This is the second part of an article on the history of the Marxist Unity Group (MUG), a faction of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). The first part covered the background and foundation of the group. This part describes its practical interventions towards transforming DSA into a Marxist party from the 2023 DSA convention to the present.
2023 DSA National Convention
MUG came into the 2023 DSA convention much better known and better organised than its predecessor, the Marxist Unity Slate (MUS) had been in 2021. Our intervention in the Bowman Affair and the political openness and clarity we projected over the course of our founding process had generated considerable goodwill and interest in our ideas on the DSA Left and within the organisation broadly. This time, we wanted to contribute to the continued coherence of a principled DSA Marxist Left by collaborating with other formations on proposals that would address the key organisational and political questions in DSA.
On the political side, there were key questions on which DSA members in Congress had acted out of line with socialist principles and as junior partners to the mainstream Democrats. These included Bowman’s votes for US military aid to Israel, as well as all DSA members in Congress except for Rashida Tlaib voting to force a contract on workers in the railroad industry and strip them of their right to strike1. Without exception, DSA members in Congress had also voted for tens of billions of dollars in US weapons shipments to the Zelensky government in Ukraine, lining up behind the US imperialist proxy war aimed at knocking out Russia as a regional power and preparing for war with a rising China, its only plausible peer competitor for imperialist hegemony at present2.
We also wanted to pose what we saw as one of our key strategic conclusions to DSA – the recognition that the US Constitution is an undemocratic instrument of the ruling class and that the working class will have to be openly disloyal to it and fight for a democratic constitution to achieve socialist aims3. Organizationally, we wanted to address the fact that DSA’s staff operated as a sort of parallel structure to the membership and controlled a significant amount of key information about the organisation, which even the elected NPC had no direct access to, instead relying on pieces of this information to be transmitted by the full-time national director, Maria Svart. Svart had been in place since 2012, well before the new era of DSA’s expansion and political transformation, and was politically identified with the right of the organisation. Another issue was the lack of transparency in the editorial structure and personnel of DSA’s publications, Socialist Forum and Democratic Left, the latter of which had dwindled to a four-page glossy mailer.
We tried to cast a wide net among Marxist factions in looking for potential partners to collaborate on proposals to address these questions, but some that we attempted to engage with weren’t interested in this sort of collaboration. In the first place, we expected Communist Caucus’s delegates to largely vote with us at convention, since they tended to sympathize with the rest of the DSA Left, but they were mostly uninterested in contesting it directly (except through their members on the Housing Justice Commission4 strongly influencing its consensus resolution), tied as they are to their base-building perspective that places activity within the economic struggle above engagement with the organizations of the left and agitation around high politics.
We ran into a similar issue with Red Star. They wanted to contest the convention in the sense of using it to advance their goals within the organisation, alright, but only the NPC election, and on a “good governance” platform focused almost solely on organisational questions. Their lack of engagement with the convention process when it came to the passing of resolutions reflects a view of the convention’s deliberative function as basically just window dressing and a lack of will to change, rather than by treating it more seriously – a role they reprised in 2025. Bread and Roses was going to politically contest the convention, and had admirable positions on things like rendering the staff side of the organisation accountable to its elected leadership, but wasn’t interested in addressing questions of political principle in relation to DSA’s endorsed candidates. With their own social-imperialist position on the war in Ukraine, they also couldn’t be regarded as particularly clean on international questions5.
The faction we ended up collaborating closely with in the lead-up to the 2023 convention was Reform and Revolution (R&R). The core of R&R at this time was several former long-time members of the ex-CWI, then ISA, organisation Socialist Alternative6, including some who had been leaders of Seattle City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant’s successful electoral campaigns. In 2018, these comrades had argued for a serious orientation to DSA from Socialist Alternative and were expelled, though Socialist Alternative subsequently briefly formed a caucus in DSA around 2021 – 2022. Since joining DSA, several younger members had joined R&R with politics to the left of the founding members, but who had also had their formative political experiences in DSA and were highly committed to it as a mass socialist party in formation. The internal life of R&R continues to be defined by a tension between its old and new guards, with the latter now dominant7. Unlike the aforementioned formations, R&R was interested in posing both political and organisational questions to the 2023 DSA convention from a Marxist standpoint, and this common ground allowed us to collaborate on five proposals together.
These proposals directly addressed the breaches of principle by DSA members in elected office over the preceding few years, attempted to increase the ability of working-class NPC members to devote their time to running the organization by providing them stipends, laid out an electoral strategy based around candidates who would act as representatives of the organization, and put forward a principled revolutionary defeatist position on the war in Ukraine. We also authored two proposals independently from R&R. One was our only successful attempt at broad multi-tendency collaboration on a proposal, an overhaul of the editorial structure of DSA’s publications, which we worked on with comrades ranging from the left of the organisation, to Bread and Roses, to Groundwork (GW), a formation solidly on the right of DSA. The other was a resolution that shared a title with the 2021 platform amendment “Winning the Battle for Democracy”, and declared that:
“In every corner of the country, from the picket line to the halls of Congress, it is our duty as socialists to fight the Constitution and demand a new republic. DSA declares that, in preparation for the Third American Revolution, to be a socialist in this country is to be an enemy of the US Constitution”
Which was in line with what we see as one of our main contributions to the strategic thinking of the socialist movement in the US8.
Despite a generative overall collaboration with R&R, some differences opened up in the course of our work together that affected our roles at the 2023 convention and future trajectories. In the first place, R&R was attached to a “tiered” model of electoral endorsements, in which some candidates would be identified as “DSA representatives” and required to exercise a high level of political principle, discipline, and coordination with the organisation, and others could be endorsed without meeting these standards. MUG was uncomfortable with this as a model for electoral work, but it was included in our common electoral strategy resolution as a concession to R&R. Once the rubber hit the road and MUG was put in the position of arguing to unconvinced delegates for a resolution that we had been major authors of and thought was a meaningful step forward, but whose vision we weren’t on board with in its particulars, MUG members became frustrated with the fact that we were putting forward this chimera instead of our own vision to DSA’s membership.
In addition, MUG and R&R sharply diverged on a major organisational question that was posed by the right-wing caucus SMC. SMC put forward a proposal called “Democratize DSA” to expand the National Political Committee from 18 to 51 members and invest a steering committee selected from its ranks with most of the powers of the existing NPC. MUG argued that this only alienated power further from the convention, the most representative body in DSA and opposed it, along with most of the rest of the left, while R&R supported it because it would provide more representation to minority factions and cultivate a broader intermediate leadership layer of DSA.
While most of what MUG and R&R put forward to the 2023 convention were the proposals we had written together, MUG distinguished itself by helping to coordinate a cross-caucus agenda change that put more substantive and controversial items on the agenda as opposed to the draft put forward by the planning committee which was dominated by uncontroversial items that were suited for the consent agenda (on which multiple uncontroversial items can be passed at once without debating each individually, with a low threshold for removing an item) including one designating an official mascot, by running a print daily convention bulletin carrying our views on the major debates and responding to the arguments of others, and by joining with the rest of the left to oppose Democratize DSA, while R&R supported both the proposal and the motion to re-consider it after it failed to win the requisite 60% of votes for a constitution change9.
MUG On the NPC
These factors had consequences when it came to the NPC elections. Both MUG and R&R ran two members for the NPC and cross-endorsed each other for the top four spots in the single transferable vote election. Yet, MUG won both of its seats, and R&R lost both. MUG’s victory owed much to the support we had gained among the broader left by acting as a cohering force within it and putting forward a bold political perspective. R&R was counting on support from Bread and Roses putting them over the edge since they had some common perspectives on labour strategy and a shared Trotskyish background, but either there weren’t enough B&R votes to spare after B&R’s own candidates were elected or their differences on Democratize DSA, which B&R strongly opposed, got in the way. The other big winners in the NPC election were Red Star, who went from zero seats on the NPC (but one former member) to three, despite their small membership numbers. This was unsurprising since achieving this precise result on their “good governance” platform was their whole aim at the convention. Overall, the convention delivered what was referred to as a left or left-centre majority, as long as B&R sided with the left. They were expected to do so and, in fact, did more often than not, especially on organisational questions where they were some of the strongest opponents of the right, but less so on political and especially international questions, such as the presidential election and DSA’s messaging at the outset of the genocidal Israeli assault on Gaza, where they tended to fudge.
The only MUG-authored resolution that passed the 2023 convention was the overhaul of the national publications, which has seriously revived them in terms of content, but was unfortunately undermined by the budget crisis, forcing the print edition of Democratic Left to be cut in 2024. Despite this, the 2023 convention was generally seen as a significant shift to the left, and even more importantly, “the left” became a more coherent set of factions that generally acted in concert and could be expected to do so to a meaningful extent on the NPC as well10. The right’s major organisational intervention, which would have drastically altered the terrain of the organization failed.
On recognition that it was very difficult for any faction’s proposed constitution/bylaws change to get the requisite 60% of votes, the convention passed B&R’s proposal for a Democracy Commission to be elected by the delegate pool following convention to author proposals for organizational changes with broad support for the 2025 convention – these would be the first major changes to DSA’s constitution since the organization’s major growth since 2016. On one level, this meant some changes were needed, but on another, it demonstrated the durability of the existing structure, which had allowed for so much growth and meaningful internal contestation while preserving organisational unity.
MUG’s NPC candidates Rashad X and Amy W had campaigned on a three-point platform:
- Follow DSA’s anti-imperialist platform consistently and unapologetically.
- Centre DSA’s platform commitment to winning the battle for democracy.
- Transform DSA into an independent mass socialist party.
The elaboration of point three included the sentence “They will also seek to strengthen DSA’s structures, from hiring staff committed to political independence to opening the books for members on their organization’s operations, decision-making, and political debates.”11 This process of opening the books and deepening members’ and their elected leaders on the NPC’s control over the operations of their organisation ended up being one of the most consequential dynamics of the 2023-25 NPC term. Major strides forward were taken in terms of financial transparency, clarity on membership numbers by chapter, and the opening of multiple national commissions, like the National Electoral Commission and the Growth and Development Committee, to an expanded rank and file membership.
These changes only came out of a direct clash with the director-level management of the organisation, which had locked away much of that operational information to only be accessible to the staff side of the organisation, rather than the membership and elected leadership, who the staff are meant to be directed by and amplify the organising of. Perhaps wishing to avoid conflict as this process unfolded, National Director Maria Svart resigned in the early months of the term, as did the operations director12.
As the term played out, the “left-center majority” held together strongest and achieved the most transformative effects on questions of organizational democracy, transparency, and member leadership, while proving more unstable on international questions, especially in the turbulent political waters of the first year of the Gaza genocide in which DSA’s anti-Zionism became subject to condemnation and anti-semitism baiting from across the mainstream political spectrum13. At the end of the day, however, the Bowman affair had left its mark on DSA, and the crucial issue of US arms to the genocidal apartheid state of Israel has been treated as a sharp red line14.
MUG’s Second Congress
Shortly after the 2023 convention, MUG held its second Congress. By this point MUG had held multiple rounds of recruitment and had grown to over 100 members in a short period of time and distinct political trends were evident within the group, as expressed over the course of the Congress on questions such as how much to emphasize MUG’s cooperation with other tendencies in DSA rather than its need to fight for its vision, the war in Ukraine, internal matters like ongoing recruitment, and how to formulate and fight for a comprehensive political program.
MUG founder and then-outgoing central committee member Parker McQueeney jokingly described the four “loose MUG subfactions” as “Post-[M]aoist semi-basebuilders, Shaefferite pure republican-Luxemburgists, Eisenacher Marxist Unitarians, [and] Semi-diplomat praktiki.”15 Intentionally a little esoteric and separating groups that overlapped significantly, this description nonetheless painted a picture of trends that would have been clearly recognisable to a participant or close observer of the Congress. The “post-Maoist semi-basebuilders” included several comrades who had come to MUG after previously having been in the Marxist Center or were active tenant organisers, and while accepting MUG’s critique of the economism of the base-building tendency, tended to emphasise MUG developing its members’ on-the-ground organising work in the economic struggle over the promulgation of its political vision within DSA and the socialist movement generally.
“Schaefferite pure republican-Luxemburgists” refers to MUG member Gil Schaeffer, an SDS and Revolutionary Union veteran who came to MUG after having written for the Weekly Worker and Cosmonaut, advocating for his variant of democratic-republican socialism, which emphasises the independent value of democratic agitation in building and uniting a mass working class movement. MUG’s struggle for a democratic constitution gave its founders significant common ground with Schaeffer, but while we treated the achievement of a mass communist party united around a consistently republican minimum-maximum program as a prerequisite to effective agitation at scale and emphasized interventions within the left, Schaeffer and a handful of comrades who agreed with his point of view believed that carrying on this agitation directly was the most important task. To this end, they proposed the formation of a “democratic constitution committee” within MUG to coordinate democratic-republican agitation. “Eisenacher Marxist Unitarians” referred to the founders of MUG, reflecting our orientation to the Marxist left as a whole and desire to regroup it into a common programmatically united party to achieve a “snowball effect” of growth once unity was achieved, modeled on the fusion of small sects into most of the parties of the Second International preceding their growth into mass parties. Finally, “Semi-diplomat praktiki” referred to those comrades who tended to come to MUG out of being committed DSA activists and wanted to emphasise our commitment to common work and collaboration with other tendencies in the organisation.
The practical differences between these four loose subfactions could be seen in the proposal to form a draft program committee for MUG. Researching and writing a draft program had been a long-term goal of MUG’s founders from the beginning, given our emphasis on programmatic unity and the example of the CPGB (PCC), whose draft program served as their anchor through various interventions in left unity initiatives. True to this vision, “Eisenacher Marxist Unitarians” would have seen the role of a draft program as primarily for developing our own ideas and putting them forward to the rest of the left, especially in DSA. Reflecting the influence of “post-Maoist semi-basebuilders,” however, the proposal for the draft program committee also included the idea that the draft program would be “in part built through a system of inquiries with workers,” a dimension that was aligned to their emphasis on base-building work, but which we were unable to realise in practice. The “Schaefferite pure republican-Luxemburgists” weren’t so interested in the draft program committee, but their democratic constitution committee was folded into it via amendment, and they ended up pursuing their democratic constitutional agitation and education through independent media initiatives like The Democratic Constitution Blog instead16.
Once the committee was formed, the “Semi-diplomat praktiki,” for their part, attempted to focus it on supporting an intervention in the For Our Rights Committee in DSA, which was drafting an action program for 2024, eventually titled Workers Deserve More, rather than on creating our own scientific draft17. Despite these diverging perspectives, MUG was able to maintain its unity through what may have been a high point of subfactional differences, in part because of our conscious tolerance of members’ factional organizing and emphasis on democratically resolving political differences with open debate, which served to clarify the points of divergence and allow the group to move forward with an enriched understanding of the terrain rather than devolve into personalized squabbles. Over two years, these subfactions haven’t really endured, and the lines have become much more blurred and supplanted by different dynamics suited to new terrain at the 2025 Congress.
From 2023 to 2025, MUG deepened its presence in many chapters and national bodies of DSA, and our role in national leadership ended up not being as an intransigent minority, as we might have expected in 2021, but as part of a constantly-shifting terrain of alignments and polarizations in which we often could get our way when we made the case in the right way or forged the right connections. These developments encouraged a maturation of MUG’s understanding of its own place in the organisation and the formulation of more elaborate perspectives on the various tactical questions at hand. Each of the 2023 subfactions mutated in the process and had its outlook in some ways affirmed by the faction as a whole, while the main conflicts centred on other questions. Some of these challenges included navigating a DSA budget crisis resulting in layoffs in the first half of 202418 as well as pushing forward effective tactical orientations to the Palestine solidarity movement and the 2024 election. DSA’s approach to the election centred first on the Uncommitted movement and then on promoting its action program Workers Deserve More, while rejecting calls both to support Biden/Harris and the MUG-supported “No Votes for Genocide” initiative, which some state-level Uncommitted campaigns evolved into19. All this took place in a difficult period for the organisation, as dues-paying membership steadily declined, a trend since the beginning of the Biden administration.
A new period in DSA’s life, and that of MUG’s struggle to shape it, opened with Trump’s election in 2024. This posed new tasks – MUG’s emphasis on the battle for democracy taking on vital urgency – and gave DSA a shot in the arm, as new layers have become conscious of the need to get organised to fight for a better world, and DSA has experienced explosive growth, surpassing its 2021 membership peak20.
Where Do We Go From Here?
At the beginning of 2025, MUG held its third Congress, the first to take the form of an in-person gathering (though comrades could also join virtually if unable to travel), in Florence, a village of Northampton in western Massachusetts. The River Valley chapter organising in this area had a well-developed MUG cell, one of the largest outside New York City, and made for relatively easy travel for our east-coast-heavy membership. At this Congress, the faction debated the first substantive changes we’ve made to our points of unity, expanding on the Fight the Imperial Police State point and reframing Demand a New Republic around the tasks of finishing Reconstruction as a revolutionary process in American society21. We also revised our political education curriculum to discuss more in-depth tactical issues around electoral activity, such as the question of ultimatism and added a section on imperialism and decolonisation.
Perhaps most significantly, we adopted a draft program for a Marxist party, which we seek to transform DSA into, based on a year of research into the role of program in Marxist history and on the particular questions we thought it essential to address22. We also debated tactical approaches to organising for democratic rights under the Trump administration, DSA’s approach to future presidential elections (the lack of effective orientation in 2024 having proved unsatisfying), and our interventions at the upcoming 2025 DSA convention. All these questions saw rich debate at a high political level, and the ability to hash out these questions at an in-person gathering for the first time helped to reinvigorate and refocus our members for the period of struggle against an increasingly antidemocratic and punitively self-serving capitalist class, as well as growth and political advancement for our movement and the faction.
MUG approached the 2025 convention with a somewhat different tactical orientation than we did in 2023. The negative aspects of the experience of tying ourselves closely to R&R and being unable to pose questions in a precise way led us to focus on formulating our own interventions at first, then endorsing the initiatives of other formations once we saw what others were putting forward. We didn’t totally eschew cooperation either, as our activity on the Democracy Commission would culminate in some consensus proposals for organisational reform, and individual members were able to collaborate with members of other formations to author proposals outside of the main initiatives that MUG was undertaking collectively. MUG put forward three initial resolutions to the convention and one revision to the platform that would have replaced the unwieldy 2021 platform with a shortened version of the draft program that MUG had developed and adopted at its 2025 Congress23. The three initial resolutions were “Principles for Party Building”, “Democratic Discipline”, and “Democracy For All: a NEC Subcommittee for Voting Rights”. “Democratic Discipline” was aimed at creating a democratic channel within bureaucratic chapters for members to put forward censures of endorsed elected officials24. “Democracy for All” would have created a subcommittee of the National Electoral Commission dedicated to campaigns focused on fighting to expand the franchise to all residents of a jurisdiction rather than just citizens, a vital task for universalising democracy in the face of the inhumane US border regime25. Unfortunately, these two resolutions didn’t make it to a vote at the convention.
“Principles for Party Building” was a conceptual resolution of the sort that many in DSA have in the past considered a waste of time, but which, from our perspective, would give DSA a chance to deliberate on and declare what sort of party it wanted to be and the principles underlying this conception. The first point of the resolution contains a definition of the party that includes its unity around a program that fulfils the minimum-maximum function, “The fundamental purpose of a socialist party is to be a mass association of the working class formed for collective political action. The party will be united around a democratically created program that outlines goals that, enacted together, will allow the working class to rule and end capitalism.” The eighth point contained a summary of the strategy of patience – the idea of building an opposition party committed to coming to power alongside the working class through the achievement of political democracy rather than seeking to enter government alongside the ruling class under the undemocratic bourgeois regime, “DSA orients itself in opposition to all ruling class political forces. DSA’s project is to unite workers to win the battle for democracy and bring about socialism, not to seek a governing coalition with a perceived lesser evil under the current undemocratic political system.”26 Incredibly, this resolution not only made it to the convention floor but also passed in a narrow vote, a colossal victory for shaping DSA into a Marxist party.
Later in the process, MUG also put forward amendments clarifying the political basis on which DSA should engage in a presidential campaign in 202627. Trade union strategy was an area where we maintained a large degree of agreement with Reform and Revolution, and we co-authored an amendment to the National Labor Commission consensus resolution with them called “A Partyist Labor Strategy”, which aimed to better ground DSA members’ work in the trade union movement in DSA as a party and a unit of action. This amendment failed in a narrow vote on the convention floor, attracting the support of the left and even elements of Groundwork, but opposed by Bread and Roses, who are highly grounded in the existing union reform caucuses such as Teamsters for a Democratic Union, and conservative about deviating from an economistic approach to this work28.
Political program was another question where MUG was driven by events once again into a close collaboration with R&R. We submitted a version of the draft minimum-maximim program we had adopted at our Congress, and they a transitional “fighting socialist program for DSA” that lacked a maximum program for a communist future and contained two sets of demands – one a set of slogans of the day (with “affordability” given pride of place) and another longer term but still not meeting the criteria of a minimum program since they failed to address the form of working class rule in political and constitutional terms29. These programs were quite different in self-conception and political substance, but the adoption of either would have been a substantial political improvement over DSA’s 2021 platform as well as Workers Deserve More.
With Bread and Roses proposing a rerun of the Workers Deserve More drafting process for another two years, the committee for which would be constituted by representatives of various national bodies, we chose to merge our programs and produce a draft that achieved more of both groups’ desired functions for a program30. We championed this combined program as a means to arm DSA with a concrete Marxist perspective for the transformation of society, but in the end, delegates voted in favour of the renewed drafting process rather than the adoption of this draft program. As the drafting process proceeds, MUG will attempt to ensure that DSA’s next program fulfils the essential functions of a revolutionary minimum-maximum program orienting the organisation toward the conditions to achieve working class political rule, immediate economic and social measures, and a communist future.
A dominant theme of the 2025 convention was a return to organisational questions as a key axis of division within DSA. On the one hand, several past organisational disputes, such as the voting method used for convention delegates (Scottish Single Transferrable Vote now mandated to ensure proportionality) and the “democratic centralism clause” (abolished), were transcended by the Democracy Commission reforms, which packaged together several measures with supermajority support across tendencies. On the other hand, the right wing of the organisation came to embrace what is now one of their signature proposals, so-called “one member, one vote.” Nominally inspired by recent efforts in major trade unions such as the UAW to elect leadership directly by members rather than a delegated convention to bypass the entrenched power of the bureaucracy, these proposals would have similarly taken the power to elect national leadership out of the hands of DSA’s highest deliberative body, the convention31. However, in this case, the target was not a stratum of class collaborationist bureaucrats, but the active and engaged membership of the organization which was perceived to be more left-wing than the average disengaged “paper member.” Of course, the DSA convention does satisfy the true meaning of one member, one vote – the idea that “it is a fundamental principle that each member of a deliberative assembly is entitled to one—and only one—vote on a question” – but in this case it was precisely the importance of deliberation as an element of democracy and the sovereignty over the organization of its most representative deliberative body that was under attack32.
This modus operandi will no doubt be familiar to those who have participated in the Your Party founding conference, where one member, one vote was even further distorted to somehow justify no votes being taken by the members of a deliberative assembly, with all conference decisions pushed onto an online vote of all members. In DSA this demagogic attempt to rob the organization of one of its key strengths – deliberative member democracy – was defeated, but the right wing of the organization will no doubt attempt to enact it again since they believe themselves to be the champions of a passive silent majority of the organization that will be more likely to ratify their perspectives in an online vote than champion them in a deliberative process.
Another of the Democracy Commission reforms expanded the National Political Committee to include 25 members elected at convention, plus the two YDSA co-chairs for 27 seats total. MUG ran three members for the expanded NPC and won these three seats, which keeps us at approximately the same proportion of the body as we had with two members on the NPC pre-expansion. We are now in a position where our five years of intervention in DSA have achieved significant organisational change in the direction of openness, member-leadership, and accountability. We have been part of a culture shift that has legitimised the existence of factions with clear political perspectives, and has helped DSA to shed its historical anti-communism and reformism. Our revolutionary democratic standpoint has gained increased recognition across the organisation as an important element of our common politics, though we still have to fight for its paramountcy, and our conception of the role of a Marxist party and core elements of the strategy of patience have been formally adopted as DSA’s self-conception, though we must fight to realise and consistently apply it.
MUG continues to grow in numbers and geographic scope and works to improve our own organisation and ability to fight for our vision and provide communist leadership both in chapters and national bodies. In particular, at our most recent Congress early this year, we committed ourselves to practical experiments in implementing our electoral strategy through chapters in order to set a new example and model of this activity for the organisation as a whole. In 2021, we wrote that “[t]he fight for Marxist politics in DSA has only just begun.”33 In 2026, we can say that it really has gotten somewhere, though we are still taking the early steps down the path that will bring about a mass and politically well-equipped communist party in the United States capable of leading the working class in the battle for democracy.
Brief Conclusions for the Left in Britain
This account has been a part of the history of only one of several factions active in DSA. No doubt the founders of the other formations in the organisation could write similar accounts of their own origins, activities, and perspectives for the future. The members of the Marxist Unity Group have taken the time to collectively elaborate on what we think is the right path forward for the organisation and continue to iterate on and develop that vision through debate and discussion as it interfaces with present reality, continued historical research, and new ideas and perspectives within and outside our ranks. In this process, we elevate our own political thinking and know-how to a level beyond what any of us possesses as individuals. However, we’re only one lobe of the collective mind of the socialist movement organising a real opposition party in the territory governed by the covenant with death that is the US Constitution34. The existence of multiple such entities in DSA and a general culture that increasingly legitimises political disagreement and debate, reliance on the leadership of ordinary members who have gained the trust of their comrades by advocating a definite path forward, and the eschewing of baked-in power for celebrity leaders and bureaucrats are immense strengths of DSA.
This path for DSA wasn’t an inevitability, though. The fact that DSA as an organisation existed and had a relatively democratic internal regime before the Bernie movement is part of what allowed it to happen. Bernie attempted to funnel the energy of his movement into an undemocratic, unelected leadership-centric organisation without a sovereign membership called Our Revolution, but with DSA offering the “real deal” at the same time and flourishing precisely as a result of its ability to foster member creativity and various avenues of struggle, Our Revolution never properly took root. At various times, DSA has been threatened with staff possession of organisational affairs and information, with the lure of state loyalism35, and with celebrity politician cults of personality, but the ability of members to organise themselves and a structure that responds to such organisation has been key to preventing its capture by alien class forces.
Your Party may wind up stillborn. Comrades in that organisation certainly face a somewhat steeper challenge since it combines the features of an “externally mobilised” party like the mass workers parties of the past, or like DSA, with those of an “internally mobilised” party set up by politicians to support themselves, also the model of the abortive Our Revolution36. Without concerted member organising, political exposure, and dedicated publishing in the pages of Prometheus Magazine, the Weekly Worker, and elsewhere, the DSA-like elements, meaning structures for genuine member control, would likely not have had the twinkle of existence that they did.
Given the challenges, it is heartening that a wing of the organisation developed that was more or less correctly focused on winning and solidifying member control over the apparatus of the party and fighting the politics of state loyalism and deference to celebrity politicians within it. Despite the failure of the Grassroots Left slate to win a majority in the leadership elections, it has shown itself to represent a considerable minority of total membership, possibly a majority of active members. The potential may exist to solidify that status over the course of a long-term struggle, especially as (or if) branches and other membership structures are set up. Hopefully, the history of MUG and the experience of DSA over the past 10 years, since the initial Bernie explosion, demonstrates the potential for revolutionaries who commit themselves to long-term struggle in a reformist and class collaborationist organisation.
If revolutionaries end up categorically excluded, hopefully, this history can also inform their activity within any future regroupment initiative. Above all, what is needed is clarity about the importance of deliberative member democracy and the right to organise within the party, as well as a programmatic orientation that rejects loyalty to the capitalist state and imperialism and puts forward the alternative of working class rule through a democratic republic.
- Seattle DSA, ‘3 DSA Members in Congress Vote to Ban Railroad Strike – They Don’t Speak For Us’, Seattle DSA, 1 December 2022 <https://seattledsa.org/2022/12/3-dsa-members-in-congress-vote-to-ban-railroad-strike-they-dont-speak-for-us/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
↩︎ - Matthew Strupp, ‘The US Proxy War in Ukraine and Socialist Anti-War Strategy’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 1 November 2022 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2022/11/the-us-proxy-war-in-ukraine-and-socialist-anti-war-strategy/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
↩︎ - Jenna Grove, ‘Fight the Constitution! Demand a New Republic!’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 25 March 2021 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/03/fight-the-constitution-demand-a-new-republic/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
↩︎ - The Housing Justice Commission is the national DSA body dedicated to organizing around housing issues, it is currently heavily oriented toward the building of autonomous tenant unions and Communist Caucus membership is highly concentrated in it, greatly influencing its political direction.
↩︎ - Bread and Roses Caucus, ‘Stop the War in Ukraine!’, The Call, 25 February 2022 <https://socialistcall.com/2022/02/25/war-russia-ukraine-socialist-response/> [accessed 17 March 2026].
↩︎ - https://internationalsocialist.net/
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↩︎ - Maurice Isserman, ‘Why I Just Quit DSA’, The Nation, 23 October 2023 <https://www.thenation.com/article/activism/quit-dsa-gaza-israel/> [accessed 18 March 2026].
↩︎ - Democratic Socialists of America, ‘Status of DSA National Endorsement for Rep. Ocasio-Cortez’, Democratic Socialists of America, 10 July 2024 <https://www.dsausa.org/statements/status-of-dsa-national-endorsement-for-rep-ocasio-cortez/> [accessed 18 March 2026].
↩︎ - Parker McQueeney (@centristmarxist), ‘The 4 loose mug subfactions’, Twitter, 12 November 2023 <https://x.com/centristmarxist/status/1723910270429298709> [accessed 18 March 2026].
↩︎ - The Democratic Constitution Blog <https://democraticconstitutionblog.substack.com/>
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↩︎ - Marxist Unity Group, ‘Statement on DSA Budget Priorities’, Marxist Unity Group, 20 January 2024 <https://www.marxistunity.com/publication-archive/fkvheb3igdf3v3zdnsigwwsn6t2neu> [accessed 19 March 2026].
↩︎ - Ethan Eblaghie, Daniel Crowell, Martina Manicastri, Andrew Thompson, Suraj Patel, and Francesca Maria, ‘“Uncommitted” Organizers Support “No Votes for Genocide” Campaigns’, Democratic Left, 22 October 2024 <https://www.dsausa.org/blog/uncommitted-organizers-support-no-votes-for-genocide-campaigns/> [accessed 19 March 2026].
↩︎ - Peter Sterne, ‘DSA’s membership nearly doubled since start of Mamdani campaign’, City and State, 27 January 2026 <https://www.cityandstateny.com/politics/2026/01/dsas-membership-nearly-doubled-start-mamdani-campaign/410966/> [accessed 20 March 2026].
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↩︎ - Marxist Unity Group, ‘Democratic Discipline: A Uniform Process for Electoral Censure Across DSA’, Marxist Unity Group, 6 April 2025 <https://www.marxistunity.com/mugdsa-convention-2025/democratic-discipline> [accessed 20 March 2026].
↩︎ - Marxist Unity Group, ‘Democracy for All’, Marxist Unity Group, 6 April 2025 <https://www.marxistunity.com/mugdsa-convention-2025/democracy4all> [accessed 20 March 2026].
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↩︎ - Henry M. Robert and others, Robert’s Rules of Order: Newly Revised, 12th edn. (Public Affairs, 2020), 45:2.
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↩︎ - Jean Allen, ‘The Collective Mind’, Cosmonaut Magazine, 22 April 2021 <https://cosmonautmag.com/2021/04/the-collective-mind/> [accessed 20 March 2026].
↩︎ - A commitment to the interests of one’s state to advance or preserve its position within the capitalist world-system
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