Introduction: A Mass Orientation
This article will attempt to address some ongoing debates within DSA on how best to carry out electoral work and build a socialist working-class party. The first section will lay out what we mean by mass movement electoralism, followed by a sum-up of some of the practical electoral organizing done in Chicago. The next section gives voice to many of the tactical considerations in building campaigns, working in coalitions, and how DSA can gain experience and sharpen our socialist politics. Lastly, we address the strategic question of how to build a broadbase socialist party that can contend for power. Two key questions run through our analysis: how to become a more multi-racial working-class organization, and the need to support class-struggle candidates as well as DSA cadre.
There have always been debates, inside and outside of DSA, as to what constitutes “socialist politics.” There are those who argue explicit socialism must always take priority: fly the red flag proudly and wave it for all to see. This argument posits that anything less reduces our appeal as an alternative to the Democratic Party. Electoral campaigns like those organized by the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and various small communist groups are rarely serious about winning. Their purpose is making political points to educate the working class, who nevertheless give miniscule support to such candidates. Perhaps the working class is to blame for failing to support these radical candidates. Or maybe the working class is looking for more than pure ideology.
Unfortunately, ideological purity cannot protect us from the dangers of our time. We are now at a conjuncture where fascism is the main threat to all the advances won over the past century by mass popular movements. These include victories by labor, people of color, women, the LBGTQ+ community, and the environmental movement. We believe there is a strong anti-fascist majority in our country, and that is where we need to be rooted. We need to be working with all our friends and allies to fight fascism, and we have many to call on. That means socialists must be everywhere, developing relationships, creating issue-based coalitions, and building alliances for defeating authoritarianism. In other words, cohering a broad progressive front, or what might be called an anti-fascist united front.
DSA can play a central role in this. As the largest socialist organization in the U.S., we can help unite a broad array of forces, gaining respect through building unity and solidarity with others. Through mass work we can also best popularize our socialist political vision. This means rejecting a siloed or sectarian style. The 2025 campaign of New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani was an excellent example of such a broad and principled outreach.
But should we only support cadre candidates who can boast long-term allegiance to DSA? Or do class struggle candidates, those with loose ties to DSA but committed to the same ideas and issues that DSA holds dear, also deserve support? We believe both types of candidates are needed to build a multi-racial, working-class socialist movement, and that mass-movement electoralism plays a key role in this effort.
Whether supporting cadre or class struggle candidates, we need to ask the following questions: How will the campaign build the fighting capacity of the working class and push back against MAGA and corporate Democrats? How do we create an ongoing coalition and broaden our relationship? Can the campaign change the balance of forces in Chicago? Will it increase our organizational capacity and knowledge? Will it expand our membership, and help transform the class and multi-racial membership of DSA? Answering these questions and others will help us map out a strategy for mass movement electoralism. Canvassing for that perfect candidate who started as a DSA comrade and promotes every policy that seems socialist. But if we want to really contest power, we must organize with all friends and allies, many of whom are not, or not yet, socialists. These allies only need to agree with our program that “workers deserve more” and be willing to fight to break the power of corporations and the far right.
I. Mass Movement Electoralism
Our starting point is the key link between mass movements and elections. Mass movements are instrumentally valuable for winning elections. But elections are also instrumentally valuable for growing a movement. Call this mass movement electoralism.
Starting With Sanders
The development of mass movement electoralism is largely a by-product of Bernie Sanders’ presidential campaigns. Starting in 2016, Sanders framed his campaign as a political revolution from the bottom up. The messaging of “Our Revolution” reflected the campaign’s movement orientation: it aspired to transform the U.S. government through collective action. The movement orientation of the campaign was further reflected by its small-dollar grassroots funding model and its volunteer-driven field operation. The Sanders campaign was mass movement-oriented in both messaging and structure.
Fast forward to 2020, the campaign went even further. Building on the success of 2016, its leaders leaned deeper into a movement identity. Through messaging, the campaign created a new slogan: “Not Me, Us.” As the slogan explicitly suggests, the campaign was not about Sanders, but the movement. Meanwhile, the campaign aspired to scale up its operations by fundraising more small-dollar donations from more people, while knocking on more doors with more volunteers. Sanders’ campaigns reflected a new model of electoral organizing: mass movement electoralism—using a mass movement to win elections, while using elections to grow the movement. The largest organizational gain was a tremendous growth in DSA. Much more so than the organization Our Revolution, which grew out of Sanders’ 2016 campaign. It never expanded much outside of its identity with Sanders and has failed to sustain enough enthusiasm to lead a mass movement.
Meanwhile, in 2017, an unknown organizer named Zohran Mamdani joined the New York City chapter of the DSA. As an unknown organizer who rose to become the Mayor of New York City, Zohran has repeatedly cited Sanders as one of his biggest inspirations—like so many others in DSA. And from a small organization to the largest socialist organization in the country, DSA has experienced unprecedented membership growth, in large part due to Sanders, Mamdani, and Trump.
Democratic Socialism and Mass Movement Electoralism
It is one thing to practice mass movement electoralism. It is another thing to practice it as democratic socialists. Democratic socialist mass movement electoralism is anchored by a distinctive political identity with a principled aspiration to build a society that is democratically owned.
If you look back at U.S. history, the foundation of socialist organizing has almost always been labor, not elections, and for good reason. The foundation of socialism is anchored in a distinction between workers and owners. Because workers do not have ownership, they are powerless. Unless, of course, they form a labor union: an organized group with other workers that can act as a source of power that counters that of the owner. Organizing workers at their jobs is thus, and always has been, a core aim of socialists. So why has DSA embraced mass movement electoralism?
First, elections speak to the masses—particularly in the U.S. While socialists aspire for a class-conscious movement that sees the economy as its terrain of political struggle, the reality is that most Americans do not think of politics in that way. Rather, the popular way of thinking about politics is a narrow one: politics is about elections. To communicate socialist politics and win the hearts and minds of a mass audience requires socialists to engage electorally. This can also be quite effective. As Sanders indisputably proved, an effective movement-oriented campaign has the capacity to transform popular political discourse and put a socialist political movement into motion. Finally, there is an urgent need to stop fascists from consolidating power, through elections or otherwise. Whether it is speaking to the masses to put in motion a working-class movement, winning governing power to transform society, or taking electoral power away from fascists, there are deep justifications for socialist mass movement electoralism.
Problems of Race and Class for Mass Electoralism
Yet there are different problems for electoral organizing, and the first practical question will always be our capacity. In the current political climate, there are simply not enough socialists to do all the organizing work that needs to be done. By contrast, the second problem is a matter of values: what is the most valuable use of our capacity in which some commitments are ranked higher than others? Linked to values is political strategy. What are our goals and how should we organize to achieve them? This problem generates some of the most heated debates.
For example, the debate over only supporting cadre candidates, or additionally class struggle candidates. Cadre candidates are those who have shown long-term commitment to DSA, are accountable to the organization, and proclaim allegiance to socialism. Such candidates should certainly be a key effort in DSA electoral work. A class-struggle candidate may have looser ties to DSA, but a long history of fighting for working-class issues and solid roots in her community. This is particularly relevant when a candidate seeking DSA endorsement is a person of color with a proven track record as an organizer. After all, building multi-racial class unity is a core principle of socialism. This speaks to underlining strategic conceptions of how to build DSA, the importance of cohering a broad socialist movement through coalitions and alliances, and how to lay the foundation for a socialist party that can contend for political power.
In the context of multi-racial organizing, it is imperative to respect a group’s right to self-determination—especially as it relates to lived experience. This is also an important principle in how we relate to potential electeds. The ideal of cadre candidates can sometimes downgrade the importance of lived experience. People come to politics and demonstrate their commitments in many ways. Yet we often issue judgments against people who have demonstrated their commitments outside of DSA.
Imagine, for example, someone who comes to socialist politics through their experience of racial domination in our society. They demonstrate their commitment by dedicating themselves to organizing to solve problems affecting their community. They organize tenants to fight for better housing. They organize parents to fight for better education, for better healthcare, or against police brutality. Now imagine they come up for endorsement in the chapter. Yet, they are rejected for having an insufficient relationship to DSA. In doing so, DSA fails to take into consideration their lived experience. The candidate chooses to organize their communities through the lived experience of racial domination. Yet they are rejected for endorsement for committing themselves to their community rather than to DSA.
That is not to say running a cadre candidate is not a key organizing goal, nor is it to say that one’s relationship to the organization is not an important consideration, but rather that it cannot be treated as a disqualifying condition. This is particularly true for the purpose of multi-racial organizing because DSA is weakly rooted in minority communities, which is reflected in the makeup of our membership. The basic reality is that individuals within marginalized communities come to politics through distinct lived experiences that motivate distinct commitments. What matters, substantively, is whether those demonstrated commitments are aligned with DSA politics. Organizing across differences requires respecting demonstrated commitments anchored in lived experiences, not just DSA membership.
What are some of the most important shared lived experiences that can unite us? The first source of unity is fighting for the material well-being of society. A universal point of agreement within DSA is that our economy does not meet the needs of the working class. Mamdani’s “Make New York Affordable” taps into what is becoming a near universal demand. That experience has the potential to command unity when an electoral strategy is tied to specific, concrete policies that can improve lives. However, economic demands should never be our sole campaign issue. The U.S. faces an intersectional crisis that includes racism, sexism, discrimination against non-citizens, environmental disasters, and imperialism. Here we can turn to the Mamdani campaign to study how a focus on affordability can co-exist while also addressing these issues.
Our other issue is at the level of systemic reform of the electoral system itself. The entire left shares a common anger towards the ruling elites and their political control inside the Democratic and Republican parties, propped up by a privately financed two-party system. Killing the two-party monopoly and creating publicly financed multi-party democracy is a strategic demand that can help guide the movement’s electoral organizing.
II. The Chicago Experience: Using Electoral Work to Build Alliances and Grow DSA
So what has been the experience of mass movement electoralism in Chicago? How have we used electoral work not just to make a point, but to build a base of active socialist organizers and civically minded voters? We believe the “Chicago Model” of coalition-building offers a blueprint for this transition. The path to building a mass socialist party is not found in running educational campaigns that garner one percent of the vote, but in running to win governing power through coalitions.
The 2019 Breakthrough: Bridging Movements to Electoral Power
Our first breakthrough in Chicago resulted in the election of five to six alders in 2019, mostly people of color, and the formation of a Socialist Caucus in the Chicago City Council. This was not achieved by parachuting candidates into districts waving red flags. It was achieved by running candidates who were already embedded leaders in existing movement struggles; essentially, class-struggle candidates in which DSA linked to pre-existing work and coalitions.
Take the 20th Ward victory of Jeanette Taylor. Her campaign was rooted deeply in her leadership of the hunger strike to save Dyett High School and the NoCopAcademy movement. The proximity of the Obama Presidential Center to her ward also highlighted concerns around gentrification. Her track record was able to demonstrate a community-centered approach to the processes involved. Similarly, Rossana Rodríguez-Sanchez in the 33rd Ward didn’t just run on ideology; she ran on her track record of neighborhood organizing against gentrification and for expanded community services having been involved with the Immigrant Youth Justice League. These victories helped DSA gain a foothold in the larger gentrification and police politics of Chicago, and with residents who had been fighting on these issues.
Similarly, the victories of Byron Sigcho-Lopez demonstrated DSA played a vital role in beating entrenched power structures. The corruption of incumbent Danny Solis, forced to vacate his seat due to an FBI sting operation, validated much of the 25th Ward IPO narrative that propelled Sigcho-Lopez to his second run in 2019. In the 40th Ward, DSA’s large presence prevented the almost four-decade entrenched alderman from being re-elected by working alongside a formidable progressive coalition supporting Andre Vazquez who was chair of the North Side chapter of Reclaim Chicago. In the 1st Ward, community organizer Daniel LaSpata was a ten-year member and vice-president of the Logan Square Neighborhood Association and an organizer with the Jane Addams Seniors Caucus. He faced off and won against the entrenched political machine of Proco Joe Moreno. Finally, Carlos Rosa was an organizer with the Illinois Coalition for Immigrant and Refugee Rights and was the first CDSA member elected to city council. Rosa’s insurgent politics were validated with his resounding re-election victory, and the addition of all the above socialists joining him at City Hall.
These victories proved a vital lesson: Socialists can lead and partake in multi-tendency coalitions when we fight around concrete, winnable demands that affect the working class and people of color. These candidates were supported by progressive unions like the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and various neighborhood organizations. They demonstrated that we win respect not by running on abstract socialism, but on delivering and respecting the local historical conditions. All these candidates were well-known activists in their communities, supported by an array of progressive forces in their wards. Their primary identities were as class fighters, not DSA cadre. But DSA provided a path outside the corporate lead Democratic Party machine, merging socialist organizational capacity with homegrown organizers—an organic relationship arising out of the lived experience of organizers in working class wards.
2023: The Apex of Mass Organizing and the “Proto-Party” in Action
If 2019 was the breakthrough, the 2023 mayoral victory of Brandon Johnson represents the apex of this mass-based strategy. This victory was not a single candidate’s campaign, but the culmination of a decade-long labor-community-socialist alliance, organized largely through vehicles like the CTU, United Working Families, ward-based Independent Political Organizations (IPOs), and community groups attached to non-profit services. This coalition framework had already been taking shape in tackling issues like affordable housing.
DSA played a critical role in this coalition, helping to re-elect our incumbent aldermen. But DSA did not endorse Johnson even though he was a former Chicago Teachers Union organizer and had their strong backing. Nevertheless, some individual members campaigned for him, believing Johnson aligned with working-class demands even though he did not carry the socialist label. He was, in other words, a class struggle candidate. This stands in stark contrast to the narrow impulse that would reject such a candidate because he is a Democrat or not a declared socialist. The unity behind Johnson delivered a tangible shift in power to a working-class-led alliance. This is the ultimate proof that we run in elections to win governing power. By prioritizing the “proto-party” coalition over purity, we achieve the energy and victories necessary to transform city politics. And once in office, Johnson appointed DSA council members to important committee positions, and Carlos Rosa to head the Department of Parks and Recreation.
A recent resolution titled “Which Side Are You On?” written by Chicago DSA Co-Chair Sean Duffy and veteran member Alan Maas, passed in a close vote at our March 2026 general meeting. The resolution was a reconsideration of the last mayoral election noting that DSA has “been hindered (by) remaining silent on city-wide races, most notably for Mayor.” It went on to state, “An electoral defeat of Mayor Brandon Johnson and the socialists and progressives largely allied with him on the City Council would be a defeat for the left and the progressive wing of the labor movement, with his replacement almost certain to be a major barrier to advancing a democratic socialist agenda in the city for years to come.” This is a recognition of the need to support class struggle candidates, particularly a progressive Black mayor being challenged by the white corporate Democrats who traditionally hold power in Chicago.
But the resolution was also open-eyed about differences DSA had with some of Johnson’s actions in office. The question being, how to extend support to someone who from a working-class perspective is clearly the best choice, while at the same time maintaining the independence to criticize? Here the resolution offers a path forward. “The challenges and failures of the Johnson administration demand an honest and critical analysis, but strategies of uncritical allegiance, open hostility, passive disconnection, or simply ‘ignoring the elephant in the room’ are not realistic or viable in an election that is on track to largely be a referendum on Mayor Johnson.” The answer is to ask all candidates “which side are you on,” while working to unite left-wing and progressive forces around a common agenda to tax the rich and reject austerity. This puts class politics and racial solidarity at the center of our mass electoral work.
Reclaiming Our Legacy
This “proto-party” approach isn’t a novelty; it’s a return to the most effective traditions of Chicago’s working-class history. We are reconnecting with the era when communists, socialists, and trade unionists worked to organize the packinghouses and steel mills.
In those days, the left didn’t isolate itself. It was the backbone of the union drives led by the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) and the early civil rights struggles in the first half of the 20th century. These organizers understood that political power wasn’t just about a ballot line, but about building a “bloc” that could contend for power in the workplace and the neighborhood simultaneously. The current relationship of DSA, the CTU, and community groups should mirror those historic efforts to merge the socialist vision with the muscle of organized labor. A key component to our mass movement electoralism strategy.
However, to sustain this today, we need more than just coalitions that come together for an election and disperse. We need the permanence that our forebears built. We need structures that hold the working class together between elections. This brings us to the necessity of IPOs, building DSA, and creating coalitions linked to mass organizing. It’s what Antonio Gramsci called creating institutional power in civil society. It also affects how we see building a mass socialist party addressed in Section IV.
III. Base Building and Coalitions
Having laid out our approach to mass movement electoralism and providing examples from DSA organizing, we now turn to the details of building institutional power and organizational capacity.
Building and participating in a mass movement is complex and requires balancing competing priorities. To build a mass electoral movement, we must focus on three goals:
- Building relationships between organizations and groups of people. Only a broad coalition between groups can reliably deliver significant wins on a state and federal level. These bonds are not forged overnight, but require time and resources within any strategic plan.
- Creating a mass base that will support and mobilize a left agenda. A genuine mass movement must strive to win votes and bring new members in.
- Emboldening the left flank to play a significant role in defining messaging and policy priorities. A mass movement is one step on the road to Socialism. The form such a constellation takes is not certain, but it is very likely that DSA will be a major voice in defining the explicitly anti-capitalist wing of such a coalition. In this case, we must doggedly pursue a voice in decision-making. This influence will better the odds that a coalition heightens the contradictions between labor and capital and builds a revolutionary working class.
Such influence isn’t acquired by yelling the loudest. Instead, we must build leverage through institutional capacity, build electoral and governing expertise within our organization and gather data and knowledge to deploy in future campaigns.
These goals must be pursued in qualitatively different campaign formations: cadre candidate campaigns, small-scale class struggle coalitions, and large-scale class struggle coalitions.
Cadre Candidate Campaigns
These goals must be pursued in qualitatively different campaign formations. DSA should and will continue to run their own “cadre candidate” campaigns. These are crucial for goal number three, as such campaigns immediately build our capacity because DSA members are guaranteed positions in leadership, coordination, and the data gathered by such campaigns is ours to use.
As we’ve seen with the Zohran campaign, these projects also build a mass base of support. NYC–DSA membership boomed during his campaign, and the campaign mobilized 100,000 volunteers under the Zohran vision for the city. Many of these volunteers would certainly be back to support a broader mass movement.
Perhaps a less championed boon of DSA’s efforts during the campaign was its successful attempt to weave together other organizations into a coalition. Even in cadre candidate campaigns, coalitions should be cultivated.
Small-Scale Class Struggle Coalitions
Small-scale electoral coalitions through Ward IPOs can also contribute to our ends. In these coalitions, DSA is still a major partner. Campaigns under the ward IPO stand to offer our members leadership positions (though fewer than they would enjoy in cadre candidate campaigns). By participating in these campaigns, our organization and allies also have an opportunity to build relationships and gather contact information for potential recruits to our ranks of activists and leaders, and for further support during future campaigns and mobilizations.
More importantly, DSA has significant gaps in support, particularly with working-class people of color. This is a critical failure in an organization that stands for the most marginalized groups in society. This won’t be corrected by merely handing out flyers or wheat-pasting. Diverse working-class neighborhoods already have organizations with deep ties to the community and working knowledge of the needs and aspirations of the population. DSA stands to gain by working closely with these organizations, learning to refine our own messaging and platform and showing genuine dedication to the cause of the multi-racial working class.
These campaigns are crucial for organizations like DSA to grow support in new areas. In any given campaign, win or lose, our goal should be to create a base of working-class support door by door, ward by ward. This requires retaining connections within the community that can be mobilized for further campaigns, ranging between electoral actions, legislative goals, social protest, and labor support.
These small-scale campaigns must be selected through careful strategic analysis. We should not consider the campaign based on the candidate or platform alone, but must think carefully about the coalitions we wish to cultivate and the areas that we most sorely need contact with. We must look beyond the short-term stump speech to how campaigns can directly contribute to our central electoral goals.
Larger campaigns pose far greater risks and rewards. Major runs for federal office, governor, or even mayor require much broader coalitions, but can help spread working class-oriented messaging and make substantial gains for the working class. This is what the resolution “Which Side Are You On” explained above recognizes. Bernie Sanders, who formed a diverse left-progressive coalition in his 2016 and 2020 campaigns, played a central role in revitalizing the left, even though he spent very few resources on directly building socialist institutions. These huge campaigns are key opportunities for building a mass base to fight for working class power, even if they are often not explicitly socialist.
Large-Scale Class Struggle Coalitions
Such campaigns also can make incredible material gains. Brandon Johnson, whose progressive coalition won him the mayoralty of Chicago, has notched real wins for working people. His administration oversaw a historically generous contract with the Chicago Teacher’s Union. Johnson vetoed legislation allowing snap curfews. The administration’s investment in community programs and resources along with Community Violence Intervention Programs within policing have contributed to the lowest murder rate Chicago has seen in decades. Johnson’s victory and these policies would not have been possible under a narrower coalition.
Of course, Johnson’s administration is not socialist: what’s good doesn’t go far enough, and it is difficult to assess how much the administration’s harmful stances (poor housing for migrants at the beginning of his tenure and, more recently, a budget proposing significant cuts to crucial city services such as Chicago libraries) is due to the constraints of his office or broader ideological shortcomings within his coalition.
In many cases, the possible benefits of such campaigns will outweigh such risks, but we must be careful to mitigate the greatest dangers. Any endorsement of a broad-based coalition must be put to a democratic vote. Political education also has its part to play, ensuring that members understand the potential risks and benefits of such political actions. This will deepen organizational democracy, but it will also allow an opportunity to inoculate against uncomradely debate.
We must consider a final element related to these broader campaigns: our own institutional capacity. Depending on the nature of the coalition, DSA may stand to enter members into positions of leadership and governance. If we wish to build our campaign capabilities, there is no better place. The sheer scale of such campaigns could offer our members unique opportunities to build expertise. There is no substitute.
What is to Be Done?
We must approach electoral politics seriously. Selecting individual campaigns based on the fleeting merits of purity will only get us so far. Instead, we must develop a deeper electoral strategy that considers organizational goals above the number of buzzwords in a candidate’s speech. Additionally, during these campaigns we must be ever aware of long-term strategic considerations, such as party building and class consciousness. To truly achieve our political goals, we must take calculated risks with campaigns and coalition partners that may not be explicitly socialist.
This can be applied in government as well. Once a candidate is victorious, how do we use it to further our fight for a mass party? There are some easy answers here: pursue staff positions to build institutional knowledge and use organizational pressure to get candidates on board for specific messaging or policy goals. But there are less immediate goals to consider as well. We hope to form a mass party that has countless candidates in government. Now is the time to experiment with community and coalition partnerships and inside-outside mobilizations. How do we coordinate efforts between the halls of power and mobilizations in our streets and workplaces? How do we deepen democratic ties with the community to build a durable base of support and responsive governance? Answering such questions will take a great deal of trial and error. It will be exciting to see what conclusions our comrades in New York develop while Mamdani is in Gracie Mansion.
IV. Tasks in Building a Socialist Party
Finally, we want to consider the strategic goal of mass movement electoralism, that is building a major socialist party that can contend for state power. The need to build a socialist or labor party has been long discussed on the left. Labor leader Tony Mazzocchi helped found the U.S. Labor Party in 1996, which had the support of nine international unions and hundreds of locals. But the party would educate first and run candidates much later. In fact, the Buffalo chapter of the party was expelled for prematurely running candidates. Meanwhile, labor leaders were still drawn to the Democratic Party, and leftist factional struggles undercut organizing efforts. But the call for an independent working-class party never stopped, particularly among socialists who see the Democratic Party as a dead-end or class enemy. The debate on how to establish an independent socialist party continues among DSA members today. The DSA podcast episode featuring David Dulhalde from the Socialist Majority caucus and Ramsin Canon of Bread & Roses provides good insights into the current discussion.
Here there are several strategic questions we need to consider. Is DSA by itself the heart of the process of establishing such a party? DSA is certainly core to the process. But even as we grow in numbers and elect more officials, does that mean at some undefined but not distant point we can transform ourselves into the long-sought socialist party? We don’t think any single organization can viably claim to be a party representing our large and diverse working class without broader unity built between labor, social movements, and the left. Even if DSA has quantitative growth with more elected members and more membership, how is this a qualitative change from the proto-party we are today?
Let’s start with this picture of reality. The Democratic and Republican parties each pull in 75 to 82 million votes in presidential elections. To be a serious national alternative, we need a base of 15 to 20 million, a significant bloc in Congress, a strong base in city councils, and mayors and state legislators across the country. Those are the building blocks that make a new national party a competitive reality. There is a wide range of socialists and progressive independents willing to cut ties with the Democrats and found a third party.
Can we glimpse this reality today? We think so. A strong indicator was the No Kings March of eight million people. The largest march in US history bringing together a huge mass of people deeply dissatisfied with the nation’s political and economic conditions.Take those eight million and double it. All those folks, in all their diversity and concerns, need to see a political future in socialism rather than liberalism, and they must be convinced to vote for socialist candidates. DSA will certainly be a key organization in that process. But constructing the relationships to do so may take an extended period of coalition building, electoral alliances, and growing confidence and respect among coalition partners.
Building Multi-Racial Unity
Here is another topic that we must assess realistically. Let’s look at the racial composition of DSA. In Chicago, 39 percent of the population is white; people of color make up 61 percent of the population. That is far from the composition of our local membership. Building a socialist party can only be done through mass work within the multi-racial working class. The U.S. population is now 40.2% people of color. We don’t have national statistics on the demographics of national DSA membership, but we estimate it’s about 80 to 85 percent white. Of those in the top 10 percent of wealthiest households, 88.5 percent are white, only 2.2 percent are Black, 2.4 percent Hispanic, and 6.9 percent Asian. If we just look at the working and middle classes, people of color constitute 45.6 percent, or about 137 million people.
Any socialist party worthy of representing the multi-racial working class needs to reflect this reality in its membership numbers. That means minority-based social movement organizations and many thousands of minority individuals need to join in the founding of a socialist party. It means major unions need to affiliate, not only because labor is a key component of our strategy, but because the largest percent of society with union households is the Black community. A socialist party that is serious about winning power must be built around that working-class reality. Of course, our voting base will be much larger than our membership. But we need an institutional infrastructure built upon a strong multi-racial grassroots base.
This is easy to say, of course, and much harder to achieve. U.S. society pushes against racially integrated organizations because of its institutional racist history—a history of segregated communities, churches, civil organization, schools, and social events, as well as laws and ideology that privilege white supremacy. During the upsurge in the 1960s, the radical landscape was split into the overwhelmingly white Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), while people of color organized within their communities with groups such as the Black Panthers, Crusade for Justice, the American Indian Movement, Puerto Rican Socialist Party, various Asian-American advocacy groups, and so on. These groups worked together through coalitions like the Panther-led Rainbow Coalition in Chicago. Moreover, the war in Vietnam played a unifying role. But the most integrated groups were within communist circles. The traditional Communist Party built on its historic ties and the Angela Davis campaign, as well as some organizations in the new communist movement, which had 30 to 80 percent minority cadres. But overall, these numbers were in the low thousands. Building a multi-racial socialist party will take a dedicated and continual effort, putting an analysis of racialized capitalism at the heart of our understanding, and connecting with minority-lead organizing.
An example of a missed opportunity: In Chicago, there was a militant and long campaign to create a civilian review board to oversee the city’s racist police force. This entailed a lot of community organizing. DSA was largely absent from this movement even though it had widespread support, particularly in black and brown neighborhoods throughout Chicago. Eventually, the movement forced the City Council to create the board, although not in the precise manner the organizers had advocated. When district elections were held for board members, DSA was nowhere to be found. The criticism was the community-based boards would be a sham without enough power. But if socialists are to be “everywhere,” as the recent eponymous DSA initiative calls for, it needs to recognize the struggles that people of color identify as important and be there too. Running for and supporting board candidates would have provided a direct connection with the organic demands of the minority community and strengthened the influence of the boards.
Nevertheless, DSA has done some excellent work electing minority candidates, both in Chicago and nationally. Our most nationally recognized members, Zohran Mamdani, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Rashida Tlaib are people of color, as well as the rest of the Congressional “squad.” And most of Chicago’s DSA city council members come from the Black and Latino/a community. This certainly represents a strong start in building DSA as a fully multi-racial working class organization.
Conclusion
Mass movement electoralism is an essential tool in building a socialist movement that can challenge capitalism and win governing power. Despite its limitations, electoral work is how most workers identify and live through political struggle. Mass movement electoralism embraces this tendency, meeting the majority of workers where they are, not only to ameliorate some of the most pernicious aspects of our social system but to offer agency and an alternative political vision.
Such a strategy is by necessity open and inclusive. To truly reach workers, who are largely non-socialists, we must promote and collaborate with seasoned activists and organizations embedded within existing communities and struggles. This is especially crucial when considering multi-racial working class communities where DSA seems to struggle to build membership. Rather than merely running recruitment drives, we should work with and learn from existing groups and organizational structures.
Test cases of this strategy abound in Chicago. A number of left alders ran with the support of DSA but also as established members of other communities and organizations. These runs prove the ability of DSA to pursue electoral victory within broader left coalitions. The Brandon Johnson mayoralty itself has been extremely informative, both highlighting the shortcomings of abstention during major left electoral campaigns and illustrating the dangers and contradictions broad coalitions present.
These dangers and contradictions point to a second focus of our proposed mass electoral strategy. To maintain some voice within these broad coalitions, we must build our own organizational capacity. Electoral targets should be selected with the intention of building strategic long-term coalitions, increasing our presence in key communities, and developing our own members and internal capabilities to assert ourselves as a significant partner in larger campaigns.
Lastly, we must consider DSA’s participation in mass movement electoralism within the broader goals of our organization: establishing a socialist party. To build a party capable of national contestation requires a base of support far larger than today’s self-identified socialists. As No Kings has proven, many people are dissatisfied with the state of our current political terrain, but winning these voters over to a truly left-wing, worker-oriented alternative will require a long-term strategy of coalition building and a continuous effort to listen to and support the struggles of workers of color. These priorities are absolutely necessary to build a truly mass organization.
DSA has done some amazing work we all can be proud of. We have much more yet to do.
Acknowledgement
We like to thank Bijan Terani for his thoughts and comments.
