What do people make of the Democratic Socialists of America?

Dunno if you should laugh or cry that a 21st century redo of the Militant Tendency is the high point of the American left.

It shows a rightwing shift amongst the leftist milieu. Grasping at straws. Looking for a pseudo church for some? Squandering limited personnel and resources in dangerous dead ends eg electoral politics of various sorts and squandering of limited resources in all manner of side shows and mixed up with divisive and dangerous identity politics. Promoted by the deep state particularly as part of the CIA's "Operation Chaos" promoting such divisive phenomena as the "women's movement'. As well of course by the corporate media/universities etc. It and other aspects of Operation Chaos contributed to the demise of many leftist groups in the 70's doing some useful industrial work.
. Involvement in the DSA won't tackle the big issues - the employer offensive & the corporate unionism of the AFL-CIO-CIA interwoven by innumerable threads with the corporate setup-deep state-corporate media. and its hold/influence over workers in key industrial sectors and associated low workers' morale. With large swathes probably voting for Trump. All roads lead to focusing on one strategic sector with outside the job organisation intensively assisting militant networks on the job - in a context where this can be done. Due to issues of morale etc - this activity by outside the job organisation people would have to fit into their daily routines to some extent. Such organisation should adopt such principles as need to know, compartments and vetting where possible. An obvious focus is transport industries. Consider producing a national industrial paper which could lead into regional/state editions. There are some militant looking groups already there which can be approached? Maybe you can get some swathes from DSA involved in various ways in this and doing something useful. Get big actions going affecting many millions raising workers' morale and major splits from corporate unions. Check out www.sparksweb.org for some ideas & "From Corporate Bureaucratic Unionism to Grass Roots controlled Direct Action Unionism: Perspectives for Activity & Strategy for Australia Today" in RW Vol.41 No.3 (235) Dec. 2023-Jan. 2024 on www.rebelworker.org and libcom.org

I don’t really think it is much of a positive force for socialism. Like it’s growth coincided with a bit of media coverage on socialism and their organization. But I don’t think it converted a lot of people to our cause. I suppose most people who joined the DSA were already politically aligned.

I find their Libertarian Socialist Caucus to be very disappointing. I guess that is expected of a group operating within the DSA.

Maybe I'm misunderstanding what you're saying here, but I don't think this is true at all if you mean that most people who have joined DSA (probably hundreds of thousands of people since 2016) were already people who have been involved on the left. I think the majority of people were essentially apolitical or never really involved in anything prior to joining DSA.

Sure, most were probably not involved in anything before but I wouldn’t say they had just become ‘socialist’ when they joined the organization. Especially the folks involved in the numerous organized ideological caucuses, they don’t come across as newbies to leftist politics.

I mean, they're just not socialists... and it really makes little sense why there are so-called "libertarian socialist" and "communist" caucuses within the DSA. I'm not sure why such caucuses would choose to affiliate with an organization that pushes for stuff like the Green New Deal as if it were some solution to capitalism's climate woes. The surge in membership probably also has a lot to do with Trump coming to office in 2017. I know a lot of people became more political after that, especially considering how Trump emboldened the far-right and how he was/is a literal billionaire (the first billionaire president in US history) claiming to have working-class people's interests at heart.

I think the Democrats may not like it, but they prefer it over the alternative of another National Rainbow Coalition roaming free. As long as the DSA remains in their orbit, the party maintains control and I have to salute that cunning. What the DSA think they’re getting out of it is more the question. Maybe the answer isn’t that interesting

I do fear on some level, this is the absolute limit though. In the same way conflict is generally viewed through realpolitik, reformism sets a sort of pragmatic parameters that then must be obeyed; x y and z are not realistic, you can’t say that, politican c didn’t run on that and they did fine, etc. And that’s when they win. When they lose, well Corbyn starting a new party would have been the biggest leftish story here in the recent past and the foreseeable future.

But you need to look at the role of the Deep State - FBI/CIA/Cops in all this.
With the SDS it was an extra parliamentary group involved in anti-Vietnam War activity so seen as a threat to the set up - so it wasn't just a matter of factions - it would be FBI infiltrators stirring things up to provoke splits. SDS was unfortunately involved in the blind alley of "community organising" but not the strategic industrial organising argued for above. Connected with perhaps its origins and ties with the corporate union bureaucracy.
The CIA did a brilliant job with its manufacture of the women's movement and hidden hand behind LSD, etc in disrupting/splitting/demoralising New Left groups doing useful industrial work associated with the wildcat strike movement in early 70's in the USA. New research points to the massive scale and impact of Operation Chaos - with such pop groups as the Beatles being manufactured by the UK Tavistock Institute connected with the Deep State - throwing new light on seemingly bizarre phases in the Beatles careers eg psychedelic and mystical phases - fitting nicely with CIA's promotion of the LSD/hippy phenomena to disrupt the student/worker radicalisation of the 60's/70's. See Mike Williams sage of quay web site and the work of other Beatles researchers.
A book which came out a few years back based on newly released FBI files (a fraction of the actual files on the CP USA Cointelpro Operation) shows they "manufactured" a Maoist faction in the CP USA in the early 1960's to disrupt it.
In the case of DSA - it has a very much an electoral orientation which would suit them - wasting people's energies/resources in a dead end.

ASN, how about you cut it out with the conspiracy theory nonsense?
As I'm sure you probably know, the CIA didn't "promote" the women's movement, they infiltrated it, as they did with various radical movements in Operation Chaos. So stop promoting this chauvinist nonsense.
In terms of DSA, maybe this isn't a particular useful bit of input, but I don't really find them that interesting.
Not to say that anything else is much more interesting of course.
But I even think comparing them with Militant is overstating it. Militant was a revolutionary socialist tendency within an avowedly socialist (at the time, in name at least) Labour Party. DSA isn't even as avowedly socialist as the Labour Party was, and is existing as a tendency within a pretty far right (by world standards) capitalist party.
That's not meant as criticism of anyone in DSA.
Although as someone from an anarchist/ultraleft background, it is not really surprising to see DSA elevate various candidates to office, get them elected, and then promptly denounce them for abandoning their former principles, as they have to compromise in order to get things done administering a capitalist state, or elements of it.
In terms of why did they explode, I'm not really sure. Although I think their big tent nature would have helped, and the lack of the type of cultism common in the parties of the authoritarian left.
What does seem to happen in these moments is that some group or other ends up absorbing the bulk of energise new people which come in. I think some of this is just like, and as soon as an organisation picks up momentum, and is seen to have it, then it is likely to continue growing. The organisation, Momentum, in the UK, is pretty similar. I think this is probably the most comparable group to DSA. And I think the trajectory of DSA will likely be similar, depending on how historical events in general go.
So, if DSA continues to have success and growth, then all the different factions within it will probably stay together because of what they see will be mutual benefit. But if things start to stall or go backwards (as happened in the UK with the collapse of Corbynism), then the factions will probably turn on each other, blaming each other for various failures, while the bulk of the less-ideologically inclined membership drifts away.
If it ends up having huge amounts of success, then I think we can assume it will probably follow the path of European social democratic organisations – some material benefits for the working class, alongside compromise, recuperation, and the decline of radical elements.
So a mixed bag I reckon.

Oh yeah, Militant was miles ahead which underlines how diminishing the returns of entryism are. Though watching Adam Curtis’ Shifty, there was some parallels of left celebrity serving as memetic; Derek Hatton does panto, Tommy Sheridan does Big Brother (sol-lid-darrrrrrity), AOC attends the more glamorous Met Gala. You’re right Momentum serve as the actual model, but Lansbury not as photogenic.

Don’t know how to frame this exactly, and I’m sure no one is interested in my magico-Marxism by now, but I do wonder how much of reformism’s staying power is down to this general adherence with realism, practicality and so on. At least in this period, it is shared by radical organisations, big and small. On those terms, you would go for the more likely to ‘succeed’ option as the many academics and Marxists in bio crowing on twitter would suggest.

It is my understanding that most democratic socialists, including those in the DSA, actually do believe in creating a socialist society in the long run, not to end up with a reformed version of capitalism. That’s why they call themselves democratic socialists. It’s just that they prefer to accomplish their goal with the well tested and discredited social democratic strategy. Michael Harrington, the principal cofounder of the DSA, thought their strategy was true to Marx’s so called democratic politics.

As for the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, their understanding of libertarian socialism is far from what actual anarchists understand by that term. I once saw a strategy proposal from within the caucus that was all electoral politics.

"ASN, how about you cut it out with the conspiracy theory nonsense?
As I'm sure you probably know, the CIA didn't "promote" the women's movement, they infiltrated it, as they did with various radical movements in Operation Chaos. So stop promoting this chauvinist nonsense."

Stop being abusive! But the deep state is interwoven with the corporate media - after all the corporate media could have just ignored it - but publicised it internationally - Katherine Graham who worked closely with Gloria Steinem in the "women's movement" was a key publisher linked with the CIA eg the Washington Post (voice of the CIA)and Ms Magazine a divisive mass movement was born in many countries just at the time of a major upsurge in workers industrial action - in the case of the Beatles - the corporate media got behind them on a massive scale - presenting them as musical geniuses, selling eventually a Billion records etc- their "organic" previous group "the Quarrymen" was considered by one its producers as producing "rubbish" music. According to many researchers the corporate media has played a key role in various US assassination conspiracies eg JFK MLK and John Lennon and it seems here with the Port Arthur Massacre - helping frame up Martin Bryant - see you tube on the Wasp Files.
You need to do the necessary research - see Sage of Quay web site - there is very persuasive research there. All points to a "conspiracy" and very sophisticated covering up of the Deep State tracks. Beatles researchers have uncovered important glitches in the cover-up in recent years . With the deep state/corporate media getting behind such an identity politics movement eg the womens movement - you can get going/fire up internal fighting going in various leftist groups doing good work on the industrial front contributing to their demise. It is presented as all "organic" disintegration when behind the scenes there is very sophisticated manipulation. No need for the mailed fist of the State. Although this fist was used quite a bit by the cops/FBI with some of their COINTELPRO operations as is well known against such groups as the Black Panthers - all well documented. A new book coming out some years back on Operation Chaos & the Manson Family - looks at an Operation Chaos style death squad to wipe out key people in the Anti-Vietnam War movement eg Jane Fonda and in the Black Panthers - the place where the Manson Family murders occurred was actually a hangout for these activists. - if the murders of these activists had been successful - it would all be blamed on an LSD Hippy cult nothing to do with the Deep State - all discussed in this book.
In the case of the DSA - you certainly may be seeing deep state engineering - particularly with this factional regime - but also certainly organic developments - But that is a common feature of Deep State manipulation - a small group of unknown artists such as Jack Pollack, De Kooning etc are suddenly discovered by the Deep State such US State Dept. and become this massive international movement - Abstract Expressionism. It has been a well documented "conspiracy" and they were legit artists.
So in my view the DSA there is strong possibility to likely to be engineered by them for this role to draw all manner of people and particularly those from the leftist milieu into the dead end of electoral politics and a bogus social democratic outfit. In the case of the DSA which suits their agenda - their infiltrators/operatives - would be involved in some sophisticated manipulation behind the scenes - heading off any moves for splits and infighting assisted by how the thing has been engineered and of course acting is a seeming "even handed way" - so there are no massive bust ups like with the SDS (the research needs to be done to get much more of the story on it) - the deep state has massive resources and corporate media connections - and as I have argued considerable expertise in manipulation so they can if so required provoke massive disruption in the DSA but they don't - it fits their agenda.
However the research needs to be done into the DSA and if a Deep State job or it is playing a significant role needs to be exposed - adequate research needs to be done into other aspects of Operation Chaos such as in regard to promoting identity politics.
However with the DSA there may be an opportunity to get these new people who have joined in large numbers involved in useful work particularly this strategic industrial organising. If progress can be made with this work - their morale would be raised and they can move away from this electoral politics fantasy and this fake Social democratic outfit to more appropriate anarcho-syndicalist organisation and activity.

I've got some new thoughts on the DSA - another dimension maybe to be a sort of honey trap to gather all these leftist types into it - and assuming it is a deep state front - they would have all their details so helping in the context of a future State drag net against leftist elements - currently Trump is waging quite a drag net and locking up a lot of immigrants. In the Australian context until 1971 there were in fact plans for doing something like that in the context of a national emergency - there plans were for setting up camps to hold leftist types- presumably those in the communist party and others would be targeted. THere had been had been vague legislation to outlaw "subversion". Its mentioned in the introduction to the Book "our asio files" by Meridith Burgmann and Wendy Lowenstrein. I think. Definitely if the DSA is a deep state front/job - its definitely too dangerous for people and particularly those from leftist groups to get involved in it.
It seems to me it would be more likely for the CIA to run it - they would have experience in infiltrating various Social Democratic/Labor Parties and creating factions in them - Intriguingly a faction in the Swedish Social Democratic Party the Brotherhood was involved in luring Julian Assange as part of a trap to sweden to give a lecture - one of those involved seemed to have quite spooky/rightwing connections. So it may be urgent to warn people off about the DSA particularly now they look to be facing big growth - assuming deep state front. However all we have to go on at the moment is theories/suspicions.
I think its important to get the experts involved. It would be useful to get those who have done books/research into the US deep state - to get their views on the above theories on the DSA - they also may have stumbled across some important info/contacts - also one of them may be interested in doing the research on them for a book - a publisher who specialises in this area - is Trine Day - they may be helpful - books could take a long time to get published - so its important to get whatever info on them re the possibility of deep state front to expose it if such a front and warn off people.

Look I think we're going to have to say that you have to stop posting all these deranged allegations with zero evidence.
As I'm sure you will be aware, if you have studied counterintelligence programs as much as you seem to think you have, that a primary tactic security services used in US was badjacketing – making fake allegations of people being in league with the state. As I'm sure you're also aware, this got people killed.
So you are doing something which the security services deliberately did to disrupt radical movements.
If we allow you just make these crazy allegations, someone else could equally just say that you are working for the CIA. So how about you just cut it out?

do the necessary research proposed to determine the facts

It would be different if you were citing actual declassified documents to support what you're saying, which plenty of scholars do (e.g. through FOIA requests in the US), but just referencing some conspiracy theorist's website doesn't really encourage others to take you seriously. I also don't think I've ever seen a serious scholar use the word "deep state" before either, so I'm curious what sort of "research" you're referring to there. It's mostly a right-wing/conspiracy theorist term used by people who, I imagine, don't know how to engage with actual government documents or sources. There are plenty of real instances of governmental conspiring (e.g. the American support for the Khmer Rouge as a counterweight against reunified Vietnam, as well as other stuff like Cointelpro), but you have to base what you're saying on more solid evidence than just some random guy's website or just telling people to "research it."

In any case, the DSA and electoral/reformist politics would need to be fought against regardless of whether they're being used by the Trump administration or not, which is something I seriously doubt.

I was looking at seeking the feedback from those who have done serious research into JFK,RFK, MLK and John Lennon assassination conspiracies/CIA Operations generally and particularly into CIA infiltration of Social Democratic/Labor Parties in various countries and those who have done research into COINTELPRO - and maybe you can find someone who is interested into doing serious research into DSA and a book - sort of farming out the work to them and seeking any insights to look into

Admin: any further off topic comments about conspiracy nonsense will be removed.

Follow-up admin note: a further off-topic comment was removed. If you want to start a new discussion about conspiracy theories or admin moderation decisions, feel free to do that, but don't disrupt this discussion about DSA.

I suppose maybe I am being a bit overly jaded. I suppose my thinking is because we had successful social democracy here in Europe from over a century ago, having a very small but growing movement for European style social democracy in the US is not particularly inspiring to me, because even when that sort of thing is successful it ends up with the kind of situation we have in Europe, which I suppose it's easy to take for granted and think is pretty terrible.
However, I guess that is partly the privilege of growing up in a relatively functioning social democracy. From a US perspective, having even the weak kind of social protections we have would be amazing. Like not having no-fault dismissal, and having 28 days minimum annual leave per year, not to mention things like universal free healthcare, would be absolutely life changing for the majority of US workers.
So I don't mean to be a Debbie Downer! But I guess seeing social democracy slowly collapsing in Europe for the last 40 years doesn't really inspire confidence in the general project…
That's very interesting to hear about the CP and IWW membership. Although I must say I haven't seen much in terms of active industrial campaigns or high-profile propaganda from either of those groups corresponding with a growth in membership. Perhaps I've just been missing something. Maybe if there is something to report on that front we could start a new Discussion.
Also interesting comment about anarchism. I have started a new Discussion about that here: https://libcom.org/discussion/are-anarchist-organisations-decline 

I don't think people should underestimate how much AOC & co. are changing the makeup of the Democratic Party. Virtually every Democrat supporter I've seen (on the internet, I don't live in the US to be fair) despises the people who lead the party. The old guard types aren't going to be around forever and the powerbrokers are well aware how popular people like AOC and Mamdani are with the Democratic base. The 2024 election showed how little people were inspired by the solidly establishment candidates of Biden & Harris; even with the threat of another Trump term on the horizon, they still managed to do worse than ever.

I don't think the party is going to suddenly turn into an open social-democratic one, but I think the DSA-aligned leftists will gradually become the leading force. The DSA itself has lots of factions within it wanting clean or dirty breaks or whatever but they're sort of irrelevant when the main thing that attracts people to it are precisely the candidates the factions are dissatisfied with. In fact, the proliferation of all these different caucuses to me indicates exactly how irrelevant they are.

The National Rainbow Coalition post the 84 run. That result was set in stone but in 88 the Democrats were cognisant they were a legitimate threat and manoeuvred internally to counter it. The old guard may feel the same about the DSA but they’re not going to live forever and sections of capital will eventually come around to the inevitable. There’s also this propulsive tendency of the left to chase ghosts, unionisation increasing means nothing other than unionisation increasing, not an indication of militancy. Democratic success in Nevada over the last few cycles has been attributed to the culinary union there as one example. It’s likely power will consolidate around a tradeunionised, reformist, pro Palestine base as a new form of liberalism in the U.S and elsewhere, internally going around in circles with its contradictions. Sure socialism will be electable but only as something unremarkable.

But maybe that’s conspiratorial.

To Juan Contatz's original question about why the DSA exploded in 2016, that's something that I think about occasionally as well. I remember running into some DSA folks at a picket in late 2016 and being surprised since I'd never seen or met a DSA member in 10 or so years of going to protests and other events. Within a year they were the largest leftist organization in the US since SDS in 1969.

I think there's a couple of interrelated reasons why they blew up. The first and most important was the Bernie Sanders phenomenon. I think it's easy to forget that his campaign was the first time in decades that socialism was discussed in a serious way at a national level in the US and he made a big point to label his politics as "democratic socialist." I literally think that there were thousands of really excited young people who were looking for something to get involved with once Bernie conceded, googled "democratic socialism," saw that there was an organization for people with their exact politics, and joined. I also sort of suspect that a lot of branches were formed from networks of Bernie volunteers who decided to join or start DSA chapters en masse, but I don't actually have any evidence to back that up.

Another thing that I think allowed the DSA to explode was having really popular media. The most popular socialist publication at the time, Jacobin, and the most popular socialist podcast, Chapo Trap House, were both run by DSA members who were outspoken in support of the organization.

The last thing was that there weren't a lot of great alternatives: CPUSA was as moribund as the DSA at the time and was less likely to attract folks who weren't communists, trot groups like the ISO (which was probably the most active and visible socialist group at the time) and Socialist Alternative had more restrictive politics, bad internal cultures, and hadn't been very open to the Bernie campaign, Marcyite groups like the PSL and WWP and Maoist groups like FRSO weren't as well positioned politically, generally seeming more focused on anti-war and police reform protests and having less palatable politics around North Korea, Iran, etc. (the whole online Tankie thing was just starting to emerge at the time), and the IWW was too specifically focused on workplace organizing to attract folks who had just been energized from a socialist electoral campaign.

Since some folks brought up Militant, I wanted to mention a more recent episode of a small socialist group blowing up from out of nowhere. This past year or so, Socialist Appeal (Ted Grant's group when he split from Militant) and their international, the International Marxist Tendency and all, or nearly all, the groups changed their name to the Revolutionary Communist Party or something similar. The US group, which I believe may have just been called the US Section of the IMT and seemed miniscule even by tiny Trot sect standards, is now rebranded as the Revolutionary Communists of America and has been on a really large membership drive, mostly oriented around leaving stickers that say something like Are You a Communist or Join the Communists around college campuses. While it's hard to say how large they actually are, since most of their activity seems to revolve around slick self-promotion and highly-visible activities, they've definitely managed to hold some fairly large looking rallies and have a lot of really active members in places like reddit. Does anyone have any insight into this development? It feels much less organic than the growth of other groups like the DSA or PSL (which I'm not sure is entirely organic either, given their ties to wealthy pro-Chinese propagandists) over the last ten years.

I mean, the growth of the British Soc App/RCP makes slightly more sense, cos they were one of the only groups that had stuck with Labour in the pre-Corbyn years and so they were in a good position to recruit from that, for them Corbynism was like a prophecy come true whereas everyone else who'd spent the past however many years trying to build a new party outside Labour was stuck in the position of having to hastily rewrite their positions if they wanted to be able to recruit Labour people.
Internationally it's a bit more mystifying but I guess it could be a thing of British RCP grows - IMT/RCI gets enthusiastic new members who post about it online a lot - Americans are influenced to join via reddit and the like? Maybe?
The other observation I'd make about them is that usually trot groups have been very careful to have their own set of imagery distinct from stuff that looks too "USSR" , Trot groups have almost always been called socialist rather than communist and avoided use of the hammer and sickle etc, whereas the RCP's imagery is a lot more tankie-looking, so I think that's a (seemingly successful) attempt to fish in the same pool as the likes of the YCL in the UK and the PSL/WWP in the US?

I think the IMT/RCI has stalled since their big membership drive campaign; they don't post their big membership target milestones any more. It's worth keeping in mind that the standards for joining are pretty low, it's basically "are you a communist?" and "do you agree to follow the leadership's orders?". Add that together with their aggressive self-promotion and advertising and you get a group that is probably a lot less significant than they seem.

What surprised me about the IMT is the extent to which they transformed into the RCI without any visible signs of internal dissent. The whole organisation began in opposition to the majority faction of Militant that wanted to ditch Labour and run independently. Now they themselves have ditched Labour and are running independently, without any real explanation of why beyond "communism is so in right now". Surely some of the old timers would have freaked out at all this.