The failures of the DSA are going to get us killed

I couldn’t believe my eyes when I saw Trump supporters breach the Capitol on January 6. I was visiting family and we were getting ready for dinner when I received frantic texts from comrades in Mexico City. “What is going on in the US? I just saw the videos from the Capitol”. I assumed it was the Proud Boys as usual but when I turned on the TV and watched a riot of Trump supporters outside the Capitol and an armed stand-off inside, I knew this was different.

As we commented on the chaos over dinner, my grandmother, who is blind, began to tense up; she was getting worried as we were talking about civil war and running away to Mexico. I tried to reassure them that things would be OK, and that this would be resolved, but deep down, I wasn’t—I’m not—so sure.

The reason I’m not so sure is because I have seen how in the last couple of years the national leadership of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) and publications like Jacobin, have failed to appropriately respond to profound crises that have shaken the United States. And if this string of failures continues, I am not sure that we can stop the far right before it becomes a mass movement, at which point, a “race war” might be inevitable.

My lack of faith in the DSA as it exists today comes from the lack of national urgency and initiative around struggles like Occupy ICE in 2018, when there were militant occupations at detention centers around the country including in Los Angeles, Portland, Philly, New York, Texas, and Tampa. Given that the border wall and family separation were the centerpiece of Trump’s agenda, DSA should have prioritized this work. While some DSA chapters took action locally, Trumps’ family separation program went almost unopposed and led to over 100,000 migrants and refugees locked in overcrowded and squalid camps along the border, followed by the disastrous “Remain in Mexico” policy that has stranded over 60,000 refugees in open-air camps and city streets in Mexican border towns.

Already, Republicans are stalling Biden’s weak immigration agenda, and this issue will become a rallying point for Republicans and the far-right. If we don’t confront the American deportation machine with resolute, abolitionist actions, the right will galvanize its forces around this issue.

If we don’t confront the American deportation machine with resolute, abolitionist actions, the right will galvanize its forces around this issue.

In addition to the lack of urgency to abolish ICE, in 2020 the DSA missed several opportunities to mobilize its members to confront the right and to become a struggle organization fighting alongside workers. For example, when the pandemic hit, DSA chapters should have established mutual-aid networks to help communities, the elderly, and nurses who were fighting for PPE. Especially when it became clear that the Republicans aimed to sacrifice the working class to re-open the economy, the leadership should have sought to lead and coordinate the fight-back against evictions and layoffs to deepen the roots of the DSA in the working class.

After the pandemic, a period permeated by politics opened the possibility for a national protest movement for healthcare and workplace protections. According to Mike Davis,

A national protest movement would have opened a second front for BLM and changed the election dynamics. It would have highlighted the specific union and community organizing campaigns that should be priorities for support in 2021. It would have kept Medicare for All on the top of the agenda and prevented the current marginalization of progressive voices inside the Biden administration.

However, this did not happen, and although Mike Davis repeatedly warned us that “we cannot abandon the streets”, for the most part, the Left did, and in its place we saw deranged Trump supporters take the streets on May 1. A missed opportunity for the Left.

In the Wake of Rebellion

The second and even more appalling failure happened right after the national uprising against racism and police violence that was ignited by the murders of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, and Nina Power. Again, the national leadership of the DSA and the largest socialist publication, Jacobin, failed to appropriately connect with the new movement. DSA chapters and individual members did what they could to respond, but the national leadership was so focused on elections that it did not call for national mobilizations in solidarity with BLM nor did it form a national coalition with BLM chapters that militantly, heroically and brilliantly organized multiracial demonstrations and launched campaigns to defund the police.

For its part, Jacobin failed to embrace the cause of abolition in the wake of the national uprising and to use its vast influence to center the voices of abolitionists in the AfroSocialist and Socialists of Color Caucus of DSA. This was a missed opportunity to infuse the socialist movement with abolitionist politics but instead, Jacobin chose to peddle the class-reductionist politics of Adolf Reed (that, like postmodernism, will vanish like a fart in the wind).

Indeed, it is a shame that Jacobin has a history of sidelining abolitionist politics, and has featured speakers like Dustin Guastella. With the confidence of a mediocre white man, Guastella shits on the abolitionist movement, condescendingly arguing that prison abolition, police abolition, and open borders are a leftist wish list of “things that we like and that we think are good”, unlike real demands like Medicare, jobs and trade. Although Guastella’s bread and butter politics are so out-of-touch with reality, one month into the summer’s uprising, he doubled down arguing for more police funding while thousands in the streets were demanding police abolition.

As Sean Larson pointed out, racism is the linchpin of American capitalism and socialists should take the abolitionist road to socialism because “one hundred and fifty years after the end of the Civil War, we should have the perspicacity to recognize a fundamental fact about the American social formation: the antiracist struggle for abolition is the struggle for socialism in the United States.” However, Jacobin takes the opposite approach and instead of centering the well-documented work of prison abolitionists, they obfuscate the nature of racism and mass incarceration with click-bait.

The Riot on the Hill

That’s why, as I watched the riot on TV, secretly, I was hesitant to reassure my family that everything would be OK, because I am not sure that it will be, especially when key forces on the Left have effectively abdicated their responsibility to lead at crucial moments. This time it would be no different.

Right after January 6, most DSA chapters were disoriented. The largest chapter, NYC, was so sectarian in the face of fascism that it reluctantly endorsed a protest called the next day. Unfortunately, only a few hundred people attended the rally and some organizers discouraged chants to abolish the police. Meanwhile, the DSA LA leadership used the pandemic as a convenient excuse not to call for a socially distanced protest or a car caravan and instead released a copy-paste statement. When it was all said and done, the cowardly national leadership rallied its chapters behind legalistic maneuvers to impeach Trump instead of organizing a broad antifascist coalition to mobilize public opposition to the far right on Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Another missed opportunity.

Through their aversion to struggle in the streets, the leadership has failed to train the membership in resolutely abolitionist, socialist politics and tactics that will be necessary to oppose the far right.

Fortunately, there have been remarkable exceptions. For example, Chicago DSA, helped to organize a coalition of unions and community organizations to protest the far-right, and although the demonstration was small, this coalition can serve as a model for future antifascist organizing in that city. In addition, the Santa Cruz DSA released the best statement I have read and every DSA chapter should study it closely and seek to implement its organizational conclusions. Notably, they conclude that “it is time for the DSA to re-evaluate its relation to the Democratic party and the institutions it controls. Instead of drawing the organizing energies of our members into campaigns to call congress members, we need to turn our face more directly to the working class.”

Tasks Ahead

Rank-and-file DSA members need to take a hard look at our organization and figure out what it will take to transform it into a vehicle for social change in the coming year. For example, it is widely acknowledged that the National Political Committee is often unresponsive to urgent matters and that with its NGO structure, DSA is very bureaucratic and not very democratic. Thus, the DSA must be further reformed and democratized so that there is a corresponding relationship with the politics of the rank-and-file and the decisions of the leadership.

As socialists, we must also fight for an organization that trains its members in mass civil disobedience and direct action, like CORE in the civil rights movement and ACT-UP during the AIDS crisis, that can prepare us to work with working class communities, not schmooze with the Democrats. Sadly, after years of prioritizing elections, DSA members are more qualified to work at a call center than to organize a sit-in. If we want to deepen our roots in the working class, we will need to prove ourselves as the most dependable comrades.

Through their aversion to struggle in the streets, the leadership has failed to train the membership in resolutely abolitionist, socialist politics and tactics that will be necessary to oppose the far right. Under the Biden administration, we mustn’t cede the streets, or the role of opposition to the far right. The DSA must build coalitions beyond the electoral arena to uplift the demands emerging from the streets so that we can be champions of the multiracial working class. This will demand an embrace of revolutionary socialist politics that can provide a “civilizational alternative” to the appeal of fascism. In this coming year of struggle, let’s make sure that our organization does not make the same mistakes again.

Héctor A. Rivera is a queer, Mexican-American, socialist educator. He writes about geography, history and contemporary politics in Latin America. He lives in Los Ángeles, Califaztlán.