North Star's Role in DSA: What Is to be done?

What role should North Star DSA play in DSA? What objectives should we be pursuing? In discussing this question, the Steering Committee came to the view that it would be best, at this point in our history, to have a robust discussion of what that role and those objectives should be amongst everyone in our group. We thought that it was important to have a perspective that was broadly understood amongst us, which could only be achieved by involving more of us in the conversation, and we thought that with the many decades of experience that our group has, the conversation would be far richer by including more voices.

A conversation like this can go in many directions, not all of which are constructive, so we want to set a few parameters. First, if parts of the conversation become tangential to the main purpose here (as sometimes happens on our Google group list serve {-;) we will move them to their own separate thread, where they can continue without consuming or derailing the main conversation. Second, we would like the conversation to be grounded, rather than to devolve into a discussion of theory which is abstract and general, or become a discussion of broad principles that do not readily translate into ‘what is to be done.’ To that end, we should suggest a number of guiding questions:

• What is the defining characteristic(s) of our current political moment?
• Given this political moment, what are the tasks of the left and DSA?
• What political strategies and approaches are best aligned with meeting these tasks?
• What are the strengths and weaknesses of DSA, in terms of its understanding of the political moment and the tasks it poses, and in terms of the political strategies and approaches that are best aligned with meeting these tasks?
• How should we act and intervene within DSA to build on its strengths and addresses its weaknesses?

 
We would like to commence this conversation with a contribution from Leo Casey. It is written in the form of six theses, so the argument is broken up into discrete points with which you may agree, disagree, or conclude that something vital is missing. The purpose of presenting this argument in the form of theses is that it will allow members to be precise about their agreement or disagreement with its different component parts.
 
If you decide that you would like to present your own set of theses, feel free to do so on our list serve.  If you decide that you would like to respond to Leo’s theses or to someone else’s points, we would like to suggest some ways to do so.

• If you agree, don’t just say ‘I agree,’ but explain why you agree and what you conclude from your agreement.
• If you disagree, don’t just say ‘I disagree,’ but explain why you disagree and what different political direction your disagreement would take North Star DSA.
• If you think something is missing, make a case why it is not just an additional point that would make the argument more precise or elaborate, but something really essential that speaks directly to how we should intervene in DSA.

Duane Campbell for the North Star Steering Committee
 
With that, here is Leo’s opening contribution:

Six Theses:
 Leo Casey
 
1.     What defines the current political movement in the U.S. is the imminent danger of a right-wing racist and authoritarian movement seizing state power, with the loss of what remains of American democracy. This movement – which must be properly called neo-fascist – has already captured one of the two major political parties, and it is now laying the groundwork for overturning democratic elections in which it is defeated. What is now taking place in state capitols across the country are efforts to ensure that when the next time elections are held, voter suppression and gerrymandering will make it more difficult for anti-fascist forces to win, and that when the results still go against the neo-fascist candidates, they will be overturned. Successful coup d’états often follow failed ones, and these efforts are based on an analysis of why the attempted long coup d’état that took place in the aftermath of the 2020 election, culminating with the January 6th insurrection, failed – the objective is to eliminate obstacles to the victory of the next neo-fascist coup d’état.
 
2.     The political imperative of this moment, therefore, is the defeat of this neo-fascist movement. If it is not defeated, and if consequently what remains of American democracy is lost, all else – the labor movement, the struggles against racism, sexism, anti-queer bigotry, Islamophobia, anti-Semitism, and anti-immigrant prejudice, the battle against climate change and on behalf of democratic rights of free expression, a free media, and the rule of law – is lost with it. The organized left – including DSA – is part of what will be lost. This is a political moment of truth that the U.S. has not seen since the Civil War and the struggle to end slavery.
 
3.     To accomplish this political imperative of defeating neo-fascism, the broadest possible left-center coalition must be organized, uniting all who would defend democratic rule, regardless of other issues on which we will disagree. There is no more serious error in this political moment than the sectarian error of identifying centrist forces that must be included in this coalition as the main political enemy of the left, either rhetorically or in practice. This coalition will be stronger, and more politically foresighted, to the extent that the left is hegemonic within it, but we should conceive that role as one of political leadership in coalition, not as excluding centrist forces and narrowing the base of the democratic coalition.
 
4.     In the U.S., there is a broad mass left (most significantly, the labor movement, civil rights and anti-racist movements, women’s movement, LGBTQ movement, immigrant rights movement, religious progressives, community organizing movement and environmental movement) and a much smaller organized left (organizations established around an explicitly left politics, such as DSA, Working Families Party, Justice Democrats, MoveOn, Indivisible, Our Revolution, and various socialist groups.) The organized left in the U.S. has historically been weak, marked by the failure to develop a mass labor or social democratic political party, but it can – and should – play a role in the mobilization of the broad left and the organization of a broad center-left coalition for democracy. Indeed, there are political opportunities in playing that role – in many countries, the left has often grown into a more significant force when it has played an active leadership role in a broad front against fascism.
 
5.     As a result of its growth over the last five years, DSA has the most potential of the groups on the organized left – it has more members and more activists than the other groups, and has had real political victories in recent years, especially in electoral politics, not just the failures that have historically defined the socialist left in the U.S. But it is being held back by:

• an inability to fully recognize that the main danger of the political moment lies in the neo-fascist movement, an inability which is expressed in its practical tendency to see centrists as a political foe equal to that of the right (the hesitancy and/or unwillingness to call for a vote for Biden-Harris in 2020, and the stance of only supporting openly democratic socialist candidates and members for office);
• a sectarian disposition that fails to understand how DSA’s growth and current strengths came primarily out of coalition efforts in electoral politics (most especially around the Bernie Sanders campaigns, the AOC victory and the development of ‘the squad’ in Congress) and out of broad opposition to Trump and the rise of neo-fascism; instead, it overestimates its power in terms of its own internal organizational capacity. This disposition leads to a ‘go it alone’ approach that devalues and disparages coalition work with others on the organized left, and to an obliviousness of the importance – indeed, the necessity – of a broad center-left coalition to oppose neo-fascism;
• the heritage of political marginality in an U.S. socialist movement that has too often defined itself not around what it could accomplish politically, but around fidelity to a set of political dogmas, such that actual political breakthroughs – even on the small scale of electing five open democratic socialists to the U.S. Congress – are treated with suspicion and even hostility, as little more than openings for betrayal of political principle. This heritage finds expression in a series of attacks within DSA on the very leaders – the democratic socialists in Congress – who are the public face of democratic socialism and DSA at this moment;
• and following from the above, the absence of a strategic perspective which understands how to build power, and the importance of accumulating victories in building power. By strategic perspective, I mean a (Gramscian) understanding of the political terrain on which we struggle, with an analysis and long-term strategy of how to best situate ourselves on that terrain, choosing the battles that we have the best chance of winning and avoiding as much as possible the battles that lead to almost certain political defeat.

6.     Given the above, DSA North Star understands its role in DSA as:

• developing organizational clarity on the imminent danger of a neo-fascist seizure of political power, and the concomitant loss of American democracy, as the defining feature of our political moment;
• urging DSA to play a constructive role in organizing a broad center-left coalition to oppose that neo-fascist danger, and to see that as a primary focus of its work;
• promoting generally within DSA a politics of working in coalition with others on the organizational left and the broad left;
• opposing attacks on elected officials who are members of DSA and its public face;
• engendering discussion within DSA of the need for a strategic perspective, and what it might include.

 
 
You are invited to join the dialogue. Use the comments section.