Priorities Resolution - NPC September 27, 2009

DSA believes that an adequate response to the economic and environmental crisis requires the US to adopt a radical reform program akin to DSA’s Economic Justice Agenda. We particularly emphasize the document’s argument that only through strict democratic regulation of finance capital and raising the wages and working conditions for the global working class can the world economy serve people’s needs rather than people serving the needs of corporate elites.

Thus, in the coming period, DSA will prioritize educating, agitating and organizing.

I. DSA will speak publicly about socialism. Simplistic and misleading “anti-socialist” rhetoric is being used by the right to mobilize populist anger against any reforms that would modestly redistribute wealth, income, and opportunity in the United States. DSA will through holding well-publicized public forums, producing timely literature, organizing a visible presence at the 2010 US Social Forum, and using newspapers, the web, radio, video and public access TV, educate the public as to why Obama’s health care and fiscal stimulus plan are not socialist. For better or worse, these reforms are similar to or weaker than the policies of most other advanced capitalist democracies.

Furthermore, DSA will articulate why only forthrightly social democratic reforms, such as reinstituting progressive and corporate taxation and engaging in prudent, but massive defense cuts, could fund desperately needed public health care and investment in education, infrastructure and alternative energy. DSA will endeavor to take advantage of the massive “socialist-baiting” of the right to educate the American public as to the major role socialist- inspired reforms have played in building more equitable societies than our own in Northern Europe and elsewhere.

II. DSA will engage in both education and action to rebuild a United States economy that serves the needs of working Americans and their families rather than the narrow interests of corporate elites.

We will fight to defend people’s basic needs against the continued legacy of the global economic meltdown and to restructure the US economy in a democratic direction. We will prepare for a range of struggles so as to be able to join nascent movements where and when we are most needed.

1. The anti-foreclosure movement should use whatever forms of protest can protect citizens from being thrown out of their homes and literally onto the streets. DSA will join movements demanding a moratorium on foreclosures and the creation of a Federal Home Mortgage administration that would refinance “underwater mortgages” at affordable rates and force banks to absorb some of the losses on their speculative mortgages. Short of

affordable re-financing, distressed home-owners should have the right to stay in their homes and pay the holders of their mortgages an affordable, present-market-value rent.

2. DSA will join progressive forces fighting for a new round of massive federal financial aid to state and municipal governments. Only by such measures can essential public services be maintained and massive deflationary layoffs be avoided.

3. DSA reasserts its commitment to passing single-payer health care legislation at either the federal or state level. We will also support national health care reform that contains a meaningful public option and state single-payer opt-out clause. Short of single payer, only by establishing a public insurer that can compete against wasteful private insurers can health care costs be contained against the pressures of private interests to inflate the cost of health care. DSA locals will actively participate in coalitions fighting for the creation of state-level single-payer health insurance systems.

4. DSA will work with other progressive organizations to achieve real regulation of banks and the shadow banking system. We favor a financial regulatory system with teeth that restores the Glass-Steagall Act’s separation of investment and commercial banks and that prioritizes investment in productive capital and commercial banks lending at affordable rates to consumers and small business.

5. DSA will continue to work with labor and its allies to pass meaningful labor law reform that would restore a real right to organize and strike and ensure that the NLRB enforces these laws.

6. DSA will join young people in demanding that higher education, in the long run, be a universal, public good financed through general taxation. In the short run, we will fight for a reversal of cuts in state funding for public higher education. We will join forces with those fighting for a radical expansion in public funding of higher education and for a major increase in federal and state grants to university students.

7. DSA will join the peace movement in demanding an end to war in Afghanistan as well as Iraq and in calling for cuts in wasteful defense spending.

8. DSA will begin a public dialogue among progressives about how to restructure the United States and global economy so that it creates productive jobs that provide living wages for all. The United States economy can only be restructured in an ecologically sustainable direction (and one that provides good jobs at good wages) if the federal government invests significant public funds in infrastructure development and alternative energy and mass transit technologies. Only if the federal government restores an effective

right-to-organize can an effective union movement force employeers to pay wages and benefits that justly reward workers who labor under safe and humane working conditions. By itself, private capital has shown no willingness to take on the massive investments needed to create such new technologies nor has it been willing to recognize the rights of working people to form democratic unions.

9. Finally, DSA will work in 2010 to insure that progressive Democrats who support many of the above items are re-elected to Congress or replace conservative Democratic or Republican incumbents. Only if the Democratic majority in Congress is not only preserved, but also expanded and moved to the left, can any of the above progressive reforms be enacted. DSA PAC will explore hiring an organizer to help our members become more effective in electoral politics, especially in primary campaigns that promote true progressives.

The above nine items do not represent a fully comprehensive program for domestic and international justice. But it is a start. Neither DSA nor any other progressive organization can predict which of the above nine areas of struggle will take off in the near future. But given the breadth and depth of the current fiscal crisis of the states and the near-certain mass increase in foreclosures, some of the above items are likely to become arenas of mass political conflict. If and when they do, DSA, at the national and local level will be there shoulder-to-shoulder with our progressive allies. In addition to being active members of a progressive coalition, DSA will bring to these struggles a socialist perspective that contends that only through greater democratic control of economic life can meaningful democratic reforms be won, implemented, and defended.

III.

For DSA to have the capacity to do this work, now and in the future, we must:

a. Build the capacity of the Youth Section — YDS—by aiding YDS’s efforts and by aiding YDS in establishing organizing beach-heads on as many campuses as possible.

b. Facilitate the transition of active YDSers into activist and leadership roles in the adult organization when they graduate or leave campus.

c. Build the capacity of our locals to take an active role in both visible public education and credible political action.