalism focused narrowly on domestic issues. This is instructive for our current politics. 

Eric Hobswam’s The Age of Empires helps to explain how we ended up where we are today. As the world falls back into multipolar conflict between different blocs of Imperialist states, utilizing smaller states as bargaining chips and engaging in mutually destructive militarist arms races, our world looks more and more like that of the late 19th and early twentieth century. Eric Hobswam’s book detailing that period, its splintered political economy, repressive racial regimes, and cultural output is more relevant than ever. 

Capitalism kills through famine. In fact, our modern world is built on a series of capitalist famines in the late 19th century which restructured the global economy and imposed a regime of primitive accumulation across the global south. These famines, in China, India, and South America, were the result of policy decisions made by capitalist governments in order to more effectively accumulate profit. These famine’s casualties equal or surpass those killed in the famines brought about by Marxist-Leninist rapid industrialization in the mid twentieth century, and were vital in forging the modern world and its division of labor. 

My Seditious Heart by Arundhati Roy tears apart the not-so-post-imperial Indian developmentalist state. She criticizes its repression of the scheduled castes, dalits, and Kashmiris as well as its descent into Hindutva fascism. She criticizes its methods of social and direct murder, from violent slum clearance to ecologically-devestating dam construction. Roy -a titan of the Indian Left and incredibly talented author- castigates them all. Her wide-ranging  anti-imperialism emerges most clearly in two sections of this book: A long criticism of the Indian state’s complicity in global wave of islamophobia that rose to support the illegal American invasion of Iraq, and her time with the Naxalite Maoist rebels in the forests of Southeastern India. 

It is possible to put forward a minimum program in the Imperial Core that is largely Social Democratic in character without abandoning solidarity with Liberation Struggles in the Global South. While Bernie’s relationship to Anti-Zionism has always been fraught, he has consistently opposed American Intervention in Latin America and supported the struggles of the Latin American people for Socialism and Sovereignty. Still, this article makes clear that Bernie’s personal feelings on American Intervention in places like Guatemala and El Salvador are less important than: “the existence of a mass solidarity movement which mobilized militant direct actions, marches, and congressional campaigns against US intervention, provided material support to Central American revolutionaries, and worked closely with the Sanctuary Movement to defend and shelter refugees.”

Swedish Social Democratic prime minister Olaf Palme’s attempts to move towards complete collective ownership over the economy through the Meidner Plan and his solidarity with Anti-Imperialist movements in the global south distinguishes him from Right-Wing European Social Democrats of the time. This Jacobin Article details Sweden’s diplomatic and humanitarian maneuvers against Apartheid South Africa, its rescuing of Chilean Leftists from Pinochet and its dispatching of medical supplies to the Viet Minh. These anti-imperialist commitments should be the minimum expected for any Socialist project in the Global North.

General Politics

Groundwork believes that Socialists can win. The following readings point to durable victories won by the Left in the Global North, victories that suggest a broader path to power and relevance.

An oldie but a goodie from Pablo Iglesias, founder of Podemos, one of the first breakout insurgent left political forces in Europe after the financial crisis. He lays out the basic method for building a left-wing mass politics for the twenty-first century that moves beyond the narrow sectarianism left by the wreckage of the 20th century. “When you study successful transformational movements, you see that the key to success is to establish a certain identity between your analysis and what the majority feels. And that is very hard. It implies riding out contradictions.” It’s a good read, regardless of Podemos’s ultimate fate, and his claim that “He [the capitalist class] wants us small, speaking a language no one understands, in a minority, hiding behind our traditional symbols” is more true than ever.

The year Ronald Reagan was elected president, Bernie Sanders was elected mayor of Burlington, Vermont, and the road began toward a Senate seat and the 2016 presidential primary, which catapulted DSA into relevance. Now, in a world with a growing DSA electoral machine, it is important to look back at the elections that started it all. Tracing Bernie’s struggles with ballot lines, Murray Bookchin and Michael Parenti, one can find the origins of much of Zohran’s deliverist Democratic Socialism in Bernie’s Mayoralty—both its success and its limitations.

This piece by Sophia Nova on the CDC’s responses to COVID, AIDS, and the Popular Movements, which forced them to address the needs of the communities that were affected most by those crises, points towards the ways in which the left can intervene in public health policy. We believe that well-targeted pressure campaigns with winnable demands, using a diversity of tactics, can be effective in extracting concessions from the capitalist state. 

Naomi Klein’s book The Shock Doctrine is among the most incisive and comprehensive accounts of the global capitalist campaign to create crises which expand the market’s power to dominate human lives: “An investigation that spans four decades of history, from Chile after Pinochet’s coup to Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union, from Baghdad under the US “Shock and Awe” attack to New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. ‘Shock doctrine’ describes the brute tactic of systematically using the public’s disorientation following a collective shock—wars, coups, terrorist attacks, market crashes, natural disasters—to push through radical pro-corporate measures, often called “shock therapy.” In the long term the left must grow to the point where we are powerful enough to articulate and enforce our own solutions as catastrophe strikes, in the short term we must marshal the social forces necessary to slow the march of austerity. 

“Socialism depends on the full flowering of mass democracy — not just elections, but the ability of ordinary people to govern their workplaces, communities, and lives. The authoritarian Right’s project is the opposite: permanent minority rule maintained through fear, repression, and hierarchy. Before the Left can democratize the economy, we must expand the meaning of democracy. That means aligning electoral work, labor power, and mass-movement organizing around a shared, urgent goal: defend and expand what democracy we have in order to stave off what MAGA is building.”

The far right is rather clear about its political goals. It wants to “Roll back the twentieth century” by attacking bodily autonomy, Queer rights, and multiracial democracy. They believe that the years between 1964 and 2024 can be written off as an aberration, a failed left-wing experiment in building a pluralistic society. They intend to weaponize the most undemocratic aspects of the slaver’s constitution to install a permanent oiligarchy of white supremacist wealth and power. We have an alternative vision, what Chris K calls “A New Reconstruction” which will complete the work of the first reconstruction, secure multiracial liberal democracy, and advance towards a multiracial socialist democracy. In order to do this DSA must join the already-emerging Popular Front against Fascism and White Supremacy, working with liberals when necessary to block the right, but contesting all the time within the front to lead it, shape its priorities, and struggle for Socialism. 

In this joint article with BnR member Allan F., Ben D. argues that Socialists have an obligation to put forward a presidential candidate in the 2028 race and that “Zohran’s campaign serves as a proof of concept that campaigns for executive offices present the best opportunity for the Left to spread our message to an audience of millions of working people.” A winning presidential campaign would allow us to harness the historical unpopularity of both major parties and the electorate’s increasingly desperate desire for a political alternative to propagandize democratic socialism, unite labor and the left, and build a sustainable working-class organization for the long haul. Plus, we could win. 

General DSA

The following readings represent Groundwork’s orientation towards building DSA as an organization. Groundwork believes that DSA is uniquely positioned to act as the disciplined, internally democratic, and ever-growing core of a wider movement for Anti-Imperialist Social Democracy as the first step towards Socialism. These readings articulate our vision of DSA as a mass organization of millions. To build DSA, we argue for the necessity of internally Democratic Structures based on one member one vote, a baseline acceptance of the Democratic Road to Socialism by all internal factions, and a well-staffed, centralized, and professional national organization.

“The system of wage labor, modulated as it is by structures of oppression, lays the groundwork for working people to understand the salience of a socialist analysis of their lives. However, this analysis doesn’t just automatically develop once a worker has been oppressed enough. A socialist vision of the world is one we have to expound actively.”

In this article, Nat S. argues that we should be recruiting to DSA wherever we go, and that bringing working-class people into DSA, especially working-class people of color, is a vital priority. She claims, correctly, that the idea we cannot recruit people of color into a “white organization” is a self-fulfilling prophecy. She proposes a model for active recruitment that can move DSA forward, instead of relying on either massive waves of recruitment from exogenous political developments or passive recruitment on social media or through friend groups, recruitment that simply reproduces the existing demographics of our organization. Importantly, she also highlights the necessity of us pipelining new recruits, especially recruits that are not of our typical demographics, into leadership roles and agency within the organization. 

In an argument for a mass party rather than a confederation of chapters and working groups, Oliva M. argues that better-designed structures are politically necessary. Oliva is clear that we are not just talking about formal structures (bylaws, the specific remit of such-and-such a committee, etc.), but about social structures that guide membership behavior. However, the article does present strong opinions on the relationship between formal structures that our caucus continues to hold today. It argues against autonomous, self-selecting, single-issue working groups, especially those that grant voting rights to those outside the organization. The agency of a single issue-based formation can never be prioritized over the agency of the membership as a whole. Second, it argues that Socialist organizations are fundamentally instrumentalist, our goal is to seize power to transform society, and we use internal democracy not because internal democracy is inherently good (“society will not improve if billionaires hold meetings together using Robert’s Rules!”), but because a working class that can make decisions collectively about building its own political power is a necessary precondition for a working class that is capable of making decisions collectively about the organization of society. As Olivia puts it: “We must have an ideology, a habit, of collective power, wielded as casually by the vast majority of the working class as billionaires today spend their money.”

In a society that is becoming increasingly discriminatory and deadly for queer and trans people, DSA exists as a space that provides not just safety but meaning and the possibility of collective action. Queer and Trans people remain a marginalized demographic that DSA has been disproportionately effective at recruiting, and our politics must continue to fight not just for transformative economic demands, which would disproportionately benefit queer and trans workers, but for the specific demands that allow them to live dignified lives. “Queer and trans people are a minority both globally and within the United States–without solidarity, we cannot survive. This creates significant obligations towards us on the part of cisgender and heterosexual socialists, but also upon queer and trans people to pick up the red flag and fight to build a mass socialist movement.” It is only through a mass socialist movement that identifies the struggle for queer liberation with the struggle for a social transformation that we can win either. 

Our goal should not be to “raise consciousness,” it should be to struggle and win. Win what exactly? Well-defined campaigns to achieve specific goals that measurably move power from the capitalist class to the workers. As Annebell V. argued in The Organizer, a publication of the dearly departed Collective Power Network, vague notions like: “Consciousness, solidarity, struggle, and revolution are the Four Humors of modern left politics.” Focusing on these ideals rather than concrete victories allows us to back vanity, unwinnable electoral campaigns, retreat into insular doctrinal “parties” that represent no one, and, overall, abrogate our responsibility to engage in serious politics. “Many repeat the slogan ‘to make change everywhere, start anywhere.’ This is demonstrably false. It’s possible to conduct the mapping, analysis, and research needed to identify optimal targets, build a strategy, and develop effective tactics.” We owe it to ourselves to build a movement that takes victory seriously by mapping our targets, conducting structured tests, tracking our progress, and performing postmortems. 

This one is a real mass politics classic. It traces the phenomenon of people moving from Liberalism to a constellation of bespoke leftist ideologies that have little in common with one another beyond their marginality and opposition to the democratic socialist project. “Terminally online, constantly accusing others of being sheepdogs or sellouts, and rarely working with others to expand the socialist movement through mass action,” these are just some of the calling cards of what we call ultraliberalism/ultraleftism. Ultraleftists believe that politics is something that you are, a label, not something that you do.

Patrick identifies Four Reasons why Liberals become Ultraleftists.

  1. It allows the individual who made the switch to maintain their moral superiority and feel like they’re the furthest left in the room. 

  2. An obsession with radical tactics and electoral abstentionism, born of a mistaken desire to replicate the class struggles of yesteryear in a radically different conjuncture.

  3. A belief that it is primarily liberals’ tactics that make them ineffective, and the belief that those tactics (voting, petitions, etc.) are inherently ineffective.

  4. A view of the Left as a consumer subculture where one can cultivate a bespoke leftist identity rather than an actually existing political movement. “It's an attempt to cultivate a unique brand of having correct politics, even if those politics have no bearing or influence on the world at all.”

Patrick offers several solutions to break the pipeline.

  1. Political education that explicitly points out the marginality of the American Left pre-DSA and explains the dead ends the left took (High-Control Cadre organizations with no actual constituency, hyper-local “community organizing,” non-profits, structureless affinity groups, etc.) while extolling the virtues of a Mass Democratic Socialist Political Party. 

  2. Prioritization of recruitment in our workplaces and communities rather than self-selecting online spaces. 

  3. Winnable campaigns that get Ultras to interact with normal people. 

Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò is at it again this this article for teen vogue: “If the actions of the people surrounding you are oriented in maintaining a particular political posture, internal standard of correctness, or some other goal rather than a tangible victory, you may have ended up on team Be a Thing.” Basically covers it. The left should be ruthlessly focused on attaining power to defeat the far right and win a green social transformation: “because the more our political energy goes to the politics of self-expression, the less there is for the fights we really need to win against mass deportation, mass incarceration, the climate crisis.”

Democratic Socialism is the real movement to abolish the present state of things. It should also be DSA’s hegemonic ideology. Defined by its engagement with politics as they actually exist, Democratic Socialism: “is far less rooted in strict doctrine than a pluralistic and pragmatic perspective that has emerged over the course of DSA’s actual practice of struggle.” This Democratic Socialism ought to take for granted that we will use all available and appropriate avenues in the struggle for power, including electoral campaigns. As Rose argues: “Sectarianism and ultraleftism are authoritarian positions, rooted in moralism and idealism, where subservience to dogma is the beginning of political ethics. What a majority thinks does not matter; all that matters is the ‘correct’ line.” Now, of course: “The solution to the problems outlined above is not, as some have suggested, to restrict our membership, put in place ideological tests or require our members to uphold the platform in a specific way.” Instead, it is to recognize and isolate bad actors who are openly in disagreement with DSA’s principles, adopt voting methods that reward building broad consensus rather than coercing a section of our membership, and enforce the democratic centralist clause in our bylaws. Democratic Socialists deserve a Democratic Socialist organization, and we should be willing to defend Democratic Socialism and its theory of change both inside and outside our organization. 

In this January 2025 article, Allegra R. lays out a smart set of steps to take when dealing with a membership spike. 

  • Getting an onboarding machine ready

    • Making sure recruits fill out a Google form or something similar that collects important demographic information (including whether they’re a union member!) and tracks how they found out about us. 

    • Identify potential on-borders, reliable people equipped with onboarding guides and sample scripts, as well as the time to schedule many one-on-ones. 

    • Keep track of new onboarded people through tools like Solidarity Tech or Action Network.

  • Have an active campaign for new membership to plug into 

  • Get your comms everywhere 

  • Be strategic: Identify and defuse personal or ideological conflicts before they become a problem, and regularly check in to see whether the campaigns you’re plugging new members into are actually motivating them. 

  • Translate Positive Numbers into Positive Vibes: If the above steps are successful, make sure everyone knows about it!

  • Woulda Coulda Shoulda: For a Nimble, Mass-Oriented DSA

“In politics, abstention is itself a form of action — one which almost always benefits the enemy.” This quote from Ralph Miliband encapsulates the wider critique this article has of the 2023-2025 NPC. It accuses the NPC of demobilizing our membership by refusing to engage with extant political crises and its decision to hollow out our core of experienced staffers through layoffs. The article presents an alternative vision of DSA, with national recruitment drives and a coherent national line on the political issues of the day, as well as a large, well-resourced core of staff helping to supercharge the organizing of larger chapters and get smaller ones on their feet. 

This excellent article by J. Kraush, former NYC DSA growth and development coordinator, with the assistance of A. Zeren challenges the conclusions of the 2025 National GDC report, which argued that growth was largely the result of broader political developments DSA cannot control. Instead, Kraush and Zeren argue that list-building, socials, an active membership committee, and clear onboarding pipelines can help a chapter grow and develop. 

In “Members are Members,” Daniel C. argues for direct election of the NPC, DSA’s highest decision-making body, by the membership as a whole. He argues for the intelligence of our average member and their ability, if allowed to hear from all candidates and perspectives, to make an informed decision about who should lead us. He argues for the reverberating positive impacts of adopting a one member one vote system, with direct elections allowing our highest-level leadership elections an opportunity to become exercises in internal organizing and political education and to “supplement the town-hall democracy of local DSA meetings with a national counterpart by pulling the murky world of DSA subfactions and top level political decisionmaking out of Discord and Signal chats and Twitter into everyone’s hands equally, where the members can make sense of it on their own terms.” Importantly, this vision of one member one vote contained important safeguards for minoritarian tendencies, including an NPC debate accessible to all members, a call for nationwide deliberative forums to go along with the election, equal access to membership lists, and an encouragement to mass phonebank and canvass members to solicit their participation in the elections. 

Articles on Groundwork-led Campaigns

The following readings illustrate how the previous principles have been applied in practice. They highlight the success of Groundwork locals, electoral campaigns in which Groundwork was a large part, and the successful passage of non-reformist reforms.

​“We are here to win and we have to seize the power of the state, because nothing else can address this global crisis at a scale that can match it,” says Charlie Heller, one of the leaders in DSA-NYC’s ecosocialist working group, in the introduction to this article on the campaign which successfully passed BPRA (the Build Public Renewables Act) in New York State. BPRA provides a successful model from which to build a Green New Deal, incorporating racial justice (shutting down polluting natural gas plants in black and brown neighborhoods) environmental justice (having the state build the renewables needed to reach 100% renewable energy by 2040), labor justice (creating 25,000 green union jobs), and a just transition (by paying to retrain fossil fuel workers to work in the renewable sector). This article explains in great detail the process of developing a successful campaign with winnable demands and how to pivot it when faced with opposition. BPRA’s passage required almost all of the tools in DSA’s toolbox, from bringing Unions on board as coalition partners to primarying intransigent legislators to escalating public pressure. Its success demonstrates that non-reformist reforms are possible, even without a DSA majority in a legislature. 

This article builds on the previous one through a long-form interview with the organizers who successfully passed the Build Public Renewables Act. It is worth a read, if only to learn about the enemies DSA made during this campaign and the strategies we used to defeat them. The advice given by the interviewees, to be strategic and not succumb to despair, is more relevant than ever. 

Reflecting on DSA-LA’s successful capture of a fifth of the seats on the LA city council, Tal L. writes on what makes a successful electoral campaign in the country’s second-largest city. These victories: “were the result of three key interconnected factors in Los Angeles politics: macropolitical trends that made left political platforms more popular and viable among the Angeleno voting base, three powerful, well-run, and volunteer-driven campaigns by our three candidates, and crucially, intentional and thoughtful work by DSA-LA to maximize our organizational strengths and political opportunities.” 

Tal elaborates on the progression of the DSA-LA electoral program, starting from the beginning. DSA built from helping to re-elect a Socialist school board member (and thus building their relationship with United Teachers Los Angeles) to running a Popular Front campaign as part of a coalition backing Nithya Ramen, to building political maturity through adopting a “Democratic Socialist Program” to which elected officials can be held to account, and running cadre union and DSA organizers like Hugo Soto-Martinez. 

Importantly, the districts that DSA chose to run in were picked through a process of power mapping, which both identified the “Status-Quo Political Coalition" that DSA-LA is building a Socialist political pole to oppose, and used metrics like 2020 primary votes, number of DSA members, total registered voters, and results for progressive ballot measures to identify vulnerable districts. Using a combination of a city-wide minimum program, picking measured and strategic fights, and building relationships with organized labor, DSA-LA has captured two more city council seats since this article was written and is poised to elect a slate of candidates across the city this cycle. 

This interview with Kelsea Bond, DSA’s newly elected Georgia city councilwoman, is a useful window into how to organize in the South. Kelsea’s observations on how to target districts effectively, on how to run in non-partisan races, and how to frame a candidate’s relationship with DSA are all incredibly useful. Her campaign should be an inspiration for Socialists across the south, and as she says, “If we have ever had a political opening for socialists, I think that moment is now.”

In “This Solar Panel Kills Fascists,” Gabriel Hetland reflects on the Build Public Renewables Act and how its passage provides a way to fight back against fascist erosion of Democracy. Rebuilding state capacity, providing good union jobs, and directly disarticulating the power of energy capital, BPRA provides an example of a non-reformist reform which coheres the working class against its enemies. 

Astra Allen
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Political Disagreement in NYC-DSA: Breaking Down the No More 24 Vote and Ensuing Discourse