Carnation: Strategy & Tactics for DSA in the Next Four Years

Abdullah F, Griffin M, Tej B

April 7, 2025

Introduction

In the last year, millions of Americans have taken action to protest Israel’s genocide of Palestinians. The Democratic Party refused to prevent this horrendous crime against humanity and instead doubled down on the status quo. Now, Donald Trump’s administration is set on dismantling the government with the help of the richest person on the planet, Elon Musk. The working class of the United States needs a unified political voice.

We make the argument that building federal power is necessary for achieving socialists’ critical medium-term goals of ending genocidal wars and fighting climate change. DSA does not currently have the resources or membership to exercise federal power. To build the power of the socialist movement – to build the power of the working class to rule – DSA members must focus our efforts on five specific key issues:

Medicare for All

Bring Down The Cost of Living

End Political Corruption

Unions for All

End US Militarism

DSA should run local campaigns around these issues to grow our membership, resources, and capacity and to develop leaders over the next two years. We aim to bring DSA membership back to 100,000 members and to develop fundraising infrastructure capable of raising $10-15M.

To begin to exercise federal power, we propose running a slate of five DSA members for Congress in 2028, using the political infrastructure developed from local issue-based campaigns. This block of five members of Congress will use the same five specific issues as the basis of their platform.

The infrastructure and leaders for our party won’t come out of thin air. To build our party, we have to build a strong and solidaristic labor movement. At the local level, our issue-based campaigns must be closely connected to unions. With our leaders in office, solidaristic unions can be the organized base for socialist governance.

To really exercise our collective power, we must act together, democratically choosing the tactics that will win improvements in people’s daily lives along the path to preparing the working class to govern.

1. DSA is our party

With tens of thousands of members and chapters across every state, DSA is our socialist party. For the first time since the CPUSA at its peak, we have a mass socialist party in America. As the far-right continues to grow, more and more people are turning to DSA as a party that can transform politics and fight back against the upcoming attacks on the working class.

DSA is a member-based organization and we aim to grow our ranks by recruiting new members. Members have the right to participate in DSA by choosing our leadership and deciding our political direction. Members must pay dues, which is one way that we build our collective power independent of the political establishment.

We constantly discuss and deliberate on political questions among ourselves and we regularly conduct political education open to the public and targeted at members.

DSA members regularly decide to support and campaign for candidates running for political office. Ignoring elections would leave politics to the rich. Campaigns for political office can be used to raise the expectations of the working class, win some

power, broadcast socialist politics, engage new activists, and develop the skills of organizers. Often, and increasingly over time, these candidates are themselves DSA members who are active in their local chapters.

Members also participate in a variety of other political campaigns for causes in their community, and many DSA members are also leading and active members of their unions in their workplaces. In their unions, DSA members strive to convince

their coworkers of a more confrontational approach to fighting the boss and winning public goods. Our political campaigns seek to bring together sections of the organized working class to fight for demands on and off the shop floor.

All of these features of DSA make it a political party – regardless of the electoral system in the United States. Socialist parties in the past have ranged from factions within existing parties to clandestine correspondence networks in exile to coalitions of unions. As a group of people with common goals who organize to achieve those goals, we are a political party. 

The legal and political environment in the U.S. may change, but many of DSA’s characteristics are ideal for building working class political power: DSA is easy to join, stands for a clear alternative to mainstream politics, has a democratic culture, and is an organization of organizers.

When DSA members run for political office, they often choose to run on the Democratic Party’s ballot line. This is because U.S. laws make it incredibly difficult to start and maintain new ballot lines. What sets our candidates apart is their politics and how they campaign – by advancing popular progressive policies, identifying class enemies, and actively engaging potential voters. The power to change election laws will come from building a committed working class political base. Changing these laws to have a socialist ballot line is crucial for building a long-term constituency for our party.

Our party’s goal must be to build working class political power – to disrupt the party system, to force working class issues to the forefront in society, and to develop worker leaders who can run society. To do this, we must build our socialist party by recruiting more members, clarifying our politics, and consciously planning our

political interventions.

2. DSA is a party of socialism, with our eventual goal being the end of capitalism

DSA is a socialist party. Our goal is to end capitalism.

Capitalism is the economic system that forces the vast majority of people to work to support themselves and their families without much say in their work or the rest of their lives. A small elite of rich people and politicians profit off of this work and they use the wealth that they hoard to control our political system. This undemocratic political system is harnessed to enable imperialism around the world, arming genocidal regimes and undermining progressive movements.

In our waking lives, many of us are not that free to make decisions that really impact our futures – about how we carry out tasks at our jobs, or what profession to study for, or starting a family, or participating in sports, or socializing, or artistics pursuits. When workers win more time off with their union, they have won more freedom for themselves. We are struggling for freedom from exploitation, oppression, and domination.

We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. 

We are not liberals. We stand for the individual democratic rights that the liberal philosophical tradition championed, many of which were actually won by working classes. But we are organizing for the working class to rule society and to replace mainstream elites. We do not propose small tweaks to the system; we propose sweeping changes that would support workers in their everyday lives.

We are not just progressives. We do not hide our goal of ending capitalism and we name our class enemies. All workers have bosses, and many bosses are responsible for our lives being worse than they have to be, because of our working conditions

or because of our political system or both. We should always ally with anyone who supports the same policy as us, but make clear that we are socialists.

Socialism is the only path forward for survival of our species. Our domestic and international political systems must be reconstituted on the basis of socialism. Only a socialist vision of healthcare can respond effectively to global pandemics by ensuring equitable access to medicine and public health policy that prioritizes health over profit. Only a socialist vision of foreign policy that addresses global inequality can prevent endless wars. Only a socialist vision of global economic reconstruction can invest in the infrastructure overhaul necessary to fight climate change. Only a socialist vision of ending corruption can prevent the rich from undermining democracy and pursuing their own interests on our dime.

We are not a reenactment society or a debating club or a reading group. We study the history of the socialist movement to learn lessons for our present moment, but it is up to us to take on American capitalism. We treat each other respectfully so that we are welcoming to new members. We do not fight with each other over things that do not matter for building working class political power.

The role of the socialist party is to coordinate and strengthen working class political power. In particular, this coordination is needed where workers have the most to lose and the most to gain: their unions and in politics. Workers’ issues are always

missing in politics unless workers themselves get organized and speak up.

Because the working class is a majority of society, we know that we can end capitalism.

We are a worker-focused party. To increase our chances of success, we need to identify concrete forces in the existing social structure that can be harnessed towards fighting exploitation and oppression. There are three reasons why workers are central to this task. First, since workers suffer negative consequences under our current political and economic order, we can assume they have a minimal interest in fighting those effects. Second, given that under capitalist social property relations workers’ labor is required to produce goods and services, they are endowed with structural power to disrupt the operation of our economy and extract concessions from elites. Third, since workers constitute a majority of society, they form a reservoir of potential associational power that can also be directed towards achieving democratic changes to both the economy and political system.

We are a party of socialism whose starting point is workers, but whose goals ultimately point beyond particular worker interests and towards a broader vision of social justice and human emancipation.

3. Our most important medium-term goals are ending genocidal wars and preventing an acceleration of climate change

We identify two medium- and long-term trends that will condition the political terrain on which we struggle as socialists: massive wars between countries and peoples and climate change.

As the global hegemon that militarily guarantees much of the world’s economy, the U.S. government’s foreign interventions have consequences for political movements in many countries. Our country’s disproportionate defense-industrial complex also robs Americans of the basic social goods that many other countries enjoy. Many people’s coming of age in the U.S. is in response to endless war: the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, fighting in Syria, the constant provocation of Iran and North Korea, conflicts across Africa, the arming of Ukraine, the arming and full-throated support for Israel’s genocide of Palestinians.

It is also clear that world governments are currently failing to transition away from fossil fuels as an energy source – nevermind adapt to the coming effects of climate change. Each year sets new records for high temperatures, destructive storms, droughts, floods, and fires. Weather patterns and animal populations are shifting drastically, threatening the world we live in as we know it. We will continue to experience these climatic events even if capitalist governments cooperate to make

society renewable. It is no surprise that the environment is a cause that motivates so many, especially young people confronting their futures: the Green New Deal, Sunrise, ecosocialism.

The nature and scale of wars and climate change means that they cannot be comprehensively addressed without the highest levels of state power. This does not mean that we should exclude these issues from our campaigns at local and state levels. Because they will be constant features of our politics, we must always speak about them. But they will not always and everywhere be actionable goals.

The U.S. has only partially shifted its focus from the Middle East to “pivot to Asia.” Imperial rivalry between the U.S. and China promises to delay exactly the sort of government collaboration that is required to address climate change between the two powers most capable of having an impact.

The struggle for Palestinian national liberation will continue to polarize global opinion and affect domestic politics in countries around the world. Israel has already embroiled itself in a regional war and we should expect that it will lash out again.

Israel shares with the United States a goal of destabilizing and unseating the government of Iran.

These genocidal wars and climate change mean future political instability. Violence, conflicts over resources, and the mass movement of peoples within and across borders are fertile foundations for the far right. The far right will respond to these

dynamics by offering people fortresses: militarized borders, no mercy for migrants, and repression at home.

Israel has been isolated on the world stage, but they have still been able to wage their genocidal war because the U.S., the UK, Italy, India, and other U.S. allies supply them with weapons. American workers have the leverage to halt the Israeli war machine because it is dependent on U.S. By building a political movement of the working class that demands public goods, we can polarize our country’s politics away from endless war. This political movement of the working class has an interest in expanding democracy and reducing the power of elites, which is necessary to end unpopular wars.

Our approach must be centered on the perspective of the working class, not moralistic. Ending climate change and genocidal wars are not charitable issues; they affect people’s day to day lives. As long as the US continues to warmonger around the world, no one is safe from the consequences of endless war. People across the world, regardless of country, must cooperate to secure peace and build more sustainable infrastructure and lifestyles.

4. To end genocidal wars and fight climate change, DSA must be able to effectively force demands at the federal level

We live in a massive country with a fragmented, federal political system and frequent political conflicts between state, city, and federal governments.

This fragmentation makes political action difficult. There is a tradeoff that exists between the responsiveness of a level of government and the amount of control that level exerts over policy.

The responsiveness of local government, and the ability of DSA to elect representatives to city governments across the country, makes the prospect of remaining a local political force an attractive option for DSA. Can we build socialism city by city?

Unfortunately, our critical medium term goals of ending genocidal wars and fighting climate change require us to wield power at the federal level, where the majority of foreign policy and environmental policy is determined. We have to be able to effectively leverage political power to prevent military aid packages to Israel from being authorized in Congress. We have to be able to effectively leverage union power to prevent the shipment of weapons to Israel, as many unions around the world have demonstrated. We also have to be able to effectively leverage power at the national level to be able to democratize the energy sector and force a transition away from fossil fuels.

The power to be able to force these demands manifests itself through the coordinated political action of workers across the country at the ballot box and on the shopfloor. We do not currently have this power, as is demonstrated by our total inability to influence foreign policy or climate policy at the federal level.

To build this power, we have to organize campaigns around the issues that workers care about across the country, and offer socialism as a positive political solution to addressing these issues. These campaigns must clearly identify the root of these

issues as capitalism, and the undemocratic and corrupt political system that enables capitalism to generate these issues.

Chapters organizing around the same issues across the country can have a similar galvanizing effect as running candidates for the House of Representatives.

These campaigns cannot simply be rhetorical, through socialist media or speeches identifying issues. DSA must build campaigns that organize more and more workers into taking up the program and organizing for achievable goals around it at the ballot box and in workplaces.

We will focus these campaigns at the local level, but in a nationally coordinated manner to advance our program at the scale that we seek to build power at.

This coordination must be made explicit in the political realm to identify DSA as the vehicle for political action of the working class.

We should announce publicly that we are the political party that is seeking to save the working class hundreds of millions of dollars in rent across the country; we are the party that will implement safe staffing ratios for healthcare workers and their

patients; we are the party that will enfranchise everyone who lives in the United States; and we are the party that will disrupt weapons shipments to Israel to end endless wars.

6. Our party members in unions should organize mass-participation, solidaristic unions to connect our program to a working class base

Despite the popularity of universal healthcare, measures to bring down the cost of living, unions, and ending US militarism within the working class, the working class is not organized as a coherent political force today. This is reflected in the U.S.’s significantly lower voter turnout relative to other democracies and an increasing amount of working class support for Trump and the Republican Party. This presents a challenge to organizing a mass base for our party. Addressing this trend requires overcoming the gradual weakening of unions, which in the past have served as important vehicles for political education and mobilization. From Sweden to Bolivia, militant, left-wing unions have served as the basis for building and maintaining support for socialist governments.

Despite an uptick in militancy, unions in the US today are the weakest they have been in a century. They extract a lower percentage of income from the ruling class then they have in the past as density continues to decline

Our party has done an excellent job of building the labor movement, from supporting picket lines to getting jobs as union members and union staff. Our challenge is to build the labor movement and build support for our political program within the labor movement.

Unions are workers’ vehicles for fighting their bosses. These class-based institutions provide a framework for workers to secure workplace protections and better wages. When unions are led by socialists, and can effectively leverage labor power to win strong contracts, they can also advance reforms that go beyond the workplace, such as the UAW fighting to secure federal funding for battery plant organizing and calling for an arms embargo on Israel.

Unions alone cannot be the political vehicle for advancing a socialist program. Since union power requires mass participation at the level of workplaces and sectors, they are constrained by the need to represent their diverse membership. Unions exist to serve their members first, which can make pursuing class-wide politics a difficult task.

DSA members should build unions into mass participation, militant unions capable of extracting concessions from the bosses and growing our membership through new organizing. Only these mass participation, militant unions are capable of being a bedrock through which to advance our program.

DSA members should build solidaristic unions. This means connecting our union’s fights to the fights of other unions in our sectors, unions in other sectors, and to unorganized workers. Building a solidaristic movement is key to being able to reduce inequality in the working class and to build a coherent, fighting labor movement capable of taking on bosses and political enemies cohesively.

To advance our political goals within unions, we should organize around our program in issue-based committees that seek to build majority support for planks of our program.

Over the past year, we have seen countless “X Union for a Ceasefire” committees organize around politics within their unions. These committees have had varying degrees of success, especially when they do not pursue majority action and instead become self-selecting groups for activists. When they have turned outwards and sought to organize majorities around the demand for a ceasefire and then an arms embargo, they have been successful.

We should organize in our unions around not only our vision of ending the genocide, but also around universal healthcare, bringing down the cost of living, ending political corruption, and bringing unions to every worker. This organizing can take place in issue-based committees with concrete goals to move their union to take action on these issues.

In some unions, especially unions where DSA members are in leadership, this program will be adopted easily by existing leadership. In other unions, advancing the program may require members to run for leadership in order to advance it. These tactical decisions should be made sensitively, to avoid alienating potential allies in union leadership or endlessly pursuing action at the level of the rank-and-file without ever competing for a leadership position.

7. Our party must use clearly defined metrics to assess the successes and failures of our campaigns

DSA chapters have had successes organizing local ballot measures and issue-based campaigns. On their own, however, the success of these campaigns do not necessarily advance DSA’s long or medium-term strategy forward. We could pass rent control across one hundred cities in America without getting closer to building a mass socialist party that can wield federal power to end US militarism and fight climate change. To assess the value of these campaigns in advancing this long and medium-term strategy, we need clear metrics.

We argue that every campaign and its tactics should be assessed in terms of the following five metrics:

1. Will the campaign build DSA’s numbers by 30-40% in the next two years to get DSA to 100k members?

2. Will the campaign build DSA’s fundraising base to bring us closer to raising $15M in the next two years?

3. Will the campaign enable us to deliver a victory – a tangible material change – to our base in the next two years that DSA can take credit for?

4. Will the campaign enable us to build power that can be leveraged at a chokepoint in the economy (e.g. ports, logistics hubs, factories)?

5. Will the campaign result in the development of five new leaders who can be developed into future candidates for political or union office?

The specifics of which issue-based campaigns to run where cannot be overly prescriptive. In some cities, a plan to build campaigns around all of these issues may be viable, while in others, only one or two parts of the program may be viable to organize around. Each campaign should have a week-by-week plan to grow in numbers and funds raised.

Our ability to assess a tactic is dependent on adopting this structure rigorously and universally. It is impossible to decide that a tactic is successful or unsuccessful without a specific and shared understanding of what success means, and the means

with which to measure that success.

8. By organizing issue-based campaigns across the country in our DSA chapters and unions while building a powerful labor movement, we can build DSA and identify new leaders

Our goal is to organize around our minimal program through ballot measures and pressure campaigns that grow DSA back to its size at its peak (~100,000 members). By organizing around issues that matter to working people, we will build DSA

chapters as organizing hubs capable of taking on larger and larger campaigns.

Our ability to build a strong socialist party is also dependent on being able to identify and organize leaders. This concept is key to union organizing, where the number of leaders on a campaign is correlated with success in union elections. In the workplace organizing context, leaders are people with followers: people who have the trust of their coworkers and can move people to take action.

In our party, we have to be able to identify and develop leaders. Every successful socialist party has been able to cultivate leaders capable of clearly communicating socialist politics to masses of people. These people are often not the loudest or most

charismatic in the room, but are trusted by the people they organize alongside and crucially, by a constituency of a socialist party.

Currently, our party lacks these leaders in numbers. One of the key goals for organizing around the minimal program through ballot measure and pressure campaigns is to identify and develop more of these leaders.

Gabriel Sanchez and Kelsea Bond in Atlanta represent an excellent example of building candidates out of campaigns. As key activists in the Stop Cop City movement, Atlanta DSA members helped put the fight against Stop Cop City onto the ballot through a mass participation signature collection campaign that collected over 116,000 signatures in just a few months. Through anti-democratic maneuvering, the local government prevented citizens of Atlanta from voting on building this massive, wasteful police training facility with ties to militaries around the world. To fight back against this, Atlanta DSA ran a successful campaign to get Gabriel Sanchez elected to the Georgia State Assembly, and is now running a campaign to get Kelsea Bond elected to Atlanta City Council.

9. DSA should use our popular mandate to launch a campaign for five House seats and the presidential primary in 2028

Upon running successful local issue campaigns, DSA chapters will have achieved concrete and visible gains for working families in cities across the country. These wins could include reforms such as minimum nurse-to-patient staff ratios, rent control, and improvements to labor law that facilitate organizing on the shop floor.

By this stage, DSA chapters will have used these campaigns to accumulate substantial organizing experience, increased membership back up to 100k, developed extensive lists of voters, built the capacity to fundraise millions of dollars, and identified promising leaders who have the potential to run on a slate for Congress.

Rather than endorsing candidates who are not DSA members, we will identify leaders from our local issue campaigns to run for Congress. These candidates will be trained by DSA and we will write a shared platform for these candidates based on our minimal program. This approach is analogous to that of the Belgian Worker’s Party (PTB-PVDA), which has effectively leveraged power at the local, regional and federal scale since their resurgence. In the PTB-PVDA, candidates are selected from local issue-based campaigns and trained by the party to effectively communicate politics to a working class base.

Running DSA leaders for Congress is a key test of our ability to build federal power. By electing socialists to Congress, we can leverage our federal power to end the genocide in Palestine and fight back against an acceleration of climate change.

The Neighbor to Neighbor campaign of the 1980s is an excellent example of what is possible with this approach. From 1986 to 1988, over a hundred organizers, many from the United Farm Workers, were deployed with the Neighbor to Neighbor campaign to support candidates who were willing to vote against military aid to the Contras in eighteen congressional districts. This campaign was successful, and in 1988, during a Reagan administration, Congress voted 219-211 to end military funding to the Contras. This campaign lays out an excellent template for DSA to follow for building federal power.

Conclusion

After a year of the Biden regime arming, funding, and supporting Israel’s genocide in Gaza, Trump is now in office, and is seeking to implement a wide range of policies to restrict democratic rights, initiate mass deportations, and attack publically

funded institutions. At the world stage, politics hangs in a delicate balance, with the potential for an outbreak of war and nuclear annihilation growing larger every day. No one is coming to save us – we could lose whatever minimal democratic rights we currently have at home and allow our government to destroy the world through war. But we should remember that a party of tens of thousands of socialists organizing in politics would have seemed impossible just ten years ago. By organizing around a minimal program with issue-based campaigns, we have the ability to build a massive base of support that can win power at the federal scale for a socialist party committed to not just preparing for climate change and putting a stop to endless

wars, but to the working class taking power.