The question facing the Democratic Socialists of America: What Are We?

[A Convention of the Democratic Socialists of America will be held in Atlanta at the beginning of August. As part of the lead up to the convention, I will be publishing some discussion articles here. This is the first.]

What is the DSA? That is the key issue for our upcoming convention.

No it is not a joke, or a trick question. I am totally serious: what is the DSA?

Because a group with 4,000 members is double the size of one with 2,000 members, and one with 8,000 four times as large.

But a socialist group that goes from 5,000 to 60,000 members in three years is a qualitatively different phenomenon. We didn't "recruit" (convince to join) even a few percent of the new members. They came to us. It is not as simple as saying that we are growing: we are being grown.

In the last three years, the DSA has been completely transformed, but from the outside. It was done to us. And there is every indication that this is continuing and will continue.

The standard explanation is that Bernie popularized the democratic socialist brand and when Trump won the Electoral College it was like, "oh shit -- I better do something."

It's as if Bernie was the pipe pointing in the DSA's direction and Trump's gaming of the Electoral College inherited from slavery was the opening of the valve. But that's not enough. You've got to have water, and not a trickle. It has to be a lot of water under a lot of pressure to give somebody a soaking like the one we’ve gotten.

I believe what has been going on in this country is that working people are developing class political consciousness, groping their way towards cohering as a political force. We are both a part of that movement and a product of it.

I’ve been active politically since the late 1960s. And until this decade, there had never been a working class movement worthy of the name in the United States.

By that I mean a grass-roots movement of working people who identify as such, comparable to the Black movement or women's movement. I specifically do not mean the (mostly ossified) "organized labor movement" inherited from the 1930s.

Think about it: for decades there has been mass consciousness about the need to fight sexism, racism, ableism, etc., but nobody talked about "classism." People got denounced for "playing the race card" but not for "playing the class card." Gays were accused of practicing "identity politics" but who ever heard a criticism of workers as such for indulging in "identity politics"?

That absence of the working class as a self-and-other recognized political force changed in 2011. The Occupy movement with its central slogan, "we are the 99%," was the first time in decades that there was a mass expression of at least rudimentary class consciousness.

And look at the polls from the fall of 2011 that asked about Occupy and its issues. The movement immediately had the sympathy and support of tens of millions of people, and all it had done was to raise the flag of the working class and copy that old movie Network by shouting, we're mad as hell and we're not going to take it anymore.

The next big national development was Bernie’s campaign.

In a few weeks in the summer of 2015, Bernie went from being dismissed with a patronizing smile to becoming a serious candidate and then a rock star that filled to overflowing the largest venues holding many thousands of people.

The Sanders campaign had an extremely sharp class edge, not just in "fight for $15" or "Medicare for all," but in the $27 shtick. That said this campaign is the property of the working people -- PAC money and the corporate control that comes with it not allowed.

And Sanders insisted in every speech that he could not change things. Only we could do so. This movement was of the working people, by the working people and for the working people.

The spectacular growth of the DSA is a third moment in this evolution, after Occupy and Bernie. It is built on what Bernie accomplished but could be viewed as even better, because it is an ongoing organization that is not focused exclusively on elections, but participates in all sorts of political struggles to change the government and its policies.

But despite that, we are clearly qualitatively inferior and it is not simply a numerical issue of members but of being rooted in our class. We are not even in the same universe as what Bernie accomplished.

This elemental, almost subterranean motion toward working people cohering as a class is the underlying force that powered Bernie's campaign, transformed the DSA and is continuing to do so.

We have to stop thinking simplistically that we are going to act on the process, to shape and mold it any way we want. We are in it and of it and it is going to do a lot more to us than we are going to do to it. And the nature of the process also tells us where it is taking us: towards a mass party of the working class.

So what comes next? First, understand. We cannot make the DSA other than what it is.

I had just turned 18 and graduated high school in the first week of June of 1969 when a couple of weeks later, the 100,000-member Students for a Democratic Society blew itself up in a fight between three factions at a convention in Chicago. Each had different plans to transform SDS into something new: nobody thought it was adequate as it was

Three months later, in September 1969 when I started college, there was nothing left but scattered chapters that tried to keep on functioning (but failed) and a couple of rump national groups fighting over the name.

As it turned out, SDS could not be other than it was, because it was an expression, an outgrowth of a social movement, a radicalization among young people that was sweeping the world.

The same is true of the DSA. We are the product of a much broader process. We cannot radically change what the DSA is today nor stop it from being pushed further in the same direction. Trying will certainly destroy it, and for the same reason SDS was destroyed.

Those SDS factions were trying to transform SDS from a broad expression of a social movement --the student movement-- into a sect.

I don’t use the word “sect” as an insult, but as Marx used it, to describe a certain type of group, one defined by an ideology; with the analogy being to religious denominations, with the term applicable to all denominations, not just especially outlandish ones, which is the more common, everyday use of the word “sect.”

A party is not a sect but an expression of the political motion of a social sector (like a class). Generally, its ideology -- program-- is defined by the movement that it springs from.

And there can be no doubt that DSA has now been transformed into a party-type organization in this sense. We are growing because we are part of a much broader movement that pushes people our way. And for every person that's gone to our web site and signed up there are probably three or four that have thought to themselves, "I should do that," but somehow never got around to it yet.

And this socialist sector is but a small part of the much broader class movement.

Thus we need to think differently about the DSA.

While our growth is being propelled by outside forces, only we can organize it. The challenge is to do so in a way that does not contradict the way we are growing.

DSA today is a push by the most advanced, already socialist members of the working class to come together as the most solid contingent of the working class political movement that is emerging.

Consolidation of the DSA as a political instrument of our class should be the central focus of our convention.

--José G. Pérez