Adam Delgiudice/SOPA Images/Sipa USA via AP Images
Crowds march through the streets of downtown Los Angeles to protest the humanitarian crisis caused by the ongoing siege of the Gaza Strip by Israel, October 21, 2023.
Harold Meyerson recently published his resignation from the Democratic Socialists of America in the Prospect, due to the organization’s stance on the issue of Palestine, saying that the DSA’s position has alienated him and other longtime members. He went on to speculate that an exodus of members may send DSA and the modern socialist movement back to the margins where it existed from the 1980s through the early 2010s. Meyerson attributed this potential fissure to the massive influx of young, post-2016 members, who have grand ambitions but demand an unreasonable ideological purity from the organization and coalition partners, and who also object to what he perceives as a baseline agreement that DSA’s electoral efforts must remain within the left wing of the Democratic Party.
I am certainly among those organizers who joined DSA in the years following Bernie Sanders’s first presidential run; however, at 49 years old, I may be closer to Meyerson’s age than to the median DSA member. Over the past six years, I have experienced ups and downs while working on local chapter and national campaigns. That aside, despite the perceptions of Meyerson and those he refers to as his “geezer comrades,” DSA in my view is currently more unified around our core organizational priorities than I have seen in years.
As U.S.-funded bombs decimate the lives and homes of countless Palestinians, DSA members adhere to our political platform, which states that we “support self-determination for the Palestinian people and a political solution to the current crisis premised on the guarantee of basic human rights, including an end to the military occupation, an end to discrimination against Palestinians within Israel, and the right of return of refugees, as outlined in the call for Boycott, Divestment and Sanctions.”
I believe, as do many socialists, that events must be viewed in the context of the historical and material conditions in which they are produced.
DSA has been under attack in the media for the past two weeks over its reaction to the events of October 7. New York City Mayor Eric Adams made outright false and slanderous claims on MSNBC that DSA members were waving swastikas and calling for the death of Jews at an October 8 rally in New York City. Various major publications ran articles with the now-debunked claim that this rally was organized by DSA-NYC and that DSA members made callous and offensive public remarks. My DSA comrades and I take antisemitism seriously, especially while open neo-Nazis continue to establish themselves within mainstream conservative politics. I strongly reject the conflation of anti-Zionism with antisemitism. In fact, doing so perpetuates antisemitism.
Meyerson and other public figures objected to a series of posts from DSA’s national account on the website formerly called Twitter that affirmed DSA’s commitment to the cause of Palestinian liberation. These posts specifically mourned the loss of Israeli and Palestinian civilian lives while asserting that this terrible escalation is an outgrowth of the untenable situation of physical and economic brutality in Gaza and the occupied territories writ large.
I believe, as do many socialists, that events must be viewed in the context of the historical and material conditions in which they are produced. Likewise, even Israel’s primary news source acknowledges that Hamas has benefitted from material and financial support from Israel in order to prevent the development of more sympathetic resistance groups. History has repeatedly proven that when large groups of people are brutally oppressed, acts of resistance, violent and nonviolent, will erupt from those who lack basic rights and freedoms. The IDF has pointed to violent and even nonviolent acts of Palestinian resistance to justify continued military force and occupation. Despite what those who, in bad faith, call us “Hamas supporters” say, a recognition of political blowback does not serve as approval or celebration of any human terror.
We must, however, avoid knee-jerk reactions such as those after 9/11, which silenced voices of dissent while manufacturing consent for two wars, resulting in large-scale death, displacement, and destabilization. The U.S. is increasingly isolated on the world stage in support of Israel’s military bombardment as children, journalists, health workers, and civilians are buried in rubble by the hour. I believe that a firm stance against colonial exploitation, stolen land, and imperialist wars of aggression is needed now more than ever.
Mr. Meyerson is correct that there are divisive issues within DSA; any healthy political organization engages in internal debate. In 2021, Rep. Jamaal Bowman (D-NY), a DSA-endorsed House representative and former DSA member, voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome and also traveled to Israel with J Street, a powerful pro-Israel lobbying committee that does not support the rights of Palestinians to return to their land and homes. Most members felt this went against DSA’s principles. Some believed Bowman should be expelled from the organization, but ultimately our National Political Committee voted not to do so.
This was perhaps the most contentious issue in DSA’s recent history, and we lost active members who were dissatisfied with the process and outcome of the conflict. We continue to exercise democratic procedure and debate around the issue of expectations of DSA-endorsed officials and members who fail to uphold our core principles and platform. DSA members, elected leaders, caucuses, and working groups will inevitably make mistakes and encounter conflict as we attempt to navigate the contradictions of political terrain.
An impassioned debate also abounds, as Meyerson noted, within DSA regarding how our electoral candidates should orient on the ballot line. As a socialist organization, there is a majority-held view that using the ballot line of a capitalist party that is regularly hostile to its left-wing representatives is not a viable long-term solution for building working-class power. Of course, due to the difficulty of operating outside of the two-party U.S. electoral system, this is a complicated matter. Members and caucuses within the organization have divergent views about DSA’s electoral future. I don’t think it’s particularly extreme to suggest that a better future would include a way for working-class people to have a more direct means of participating in the democratic process than our current system allows.
A better future would include a way for working-class people to have a more direct means of participating in the democratic process.
Membership in organizations across the left has decreased over the past few years, and DSA is no exception. Many of us take this issue very seriously, and understand that we must reverse this trend in order to achieve our goals and challenge the power of capital. The failure of our neoliberal economic system to manage the COVID-19 pandemic, the uprisings that followed the police murder of George Floyd, and the naked cruelty of the Trump presidency energized hundreds of thousands of people who believed we could disrupt the capitalist and militaristic systems that hurtle society headlong into multiple overlapping crises. Despite all effort and intent, our political system managed to resist the demand for fundamental change. The status quo was resumed; as a result, many organizers lost hope and dropped out of the movement.
During the past three weeks, while media outlets and social media personalities argued about who posted the best public statements in response to the deadly events of October 7, DSA members leapt into action. The organization launched the “No Money for Massacres” national campaign, which urged representatives to sign on to Rashida Tlaib and Cori Bush’s Ceasefire Now Resolution. We made over 100,000 calls in the first week of the campaign. As a result, 18 representatives have signed on to the bill. This is far from the number we need, and fewer than that opposed the McCaul-Meeks resolution of unwavering support for Israel without mention of Palestinian deaths. But it is a historic show of resistance.
We see a staggering civilian death toll, an Israeli siege that has plunged Gaza into darkness, and dehumanizing rhetoric that aims to legitimize ethnic cleansing. We are watching a genocide occur before our eyes. I refuse to be complicit. I stand alongside my Jewish DSA comrades and our allies in this struggle, Jewish Voice for Peace, when they say, “Not in my name.” Likewise, I stand with our Palestinian members and community in their grief as well as the struggle for liberation of their people.
These are the reasons I continue to organize as a member of DSA. Many thousands of us give hours and hours of unpaid labor each week in hopes of building a better world. The process isn’t always clean and will never be free from mistakes and disagreements. But the struggle against poverty, military and police violence, border violence, government surveillance, white supremacy, and capitalist exploitation that we face in the U.S. is inherently linked to struggles abroad. My comrades (young and old) and I are committed to the creation of a truly democratic society of and for the working class that functions to meet the needs of the people rather than increase the production and profits of military contractors and other corporations that profit from the perpetuation of apartheid.
