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3. Winning an election isn’t the same thing as winning power.
4. They’ll do everything to stop us.
each new policy or proposal would be systematically smeared, with eager help from corporate Democrats.
6. We must move quickly from social democracy to democratic socialism.
In other words, the social-democratic compromise is inherently unstable, and we thus need to figure a way to advance rather than retreat in the face of that instability.
Class-struggle social democracy, then, isn’t a foe of democratic socialism—the road to the latter runs through the former.
Our task is formidable. Democratic socialists must secure decisive majorities in legislatures while winning hegemony in the unions. Then our organizations must be willing to flex their social power in the form of mass mobilizations and political strikes to counter the structural power of capital and ensure that our leaders choose confrontation over accommodation with elites. This is the sole way we’ll not only make our reforms durable but break with capitalism entirely and bring about a world that values people over profit.
7. We need socialists.
Even a relatively small organization like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), something far short of a mass party with working-class roots, shows the disruptive role we can play if we embed our efforts within the class.
That’s why training a new generation of nonsectarian socialist organizers is so important.
8. The working class has changed over the past hundred fifty years—but not as much as we think.
Those working people are as different and divided as ever, yet they still have the potential to rattle the system and win real gains. We simply cannot have an emancipatory politics within capitalism that doesn’t revolve around the class whose labor makes the system run.
9. Socialists must embed themselves in working-class struggles.
These strikes won national attention and public sympathy.
By going on strike, educators not only demonstrated their own strength as political actors but developed a political consciousness and a grassroots infrastructure.
10. It is not enough to work with unions for progressive change. We must wage democratic battles within them.
In short: we need to do more than defend existing unions from attacks from the Right.
Our goal must be to transform them into vehicles of a more expansive, democratic unionism through facilitating membership engagement and creating structures that make leaderships more accountable.
11. A loose network of leftists and rank-and-file workers isn’t enough. We need a political party.
12. We need to take into account American particularities.
These are not democratic institutions but antidemocratic machines that provide well-oiled pathways to political power while stymieing challenges from below.
don’t get a vote when it comes to my own party’s political platform.
13. We need to democratize our political institutions.
Abolishing the Electoral College and pushing toward more proportional voting systems that encourage participation must be immediate demands.
14. Our politics must be universalist.
Without the bedrock of a class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individual qualms can be addressed but structural inequalities cannot.
Socialists also need to argue against the idea that racism and sexism are innate and that people’s consciousness won’t change through struggle.
Socialists don’t reject fights against oppression but instead try to bring them into a broader workers’ movement.
life. A democratic class politics is the best way to unite people against our common opponent and win the type of change that will help the most marginalized, all while engaging in a far longer campaign against oppression rooted in race, gender, sexuality, and more.
15. History matters.
Still, socialists need to understand the complexity of nature and the
unintended consequences of certain attempts to “master” it.
