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Earlier this month, the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) top leadership met for an in-person meeting of their National Political Committee (NPC), the DSA’s governing authority. The result of the meeting was “Workers Deserve More!”, a rebooted platform for the organization featuring a host of radical proposals. The document commits DSA to scrapping the U.S. Senate, “abolishing the carceral forces of the capitalist state,” defunding the Department of War, amnesty for all immigrants, and “replac[ing] the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
As more and more members seek election to local and national positions, the platform represents a clear statement of the DSA’s views. Its radicalism, therefore, gives a glimpse into how the equivalent of the DSA’s board of directors — some of whom have appeared to moderate — actually think about politics.
“Workers Deserve More!” emerged from another DSA committee that spent two months grappling with and debating its language. When the NPC took up the document, its presenter urged the DSA to pass it unamended after it cleared the committee unanimously.
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Instead, DSA leadership added four amendments: one on “real democracy” — calling for the replacement of “the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress” — another on police and prison abolition, a provision explicitly naming Jerusalem as the capital of a Palestinian state, and a ranked-choice voting section. The NPC passed two of these four amendments unanimously, while the “real democracy” provision prevailed by a razor-thin margin.
“Workers Deserve More!” has revolutionary aspirations. It aims to “win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.” The document makes clear that achieving this vision would require “building a new society from the ground up,” accompanied by sweeping structural changes.
To accomplish that goal, the DSA calls for sweeping political and economic changes, including full public financing for campaigns and the abolition of the Electoral College, alongside the establishment of public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability, and strict regulations on investment properties.
It would also defund the Department of War, close overseas bases, and end all economic sanctions, which would include those in states like Iran, Cuba, and Russia. The platform further endorses universal amnesty for illegal immigrants, and ending “restrictions on … marriage,” which would presumably entail the legalization of polygamy.
The more radical amendments to “Workers Deserve More!” were a product of DSA’s big-tent structure , which makes room for multiple political tendencies. This is what has allowed Bernie Sanders devotees and more reform-minded socialists to work alongside self-described Maoists and Communists — the latter of which have tended to push for radicalism within the organization.
The big-tent structure has proved a double-edged sword. It allows the DSA to draw on the political know-how of experienced progressive organizers, as well as the skills of more militant activists in applying political pressure on the streets. Yet that same structure creates real gaps in representation and consensus. NPC member Cliff Connolly noted that “this committee was not multi-tendency. There were several tendencies in DSA that were not represented there,” underscoring ongoing internal friction.
The more extreme members under the big tent tend to push a more militant framework and radical analysis into everything the DSA does. For example, Connolly, a member of the Marxist Unity Group caucus, argued, “[W]e’re never going to have democracy or socialism in the United States as long as the president and the Supreme Court exist in their current form. The whole point of having the Senate, the president, and the Supreme Court is so that, if popular legislation passes through the House of Representatives, the ruling class has these other levels they can pull to stop it from happening.” Connolly pointed to the Supreme Court’s blocking President Joe Biden’s student debt relief as a recent example of this dynamic.
Sarah Milner , a member of the far-left Reform & Revolution caucus, acknowledged that the platform’s more radical language may be “off putting for people.” But she pointed to Woodrow Wilson’s advocacy for dramatic structural change in American governance. Milner said this amendment “puts forward a vision of transforming the functions of the American state to allow for the implementation of socialism.” One of the NPC co-chairs, Ashik Siddique, admitted that “ab…
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