Since the presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders in 2016, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has grown rapidly. It now claims to have more than 100,000 members, the largest organization on the Left. Its members have been elected to Congress and serve as mayors of large cities. DSA has important ties to the trade union bureaucracy, with some of its members holding influential positions within the leadership of the UAW and the Teamsters. When mainstream newspapers refer to someone as a democratic socialist, they mean that this individual is a member of DSA.

 

The DSA has become the most prominent component of the progressive wing of the Democratic Party. On the one hand, this would appear to be a remarkable success story. Yet in fact, DSA is enmeshed within the constraints of liberal reformism. The scant shreds of radical politics are vanishing, as it becomes increasingly similar to every other liberal group organizing within the Democratic Party.

         

Merely describing oneself as a socialist does not make one a socialist. Both the words “democratic” and “socialist” have a positive appeal to millions of working-class people here and around the world. It is not surprising, therefore, that many groups and individuals claim to adhere to this perspective, even when the reality is quite different.

         

A socialist works to create a new society that differs fundamentally from the existing system, one in which the means of production are publicly owned and operated under worker-community control. A democratic socialist seeks to build a socialist society in which power is held at the grass-roots level and in which there is a major greater freedom to dissent and debate than there is within capitalism.

         

Democratic socialists advance immediate demands that contest the power of the ruling class of billionaires, while also looking forward to a new society. The creation of a socialist society will necessitate the total transformation of the existing system. Accomplishing this will require building a mass social movement rooted in militant, non-violent direct action in the workplaces and in the streets. A political party based on such a social movement can serve as its electoral expression by presenting a socialist perspective to the voters. It can also bring together activists from different arenas, while also helping to assist in devising solutions to specific problems. Of course, a genuinely democratic socialist party must be entirely independent of the two corporate parties.

         

The DSA does not seek to implement a democratic socialist perspective. Instead, it strives to gain a set of limited reforms that are designed to avoid a direct confrontation with the corporate rulers. The DSA does not advance the socialist tradition, but rather the very different tradition established by progressives.

         

For more than a century, progressives have sought to make a capitalist market economy a more equitable and humane society. Nevertheless, the overall situation of the working class has declined. Environmental destruction has reached the point where scientists forecast a planetary collapse as an imminent likelihood. The gaps in income and wealth have widened, leaving power even further consolidated into the hands of a few oligarchs. Essential services such as education and healthcare spiral downward as the shortage of affordable housing becomes an acute crisis.

         

Liberal reformism has failed. Capitalism cannot be reformed. The progressive perspective is premised on an illusion.

 

The Socialist Party Drifts

         

The DSA functions as an integral component of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, but its origins lie in a split within the Socialist Party of America (SPA) that occurred in 1973. To understand this split, a brief review of SPA history is needed.

         

In the first years of the twentieth century, the Socialist Party became a mass party. Its presidential candidate, Eugene Victor Debs, was one of the most popular and respected figures in the United States. Debs had become a public figure by leading a strike of railroad workers in 1894. Debs was allied with the left-wing of the SPA, which encompassed a wide range of political viewpoints. A fundamental principle accepted by all tendencies was total independence from the two mainstream parties.

         

During the First World War, the administration of Woodrow Wilson targeted the SPA for its opposition to the war. Soon afterward, most of those in the left-wing of the Socialist Party of America quit to join the newly formed Communist Party. As a result of government repression and internal splits, the membership of the SPA plummeted. It was never again a mass party.

         

Still, the Socialist Party enrolled thousands of activists into the 1930s and the years of the Great Depression. The 1930s saw an upsurge in working-class militancy and the formation of the CIO industrial unions. Socialist Party activists were instrumental in the formation of the most important of these unions, the United Automobile Workers (UAW). Walter Reuther and his two brothers, all three of them members of the SPA, rose to become influential figures in the UAW.

         

The Socialist Party split in 1936 when the Old Guard left. Many of them had been leaders in the SPA during its heyday prior to the First World War. Key members of the Old Guard soon became leaders of the American Labor Party, a phony third party created in New York to enable leftists to support liberal Democrats without voting the Democratic line.

         

The majority tendency in the 1936 split, the Militant Caucus, included many younger members who had recently been recruited to socialism. It was led by Norman Thomas, a Presbyterian minister who had opposed the First World War and had drifted into the socialist movement. Thomas succeeded Debs as the spokesperson for the SPA, serving as its presidential candidate from 1928 through 1948.

         

In the midst of Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, which was enormously popular within the working class, the sharp line opposing participation within the two-party system was beginning to erode. Nevertheless, neither side in the 1936 split openly proposed working for liberal Democratic Party candidates.

         

Events within the UAW were a major factor undermining this unconditional support for independent political action. In 1938, Walter Reuther, by then a leading figure within the UAW hierarchy, publicly supported the unsuccessful campaign for reelection of Frank Murphy, the liberal governor of Michigan. In doing so, Reuther openly broke with the fundamental principles of the SPA. At first, Norman Thomas was convinced of the need to discipline Reuther, but he was persuaded by his close advisors to avoid a confrontation. Reuther was not mollified, and he soon left the Socialist Party. As usual, an opportunistic, albeit the seemingly pragmatic, maneuver solved nothing in the short-run and undermined the essential basis of the SP in the long-run.

         

The decision not to challenge Reuther represented a major break with the Socialist Party’s tradition. Prominent members of the SPA had opted to work within the two-party system, but they had resigned soon after in realization that they were acting in violation of the basic principles of the Party. As one important example of this, key members of the leadership off the Nonpartisan League left the SPA during the First World War to follow the League’s strategy of building a progressive bloc within both political parties. Reuther’s decision to openly endorse a Democrat while retaining his membership in the SP, and the decision of the Party’s leadership to accept this, even if only on a temporary basis, was a harbinger of the future.

         

By 1950, the underlying fault lines within the Socialist Party began to tear it apart. Reuther had led a caucus within the UAW that had consolidated power and pushed out those tied to the Communist Party. The UAW, which had been a hotbed of rank-and-file militancy and working-class radicals, became a top down bureaucracy with close ties to the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

         

The 1950 convention of the SPA took place in Detroit, the center of the auto industry and the location of the UAW’s headquarters. Norman Thomas and his group were eager to align with the Reuther apparatus. In addition, the Korean War had begun, and Thomas believed that socialists should ally with the United States in countering the totalitarian policies of the Soviet Union.

         

Before the convention began, Thomas made it clear that he would not agree to be a candidate in 1952, and that he was opposed to the Socialist Party presenting its own presidential candidate. Instead, Thomas supported a resolution stressing the importance of distinguishing between candidates from within the two mainstream parties on the basis of support for the lesser evil. Thomas and his tendency were preparing to follow Reuther in working within the liberal wing of the Democratic Party.

         

The resolution was defeated and the Socialist Party of America remained formally committed to independent political action. Still, Thomas, with several other prominent figures in the Party, declared publicly that they would not be bound by the convention’s decision and would feel free to endorse liberal Democrats. Confronted with this defiant stance, those in the leadership who had opposed the resolution collapsed. The Socialist Party shifted its position and permitted individual members to support and endorse candidates from within the two-party system. Independence from the two corporate parties, which had been a fundamental point of agreement, became a tactical issue to be determined on a case-by-case basis.

         

The events of 1950 created the basis for the formation of DSA. Until this time, every trend within the Socialist Party had agreed upon total independence from the two-party system. Those who had opted to disagree with this proposition left the SPA. Norman Thomas and his group rejected this essential point. They insisted that one could support progressive Democrats while promoting a program of liberal reforms and still remain a socialist. This is the essence of the DSA perspective.

The Socialist Party Splits

         

The SPA presented token presidential campaigns in 1952 and 1956. As an organization, it remained outside of the mainstream parties, although its most prominent members endorsed, publicly, Democratic Party candidates. This incoherent and inconsistent position changed in 1960, when the Norman Thomas wing took control of the SPA. One factor accounting for this shift took place in 1958 when the Independent Socialist League (ISL) dissolved into the Socialist Party. The ISL, usually known as the Shachtmanites, came out of a split in the Socialist Workers Party (SWP). The SWP followed Trotsky in the schism within the international Communist movement. Max Shachtman had been one of Trotsky’s closest collaborators in the United States. In 1940, Shachtman and most of the SWP’s youth quit the SWP, convinced that the Soviet Union was a new form of class society, bureaucratic collectivism, rather than a degenerated workers state.

         

By the mid-1950s, the ISL had lost its way and merged into the Socialist Party. Although its members were few in number, they were experienced and dedicated activists. Not surprisingly, the Shachtmanites provided the SPA with an infusion of recruits into its leadership. Nevertheless, they offered the Socialist Party little in the way of original analysis or strategic thinking. Initially, most of them aligned with the Norman Thomas tendency before they disintegrated as a cohesive presence.

         

The other factor leading to the change in policy in 1960 was the influence of Walter Reuther. In October 1959, Reuther declared that a realignment of the two-party system should be the paramount goal of progressives. Conservatives would be pushed out of the Democratic Party and into the Republican Party. As a result, the Democrats would become a clear alternative for those interested in implementing liberal reforms. The realignment perspective provided an ideological gloss for leftists entering mainstream politics.

         

At the 1960 convention, Norman Thomas and his group joined with most of the Shachtmanites in endorsing a resolution that would move the SPA into the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. The Socialist Party would work for a realignment of the two parties that led to the transformation of the Democrats into a “liberal-labor party.” (The ISL had supported the idea of an independent labor party prior to the 1958 merger. Initially a tactical maneuver by Trotsky in the 1930s, the labor party perspective had become an important component of Trotskyist orthodoxy.} The link between the 1960 resolution and the current policy of DSA is direct.

         

The 1950s had been a quiet decade for the left, but the 1960s were very different. The civil rights movement was followed by the movement to stop the Vietnam War. Thousands of young people were radicalized and on the streets. For the leaders of the SPA, this upsurge in radical activity posed problems. As allies of the liberal wing of the Democratic Party, they were eager to aid President Lyndon Johnson in carrying through his program of liberal reforms. When members of the Debs Caucus sought to raise the issue of the war within the Socialist Party, they were silenced.

         

By 1968, opposition to the war had increased to the point that Senator Gene McCarthy’s campaign for the presidential nomination had become a serious threat to mainstream Democrats. In this volatile situation, the Socialist Party divided into three hostile tendencies. The realignment tendency remained within the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and called for a negotiated peace in Vietnam. Michael Harrington led this group after Norman Thomas died in 1968. Harrington had briefly been a member of the Socialist Party’s youth group (YPSL) before joining the youth group of the ISL in 1953. To the left of the realignment tendency stood the Debs Caucus, which supported the antiwar movement’s demand for an immediate withdrawal from Vietnam. To the right of the realignment tendency stood a group led by Shachtman. This tendency looked toward George Meany, the president of the AFL-CIO. Meany had been a staunch supporter of Johnson and his decision to escalate the war in Vietnam. Once in the Socialist Party, Shachtman moved beyond the liberal wing of the Democratic Party and into its mainstream as a Cold War warrior.        

 

The gap in political perspectives within the Socialist Party had become too wide to be confined within one organization. The trigger to the split arose from the 1972 campaign of Senator George McGovern, who gained the Democratic nomination for president by calling for a negotiated end to the war. For the first and only time since the New Deal, the liberal wing of the Democratic Party was able to overwhelm the machine and nominate a progressive for president. Meany responded by making it clear the AFL-CIO would not work for McGovern’s election. The Shachtman tendency followed Meany and blocked any effort to swing the SPA behind the McGovern campaign.

         

In the wake of McGovern’s overwhelming defeat and Shachtman’s death in November 1972, the Socialist Party of America held its last convention in December 1972. With the Shachtman tendency holding the majority of delegates, the convention voted to rename the organization the Social Democrats, USA. Many of those in the Debs Caucus had already quit before 1972. The 1972 convention was the final blow for the realignment tendency, and its members left the new organization soon after the convention.

In October 1973, the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee was formed with 500 members. It would be renamed the Democratic Socialists of America after it had absorbed the majority of the New American Movement in 1980. The Social Democrats, USA continues to this day as a small pressure group within the Democratic Party calling for a more aggressive foreign policy and unstinting support for Israel. The Debs Caucus regrouped in 1973 to from the Socialist Party USA, intent on carrying on the tradition of Gene Debs, rank-and-file militancy and independent political action.

 

The Way Forward

​

In the more than sixty-five years since 1960, there have been consistent efforts to implement the realignment strategy. Certainly, the Republican Party has moved to the right, but the Democratic Party remains a morass, with centrist Democrats contesting primaries against liberal candidates. Little has changed over the years. The realignment perspective has proven to be an abysmal failure.

         

The DSA has, as its core belief, the necessity of winning a series of incremental reforms. The workings of the capitalist system have always placed a strict limit on the scope of reforms. This has become even more true in the era of global capitalism. Huge transfers of wealth are made easily and quickly around the globe.

         

At the same time as the limits of reform become more tightly restricted, the necessity for drastic shifts in policy become more acute. This can be seen most clearly in issues related to climate change. Scientists are agreed that immediate and drastic measures are required if the planet is to avoid environmental disaster. The incremental, one small step at a time, approach is bound to fail as a response to the environmental crisis.

         

As socialists, we need to advance a bold set of proposals. The energy corporations must be brought under public ownership and control with the mandate of an immediate phasing out of all fossil fuels. We need to move people out of cars and into mass transit. The United States should institute a crash program to construct an extensive network of high-speed rail lines, with all railroads, freight and passenger integrated into one publicly owned entity. Mass transit within urban areas must be free, frequent and reliable. Short-distance air flights should be banned.

         

This is just the beginning of an effective program to counter climate change. Such a program will be expensive, but the alternative of doing little or nothing will be far more costly in the long run, in terms of money and lives. Countering climate change requires a program that cannot be instituted within the constraints set by global capitalism. A transition to a new society is essential.

         

There is space for a genuinely democratic socialist organization well to the left of DSA. To build such an organization will require learning from the past, victories and mistakes, as well as developing new and creative responses to the problems that confront us.

 

Readings

Covering the Debs Era of the Socialist Party:

Kipnis, Ira. 1952. The American Socialist Movement, 1897-1912. Columbia University Press, New York, NY.

Salvatore, Nick. 2007. Debs: Citizen and Socialist University of Illinois Press, Urbana, IL.

After Debs:

Seidler, Murray. 1961. Norman Thomas: Respectable Rebel.: Syracuse University Press, Syracuse, NY.

Isserman, Maurice. 2000. The Other American: The Life of Michael Harrington. Public Affairs, New York, NY.