The Democratic Socialists of America recently held its 2019 National Convention, and I wrote earlier about its preconvention event in Chicago. You probably know the DSA grew from maybe 6,000 members to about 55,000 members around and after the 2016 US presidential election. Over the course of that time, the group moved significantly to the left. I’ll say more about this later in a post on the DSA itself, but it transitioned from an organization of liberals and progressives to one of social democrats-to-socialists. It endorsed John Kerry in 2004 and BDS in 2017. You know, that kind of change. The DSA Caucuses make up much of the group’s politics.

Some of you might not know much about the DSA Caucuses, especially those of you who aren’t part of the largest chapters or social networks. Here in Iowa, our DSA Chapters build working class and tenant power via tenants unions. As well as other local and regional projects. By contrast, the DSA Caucuses mostly focus on national issues or national structure. They’re not obviously relevant to our work. As a result, many of us don’t know much about them.

In a similar boat? This post is for all of you.

The DSA Caucuses

So, here’s what I did. First, I researched the various ideological DSA Caucuses. By ‘ideological’, I mean they organize around issue-based platforms or ideological orientations. Other DSA Caucuses organize around identity, e.g., the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color Caucus, or organization-building, e.g., Build or Collective Power Network. I’m setting those groups aside for purposes of this post, but I’d encourage you to check them out on your own.

Second, I focus mostly on what the DSA Caucuses say about themselves. That is to say, this is a post about caucus platforms on caucus websites. Every now and then I’ll appeal to what I’ve heard when it’s relevant. But mostly I set aside the scuttlebutt and cliquish stuff. I think you can learn a lot from a group by what it puts in its platform, but you can’t learn everything. If the caucuses significantly depart from their platforms in actual practice, this post won’t tell you that.

Bread and Roses

Bread and Roses starts its platform with a clear call for socialism, and it talks about socialism in terms of a post-capitalist society with democratic communities and a democratic economy. So far, so good. But in the same paragraph, Bread and Roses links to an article in its own publication defining ‘democratic socialism’ explicitly in terms of social democratic electoralism.

Ruh roh.

My point is there’s a tension at work. In that sense, I find Bread and Roses the most difficult of the DSA Caucuses to evaluate. By reputation, they’re ‘basically Marxist‘, but they want to organize mostly around Bernie Sanders and Medicare for All. Win a working class majority, but also set aside identity. Put labor first, but also build a third party outside of what the largest labor unions want. The ‘Jacobin Caucus’, and so on.

And yet, despite the tension, when you scratch the surface the program shines through. Bread and Roses wants to build a mass socialist organization, and it believes the first step toward doing that is endorsing Bernie Sanders and pushing for social democratic electoral wins. They think elections and social democracy bring in large masses of people and that this is a special property identity issues, process issues, and other struggles, e.g., tenants unions, lack.

I think these beliefs are common. And if you’re a regular reader here, you probably know from my thoughts on Bhaskar Sunkara‘s The Socialist Manifesto that I think they’re probably wrong. Elections and social democracy help with short term mobilization, but not building socialism. At least not when they’re central to the program. I think it’s much more useful to focus carefully on the various sources of capitalist appropriation and build movements around those.

Communist Caucus

The Communist Caucus formed in 2017 with a 9-point statement. I’ll start there. They’re most interested in class formation, building a conscious, fighting working class through shared struggle. While not explicitly opposed to elections or petitioning the state, they want any such activities to be grounded in building a conscious working class.

Here I think we see the biggest difference between the Communists and Bread and Roses. For Bread and Roses, electoralism is the first move. It’s how we attract people to a mass movement. But for the Communists, it’s ground-level organizing first and maybe elections later.

The Communists believe a wide range of groups work on related problems involving dispossession and capitalist appropriation. This guides their solidarity and coalition politics. They see groups working on the environment, housing and urban displacement, certain kinds of racial or gender oppression, police violence, et al. as all working on problems growing out of underlying capitalist forces. And this provides them with useful ways to work with other groups.

This is the area where the Communist Caucus and I are closest. I’ve hit these points a number of times, particularly in my posts about Marx, Marxism, and the relationship between race and class.

However, I’m not sure whether the Communist Caucus is a national one. It looks like they operate from California. They’ve organized tenants into tenant’s councils in those areas, and that’s interesting work. But I’m not sure what they’ve done outside their home region.

Libertarian Socialist Caucus

The Libertarian Socialist Caucus is in some ways the most open-ended. But they share a common focus on creating alternative institutions like worker-owned companies, worker and community councils, community land trusts, et al. as a way to displace capital and replace it with something better. Of course, these are anarchist methods. And, like all good anarchists, the Libertarian Socialists emphasize non-hierarchical, collective decision making.

While they’re still socialists, the Libertarian Socialists oppose hierarchy and centralized rule first. Capitalism is a big part of this, but so are colonialism, racism, misogyny, et al. Like the Communists, I think they know popular power comes through shared struggle around material interests, not elections or petitioning the state. But it’s core to the very existence of the Libertarian Socialist Caucus in a way that goes beyond perhaps even the Communists.

North Star

I’ll admit I’m not too sympathetic to North Star. By reputation, it’s a caucus of liberals, progressives, and social democrats who joined DSA before its major expansion. In other words, the folks who do things like endorse John Kerry. Again, by reputation, they’re a group of people mostly interested in electoralism and pushing the Democratic Party to the left.

Is the reputation unfair? In some ways it isn’t. North Star frequently cites Michael Harrington, a DSA founder who defended more or less exactly this view. And so, if this is accurate, I’m not a big fan. But is it accurate?

Probably. North Star also has a statement of principles. They explicitly list the electoral defeat of Trump and the Republican Party as their top priority. And advancing electoral progressivism as their second principle. Given this, I won’t belabor the point too much. I don’t think North Star is worth joining.

Socialist Majority

I think the biggest thing to say about Socialist Majority is this. It’s grounded in the latest thinking from unions and social movement organizations (SMOs). I get the sense each of its members read Jane McAlevey’s No Shortcuts. But there are also strong affinities with groups like Sunrise Movement or Iowa CCI. That’s an uneasy alliance, and it’s worth thinking about.

In practice, Socialist Majority seems to advocate an ‘all of the above’ approach. In its Program for DSA, it wants to do everything all the time. And I’m not really exaggerating. They list and endorse pretty much every social movement of the last decade, from those central to capitalism to those only marginally related. They defend this strategy by claiming every social movement is a working class movement.

Putting together lots of people doing lots of things to help one another is a great idea in the abstract. You can sort of see how it’s supposed to work. But it rarely does work. What happens is this approach attracts a small cadre of highly enthusiastic people who want to do all the things all the time. This core group builds a big contact list to mobilize others as needed. In other words, it’s what McAlevey calls a ‘mobilizing‘ model, as opposed to the deeper ‘organizing’ model she advocates. Sunrise, Iowa CCI, and, say, NextGen America, are all groups using ‘organizing’ language but in fact are ‘mobilizing’ groups.

And so, Socialist Majority has sort of the opposite problem of Bread and Roses. Whereas Bread and Roses looks too narrow, Socialist Majority looks too broad. And whereas the greatest risk of Bread and Roses is dogmatism, the greatest risk of Socialist Majority is dilettantism. Neither caucus necessarily has these problems, but their theory sets them up for it.

Other DSA Caucuses

That’s not the full list. There are a few other DSA Caucuses out there. But they’re not large, national ones. Emerge is an NYC-based group. They lay out a number of promising ideas in their points of unity. Much the same story with the Red Caucus, a Portland-based group identifying as ‘revolutionary Marxist’. There’s also the Eugene Debs Caucus, which seems more adamant in its third party ambitions than Bread and Roses and also grounded in some of the ideas of the Communist Caucus. However, they don’t appear to be currently active. I’d be interested in hearing if that’s not the case.

Some Themes

I don’t want to overemphasize the differences between the DSA Caucuses. They’re all part of the DSA. Members of each caucus are enthusiastic and want to do good work. I have little doubt there are great members of each of the DSA Caucuses, even the ones I mostly criticize in this post.

But the DSA Caucuses approach very differently the relationship between class and identity. And also the relationship between capitalism and other forms of oppression.

Bread and Roses focuses most narrowly on specific national issues, while Socialist Majority focuses most broadly on a wide range. Why? I think both take strong, and ultimately misguided, theoretical stances on those two relationships. And these stances drive their decisions. For Bread and Roses, I suspect the theoretical mistake is to excessively emphasize capitalist domination via labor issues to the exclusion of other means (e.g., race, immigration, et al.). For Socialist Majority, I suspect the theoretical mistake is to fail to center anti-capitalism at all. This lack of an anti-capitalist ideological center produces no apparent criterion for focusing on one thing as opposed to another.

That leaves us with the Communists and Libertarian Socialists. I think they’re best positioned to respect internal dissent while also narrowing their focus. The Communists emphasize shared struggle and solidarity, where anti-capitalism is the unifying force. The Libertarian Socialists emphasize building alternative institutions and a common struggle against hierarchical and authoritarian systems.

As someone drawn mostly to communism and anarchism, it’s hardly a shock I’d lean toward the Communists and Libertarian Socialists. But those are the main reasons. They balance strong anti-capitalism with strong respect for internal democracy. They see that capitalism is a broad system oppressing people in many ways, but they don’t assume every struggle is an anti-capitalist one.

A Final Note

For a close look at the ideology of Trump and Trumpism – and ways to fight it as leftists – be sure to check out the e-book A Primer on Trumpism!