Public Organizations

Democratic Socialists of America

The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is an American social and political organization founded in 1982 and united supporters of democratic socialism, labor activists and representatives of the left wing of social democrats. The largest socialist organization in the United States at the moment.

Creating

In 1982 Michael Harrington, who had published The Other America back in 1962 about the problems of the poor in one of the richest countries in the world, managed to unite two small socialist organizations that had grown out of the American antiwar movement – the Democratic Socialists Organizing Committee (DSOC – a leftist splinter of the former Socialist Party of America, but focused on work inside the Democratic Party) and the New American Movement (NAM – a coalition of intellectuals from the “new left,” feminists and former socialist left-wingers. Harrington saw the main goals of the new organization as influencing the Democratic Party on the left and stopping the socialist internecine struggle. The slogan of the young organization was “The Left Wing of the Possible.

At its founding, the DSOC had 5,000 DSOC members and 1,000 NAM members, and Michael Harrington and Barbara Ehrenreich were elected co-chairs of the new organization. Cornel West, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Steinem, Francis Fox Piven, Edward Asner, and House member Ron Dellams, who in 1971 became the first socialist congressman since Victor Berger in the early 20th century, were vice presidents of the organization.

Activities

The DSA sees itself as a broad leftist organization, encompassing a variety of tendencies, from social democratic and reformist to ecosocialist, revolutionary-socialist, libertarian-socialist, and communist. Most of its members share anti-capitalist and Marxist ideas, although the self-definition of “democratic socialists” can span the spectrum from supporters of F. D. Roosevelt’s New Deal-style social liberal policies to Trotskyists.

The Democratic Socialists of America oppose capitalism, patriarchy, wars of aggression, fascism, and racism. Their activists participate in the union movement, fighting for labor rights and a $15-an-hour minimum wage, demanding democratic control of workers over their own workplaces. Hence the DSA’s ideal of public forms of ownership, including worker cooperatives. Among the DSA’s priorities is the fight for universal free education and health care. Democratic Socialists of America supports socialist feminism and LGBT rights.

The DSA publishes Democratic Left, a quarterly digest of news and analysis. The Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) is the student wing of the organization.

The Democratic Socialists of America has usually supported progressive or liberal Democratic candidates in presidential elections, including Walter Mondale, Jesse Jackson, John Kerry, Barack Obama, and Bernie Sanders, and in 2000 the Green Party candidate Ralph Nader.

Second Breath

For decades, socialist ideology has occupied a marginal position in U.S. political processes, but a notable shift occurred during the 2016 Democratic primary, when Senator Bernie Sanders, who openly describes himself as a Democratic socialist, emerged as the primary challenger to the party establishment’s unquestioned candidate, Hillary Clinton. Specifically, in the Iowa primaries, where they take the form of caucuses, exit polls showed Sanders getting the support of 84% of voters between the ages of 17 and 29, 58% of voters who described themselves as “extremely liberal” in belief, and 57% of those earning less than $30,000 a year.

In August 2017, the DSA held a national convention in which most of the 700-800 delegates representing the organization’s 25,000 registered members voted to leave the Socialist International (in which the DSA has been a member since its founding in 1982) because several of its member parties had adopted and were themselves implementing neoliberal policies (notably the SDHP, the French SP, the Institutional Revolutionary Party of Mexico, the Indian National Congress).

The influx of new members into the organization only intensified after Donald Trump’s election victory. By the end of 2017, membership had grown to 32,000. As of July 2018, the DSA already had 47,000 members, and the number of local cells had increased from 40 to 181. Meanwhile, the average age of members was 33, up from 68 in 2013. In the 2017 election, 15 DSA activists (in addition to the 12 already elected) were elected to local governments in 13 states, including Lee Carter in the Virginia House of Delegates.

In the 2018 Democratic candidate primaries for the U.S. House of Representatives for a district in New York City, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, a 28-year-old Democratic Socialists of America activist, unexpectedly defeated current Democratic House caucus chair Joseph Crowley. On November 6, 2018, she was elected to Congress along with another DSA activist, Palestinian-American Rashida Tlaib of Michigan.

In the 2019 Chicago City Council elections, the Democratic Socialists of America, in addition to Carlos Ramirez-Rosa, who was already sitting there, ran several other DSA candidates, forming the Socialist Caucus of 6 local lawmakers.