We see the task of DSA as cohering the varying and at times contradictory social forces of the US into a decisive working class subject able to topple US empire and global capitalism. 

The fundamental nature of capitalist domination is the ordering of peoples into hierarchies and the dividing of people into borders. Our response is one of solidarity. We must replace the ordering of people and borders with a common understanding that we, the working class, the vast majority of society, are linked in a common project for humanity. As the old IWW saying goes, “an injury to one is an injury to all. All for one, and one for all.” The core of any socialist program is a recognition in the value of all of humanity. We reject the idea of being realistic in order to accommodate existing processes of oppression and exploitation. We are, in Mike Davis’ words, partisans of the necessary, understanding the necessity of no less than the complete remaking of our relations to one another and the world.

The socialist project requires the adaptation of this universal value of humanity to the everyday lives we live. Centuries of repeated defeat of working class and progressive struggles have left the U.S. working class fragmented both materially and ideologically. We make sense of the world through ideology, which comes out of and reflects the material conditions and circumstances of our lives in all of their specificity. DSA and the socialist project must cohere an ideology that can both unite all of these contradictory social forces into a unitary working class political subject and make a bid for leadership over society as a whole.

The only path to uniting this social class is a dynamic, organized mass party. This party must be able to embed ourselves in all local struggles for progress and articulate those demands inside the halls of power. We must simultaneously develop demands on behalf of the entire class we organize and support the struggles of smaller social forces within our struggle. When speaking of a mass party, we consciously reject the political form of the cadre party based on the correct political line. Instead, we seek to be a party united in unwavering commitment to universal humanity and a strategy of mass politics, in which we are consistently developing both the leaders of our class and the supporters of our movement.

In the end, the success of our political project can only be measured by the social base we are able to build. If our party is successful, it will entail the transformation of millions of people to see themselves as makers of history and partisans of a new world struggling to be born. We will, through our success, see millions more conceive of the project of universal solidarity as their own project of liberation and freedom. 

If the project of DSA is to cohere a socialist ideology that can unite diverse workers into a mass party capable of contesting power, the role of the National Political Committee (NPC) is to interpret our political moment and quickly decide how the organization should respond. Its members must provide the necessary political leadership to lead mass political action and to grow DSA while maintaining and developing our infrastructure, even through moments of political malaise. This will require the NPC to shift its current priorities from running national committees and putting out statements to directly interfacing with chapters, organizing our members into action, and providing the support and direction they need in times of high political activity. Most importantly, it requires the NPC to make bold decisions that both meet the moment and unite our organization in struggle.

Regardless of the politics of its members, the NPC over the last 8 years has failed to make meaningful collective decisions that advance unity in DSA throughout times of crisis. This has led to the body becoming largely stagnant, serving as a body of committee liaisons rather than a body of professional organizers. Its members report back on the committees they liaise to without exercising political will to guide the direction of those committees. The uneven development and varying structures of DSA’s national bodies makes it even more difficult for the NPC to take decisive political action, especially with regard to political action that crosses the jurisdiction of multiple committees. Finally, without a clear and manageable system that links chapters to national, the NPC’s awareness of DSA’s current activity and their ability to plan for the future will always remain limited.

The inability for the NPC to take decisive action, however, is not merely structural. For years, the NPC has been riddled with sectarianism and a complete inability to compromise in order to advance a united political struggle. We see the solution to this as organizing. The NPC must become a body with a collective responsibility to steward our organization forward through collective action. They must holistically analyze the world, make decisions with as united a front as possible, and collectively execute those decisions. That is the only path to sustainable organizational growth in our big tent. 

The NPC’s inability to function as an organizing body that makes political decisions is evident in the wide-scale burnout that affects its members. Over the last four NPC terms, at least one NPC member has resigned before their term ended. To solve this problem requires both a structural shift that empowers the NPC to act as organizers tethered to DSA’s chapters and a transformation in its approach, seeking to unite the broadest sections of DSA and execute decisions collectively. 

A strong socialist movement requires coordination, with focus on the internal structure and capacity of our organization. We need a robust national infrastructure that connects our national leadership to our chapters, new members to the rest of the organization, and supports healthy organizing environments. As an organization we must operate with the discipline required to enact democratic mandates, centering the development of socialist organizing and administrative skills amongst our membership. Without it, we will be unable to attract and retain a self-sustaining base of membership, and thus will be unable to harness the capacity of the DSA and wage external struggles for working class power, especially in moments of crisis.

Without a robust middle layer connecting our national organization to chapters, DSA’s national leadership is unable to adequately integrate chapters into a coordinated broader vision or assist with their own local organizing. Both DSA and YDSA require more organization and cohesion at the national level, which means creating a  unified bureaucracy that works under direct and democratic control of national leadership. This is necessary to ensure that we are effectively building socialist organizations. This ranges widely from spreading best practices for efficient, effective, and accessible chapter meetings, to data-based research into effective chapter growth strategies, to offering advice and feedback to national leadership.

At both the national and local level, building cadre leadership and politically developing our membership and the broader working class must be prioritized. The political development of working people is vital to fostering a healthy democracy within DSA in which all members are capable of making informed decisions. This will require moving past self selecting into siloed off, issue-based working groups and committees into more universal onboarding and political education practices alongside measurable and outward facing priority campaigns. Nationally, merging smaller single-issue working groups into larger function-based structures, alongside effective staff coordination, is a starting point for this more cohesive vision. Expanding into a cohesive national bureaucracy will require careful, scientific planning and strong leadership directly accountable to DSA’s democratic processes. With a comprehensive national bureaucracy, we can more easily connect to chapters across the country, train and develop their leaders, and politically develop our membership as a whole.

None of this entails handing over the control of the organization to unelected and unaccountable bureaucrats. In fact, new and expanded national bureaucratic structures must be accountable to and appointed by nationally elected leadership, and in turn, membership. This means direct oversight, engagement, and support from the NCC and NPC, as well as transparent practices at all levels of national leadership to allow members to understand and participate in the organization. With an expanded bureaucracy dedicated to connecting members at all levels, we can build a stronger DSA and get closer to cohering into a mass socialist organization.

Over the last decade, DSA has grown into the largest socialist organization in the United States. Electoral campaigns on both the local and the national level have driven significant parts of that growth. We understand the horizon of DSA electoral work to be a mass party in whose elected representatives support the DSA platform without question, vote as a bloc with other DSA electeds, and are consistently meeting with both local and national DSA leadership. Reaching this point requires running candidates to win and using their power once in office to both enact policy changes and build working class organization. This approach should not focus solely on our relationship to the Democratic Party, but instead a long-term project of class formation in which we are building a conscious working class polity. 

Creating our class requires preparation and precision in our electoral work and prioritizing campaigns we can shape with our organizing. Because elected officials are responsible to the base which elects them, DSA must build an electoral machine that is not solely a small part of a winning coalition, but an essential part of our candidate’s base—a load-bearing pillar elevating their campaign. As we navigate on our journey to this level of organization, we must learn from the strategies and campaigns that have demonstrated the ability to win elections and achieve victories for the working class and DSA.

Once in office, our electeds must continue their work as socialist organizers, using their position to bolster working class organization. To do so requires prioritizing the use of political power to materially improve working people’s lives. Within these struggles, there will be victories and setbacks, each of which must be shared with the public through a robust and modern communications apparatus that clearly identifies who we are fighting for and whom we aim to defeat. Alongside larger struggles, the day-to-day duties of a public servant must continue to be prioritized, providing constituent services, political education, and responsive governance to connect the masses to socialist leadership.

When DSA endorsed candidates fail to live up to our democratically established expectations or undermine DSA projects, we must make our stance clear. Even if we cannot have the final say on their decision, establishing our independent politics is essential in preserving our integrity as an organization that truly fights for the global working class. To make our dissent meaningful, we must be clear and active in communicating with our socialists in office before important decisions are made. If and when DSA electeds take positions which significantly inhibit our work as an organization, we must be ready to use the appropriate forms of discipline, including public censures and un-endorsement.

The path to a mass party will be filled with many contradictions - and while these may be difficult to overcome, it is our duty to confront them, and not abandon the primary method of political engagement for working people. Recognizing the many barriers to succeeding as a socialist in office, we must pursue unity among all parts of DSA behind our democratically decided electoral vision. Only then can we truly build an alternative to the Republican and Democratic elites who, despite their differences, stand for the maintenance of an oppressive capitalist system.

DSA’s labor organizing, like its electoral projects, has grown the organization and become a key part of DSA’s post-Bernie identity. Many DSA chapters have been able to form lasting relationships with local labor unions, which is a necessary step in building a mass party rooted in the working class. The work of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) has revitalized the labor movement and brought incredible wins that we as an organization need to continue building upon. This is done through having our members continue to organize their workplaces and for chapters to continue to provide support to local unions regardless of membership overlap. At the national level, we see this through the continued support of EWOCs and the coordination of our whole labor strategy so that we are strategically building socialist consciousness within the labor movement we are a part of.

As a caucus, we are firm believers in DSA members organizing where they are at, whether that is in new union organizing or struggling to make an existing labor union more democratic. We see the merits of a more focused strategy like pushing socialists to work in specific strategic sectors, but believe that the most competent leaders in the workplace will emerge from workers who are organically drawn to their careers and plan to stay in those careers long-term. We find this especially true for careers requiring professional training to enter the job market such as teaching and healthcare, where many DSA members work already. These sectors also offer a key opportunity to build solidarity between workers and the communities they serve, as exemplified by unions like UTLA and CTU who organized parents in their contract struggles. Through this path, we believe that our organizers will remain lifelong members of that union and continue the difficult work of carrying a union through the moments of lower activity. They will also bring back important skills for fostering effective democracy and collective action in our chapters. 

Progress within the US labor movement means nothing if we do not use it to reign in the excesses of our imperialist economy. In the same way that unions like UTLA and CTU now use bargaining to help their local communities by fighting for them in their contracts, we need our unionism to expand from the local and national to the international stage. As a country whose production relies upon the oppression of other peoples for both extraction and for markets, we have to use our built labor power to begin the process of decoupling our production from oppression of peoples and the planet.  The struggle for Palestinian liberation has unlocked new ways for labor to engage in international solidarity, like the UAW 4811 strike protecting protesters from university repression and SEIU’s support for an arms embargo on Israel. 

Members’ experience in struggles for workplace and union democracy prepare the working class to govern our own lives after the revolution, when we will govern society. The necessity of a strike-ready union teaches our class the core functions of democracy in driving collective action and uniting supermajorities of workplaces. The planned 2028 general strike, if taken up by rank and file members, will be an incredible moment to show the power of workplace democracy and the level of mobilization and organization required to upend the current order.

As US residents, it is our responsibility to reign in the most destructive military force on the planet. We advocate a revolutionary defeatist position which states that our role as socialists in the imperial core is to oppose all US international interventions and weaken the US military in any way possible. We hold this responsibility not only to our comrades abroad who suffer under US imperialism, but also as an essential piece of the struggle for our own freedom.

As such, we see the primary tasks of anti-imperialists in DSA to localize the ongoing struggles against empire across the world into all actions of our local work. The U.S. empire is not merely relevant to US foreign policy, but also to every element of our lives. The military equipment sent abroad is retired to local police forces that brutalize Black people in our cities, and every level of our government is invested in corporations profiting off of human rights violations across the world. Through our anti-imperialist struggles, we both stand in solidarity with international forces of progress opposing US empire and we begin to free ourselves from the global systems of US-led violence that we are constantly entwined in. 

We also recognize the importance of considering the multinational and immigrant nature of the US working class. Historically, from Jews, Finns, and West Indian workers at the beginning of the 20th century to Chicano and Asian American workers in the latter half of the century, immigrants have stood at the heart of the U.S. socialist movement. Today, we see the ready defense of immigrants rights and the struggle for a just immigration system as key to challenging US imperialism and carceral systems.

Finally, the expansion of diplomatic relations and shared campaigns with progressive forces across the world is an essential strategic priority of the US left and DSA. This should prioritize membership based mass party formations similar to our vision for DSA, but should also include the widest set of organizations from which we can engage in shared work. In international relations, we believe DSA should also prioritize relations with parties that maintain deep social organization and hold significant state power rather than parties of a specific ideological orientation. While international conditions do not accommodate this in every region, we recognize our fundamental task as the taking of state power and the governing of society, and thus have much to learn from socialists already in state power. 

Winning socialism only in our own country is meaningless. Workers across borders have more in common with each other than with their bosses in their respective home countries. Our enemies—the multinational corporations, the fossil fuel industry, and imperialist military forces—all work internationally. Opposing them therefore requires a united international working class. We have a world to win, but we need workers all over the world to win it.

We believe that community is built on the basis of shared experience rather than shared identity. Centering the processes of discrimination and oppression requires understanding the whole of society as made up of specific, overdetermined pieces. Gendering, racializing, and abling/disabling paradigms as processes rather than static identities; all identities are constructs. Due to this, we believe that solidarity is built from a space of shared goals, struggles, and visions for the future. This analysis is only possible when we  recognize that identities shape one’s material realities and experiences.

Within DSA, we must strive to expand our membership to reflect the entire working class and the diversity of processes in which one has gone through and effectively incorporate the diversity of experiences into our political strategies. We must approach individuals as they are in their whole beings, not merely through the place they work or the apartment they live in. One’s viewpoints are not separate from their lived experiences and our understanding of the world can only be accurate when creating the inventory of the historical processes that have left us here. The expansion of this membership requires strong socialist organizing, leadership, and infrastructure as introduced in earlier sections of these points of unity. 

We must also be clear-eyed about the current communities not present within DSA. Chapters should look at what their demographic numbers look like compared to their community and intentionally course correct. This can take a variety of forms. Productive collaboration and communication with identity groups demonstrates that the chapter takes those concerns seriously and can provide a perspective that might not be available in the chapter yet. These efforts should not be merely meetings of leadership but experiences that help to bring together swathes of DSA members with communities not currently represented in DSA. Campaigns should be structured to meaningfully address community needs without centering normative perspectives that might be over represented in the chapter. Working towards a truly representative membership should be treated as part of the main chapter focus on recruitment and development; diversity is not separate from any other chapter priorities.

Members of DSA consistently encourage DSA chapters or DSA as a whole to participate within coalitions alongside other organizations with similar politics or aims. This makes sense logically—our power derives from the many ordinary people who work together to carry out our campaigns, and so it follows that campaigns that are supported by many organizations will be more powerful. However, this is not always the case.

Coalitions that do not center tangible, material organizing will be aimless and weak. Too often coalitions exist merely as a group chat of friends or an email list of organizations to sign on to events or statements. Without concrete shared demands and goals, the presence of a coalition itself will not make a difference in whether or not we achieve our goals. DSA at the national and local level should grow through coalition work, activating a base of existing supporters of a given cause. This kind of growth requires engagement with the rank and file membership of other organizations, and fosters long term sustainable coalition partners. Campaigns end, so unless there is overlapping membership and a clear reason to continue a relationship, the coalition quickly falls apart. This also prevents the tokenization of minoritized communities that may be under-represented in our chapters, our coalitions cannot only be representative on paper. 

It is also vital that DSA maintain political independence when we operate within coalitions. Functional working relationships without compromising on our theory of change, or third-partying ourselves is essential to building a mass socialist party. This holds true both for our relationships with the Democratic Party establishment, and other grassroots organizations. Clear, democratic partnerships with concrete demands is one of the strongest paths to building a mass socialist party and working class solidarity. We cannot abdicate our duty of providing political leadership and direction during times of crisis and put all of the responsibility for making decisions around political strategy on our coalition partners.

We believe that one of the greatest contrasts between our capitalist present and our socialist future is culture and the community that builds it. As a society, capitalism increasingly alienates us not just from our work, but from our families, friends, neighbors, and communities, whether they be based on where we live, or what we’re interested in. 

It is inherent that a core part of our project to build a mass socialist party is building and modeling socialist culture. Socialist culture is not only upheld by monthly socials or DSA members spending time with each other at a bar after a meeting, although both are enjoyable and can help to raise morale. Rather, building socialist culture must fundamentally be an organizing project. Capitalism has seeped into every part of our society, and we must understand that to achieve our dream of a socialist society, socialism must seep into every part of society too. Engaging with social spaces must be a part of organizing and that the strength of our movement depends on our ability to do both at the same time. And ultimately, we must use socialist culture as a means to recruit and retain new members, expanding our socialist project into a mass socialist party.

Internally, we must ask ourselves how we are improving the culture of DSA and making it more accessible for regular people and whether the culture of our chapter actively brings in new members or drives them away. Investigating and strengthening local grievance structures, and having an active code of conduct, are just a couple starting points for this kind of work. From there, we can collectively make interventions that make our chapters anchors in the local community. 

Externally, DSA must become more extensively and organically involved in our local communities. Every place where people gather is a potential frontier to lay down more roots for a mass socialist party. From garden clubs to church congregations, local sports leagues to pottery studios, there are opportunities to organize working class people everywhere. Furthermore, DSA has the opportunity to create these spaces under our own roof. DSA-led social spaces, when built in a healthy and productive manner, can and should be used to on-ramp new members into material, deep organizing work. 

Ultimately, community is a function and a feature of both our socialist politics and of the world we want to build. When we socialize and build community with an intent to organize, we strengthen the foundations on which a mass socialist party can be built.