Charles Spirtos/Flickr
Demonstrators carry the DSA flag during a protest in Austin, Texas, May 31, 2020.
“Labels get in the way sometime,” remarked Dylan Wegela, a first-term state representative from Michigan. The teacher and former labor organizer was responding to a question about whether his belief in democratic socialism prevents him from reaching voters in his largely white, working-class district in the suburbs west of Detroit. “I never deny I’m a socialist,” he continued, “but my community doesn’t know what it means. They do like things socialists want, though, like Medicare for All and affordable housing.”
The occasion for these reflections was “How We Win”—a conference sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Fund, The Nation, and Jacobin—held last weekend at Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C. The 50 or so politicians in attendance occupy elective offices in mostly blue cities and districts all over the nation. They include state senators from Brooklyn and Philadelphia, council members from Knoxville and Pittsburgh, an alderman from Chicago, the mayor of Burbank, California, and a theater director who sits on the board of education in the Riverhead School District on the east end of Long Island. It was a decidedly young crowd. I saw not a single pol with even a trace of gray or white hair, unless one includes Bernie Sanders, who briefly addressed the group via Zoom.
At times, the working conference rocked like a celebration. “This is the largest gathering of socialist elected officials in decades,” exulted Maria Svart, executive director of the DSA Fund. Happy shouts and a stamping of feet followed her statement and other speakers who echoed it. Since Sanders ran for president seven years ago, DSA has boomed to close to 100,000 members; voters have chosen more than 150 socialists to govern them at levels from the House of Representatives to that school board in Long Island. Indeed, not since the heyday of the old Socialist Party of America, more than a century ago, have there been so many victorious politicians who sport the “S-word” on their bios.
Yet, Wegela and his fellow officials devote most of their time to advocating for winnable reforms in the only system we have, not planning how to hurl the rotten machinery of capitalism into the recycling bin of history. Svart claims they all share the goal of learning “how to shift power from the owning class to the working class.” But every panel I attended discussed such practical goals as how to build and support labor unions, reduce the fear of crime, persuade Latinos to spurn right-wing candidates, and stop cities from financing lavish sports arenas. Every official who attended, I believe, had run as either a Democrat or in a nonpartisan contest. I heard no one mention launching a radical third party or backing any of the marginal ones that exist and are running self-described democratic socialist candidates for president next year. During the conference, “socialist” got mentioned almost exclusively as a term of self-identification rather than as the goal toward which all were striving.
The current surge of elected DSA members, while modest, would not have occurred unless socialists ran as Democrats.
The ideological ancestors to this new generation of socialist elected officials defined themselves and their work rather differently. The nearly 1,000 American socialists who got elected to office in the early 20th century ran as the nominees of a party of that name, which proudly belonged to an international socialist movement that was much larger in Western and Central Europe and was growing all over the industrial world. Like their 21st-century comrades, they tried to deliver on the promise of a government that would curb the powers of corporations and the rich and serve the interests of ordinary people. The so-called “sewer socialists” who ran cities like Milwaukee, Berkeley, and Schenectady, New York, instituted factory inspections, built new hospitals and schools and parks in working-class neighborhoods, and prevented the police from aiding employers during strikes.
But they were quite forthright about the limits of what they believed those reforms could accomplish. When Eugene Debs, a former Democratic state assemblyman and union leader, accepted his party’s nomination for president in 1912, he declared, “The Socialist Party is organized and financed by the workers themselves as a means of wresting control of government and of industry from the capitalists and making the working class the ruling class of the nation and the world. Since the socialist revolution cannot be achieved in a day, never for a moment mistake reform for revolution and never lose sight of the ultimate goal.” That year, 19 Socialists held office in the state of Michigan alone.
The current surge of elected DSA members, while modest, would not have occurred unless socialists ran as Democrats, a process Sanders began when he nearly beat Hillary Clinton for the presidential nomination in 2016. But that affiliation does raise a question: How does a progressive Democrat who identifies as a socialist differ from a progressive Democrat, like so many in the current party, who does not, when their stances on the key economic and cultural issues are identical or nearly so?
Polina Godz/Jacobin
Participants in “How We Win,” a conference sponsored by the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Fund, The Nation, and Jacobin, gathered last weekend in Washington.
At the end of the “How We Win” conference, a few panelists did suggest an answer. I had to leave early, but David Duhalde, chair of the Fund, a veteran DSA activist, and organizer of the meeting, summed up their arguments in an email: “We are building for a world where democratic socialism is possible, and that democratic socialism is impossible absent political power.” He adds, “The socialist identity is key to show our long-term vision and … counter-intuitively attenuate the effects of some types of red baiting. You can’t accuse someone of being a socialist when they are open about it!”
In the past, American socialists made their most valuable contributions as dedicated, shrewd, and uncorruptible organizers of mass insurgencies, not by dreaming out loud about a revolution to come. Their work was indispensable to the growth of and the gains achieved by the movements for Black and immigrant rights, feminism, organized labor, and more. Most of the socialists at the D.C. conference entered politics through contemporary movements, too. While in office, they continue to employ the kind of methods that succeed outside the electoral realm. “You have to knock on people’s doors not just before elections but all through the year,” advised Phara Forrest, a member of the New York State Assembly who is also a registered nurse. “You have to teach people how to organize themselves.” As two young socialists named Karl and Friedrich put it in a manifesto 175 years ago: The task is to “represent the movement of the future in the movement of the present.”
To expand their influence, the comrades now serving in office and those who follow them may have to be content to regard their ultimate aim the way many a Christian thinks about the Second Coming. As Irving Howe and Lewis Coser wrote 70 years ago in one of the first issues of Dissent: “Socialism is the name of our desire … the desire arises from a conflict with, and an extension from, the world that is; nor could the desire survive in any meaningful way were it not for this complex relationship to the world that is.”
Meanwhile, there is a good deal of vital work to get done, and many elections to win.
