Statement on the 2025 DSA Convention
“I envy you. You North Americans are very lucky. You are fighting the most important fight of all. You live in the belly of the beast.” — Che Guevara
We have a tremendous opportunity, as the largest socialist organization inside the United States, to work against imperialist power relations. However, DSA is always at risk — like many Western political projects before it — of drifting into soft complicity with imperialism. The defining issue we face as an organization is how to organize within the imperial core, and it is very important to take a sober look at why there have been failures of various left projects before ours. We need to be cautious about solidifying some of the troubling tendencies that have always been present inside the Western left, and seriously grapple with the strategy of reformists and opportunists — chiefly inside the Democratic party but also within our own ranks — of accepting existing social relations (imperialism) as a “golden goose” that can be used to redistribute resources through “social democratic” policies. 21st Century Socialism Caucus was founded, in part, to highlight this very dangerous tendency and to break these patterns.
At this year’s convention, we fully support the Springs of Revolution slate and platform. Anti-imperialism is our guiding principle, and the Springs of Revolution program is critically important to correctly understanding the world as it is now and our political opportunities to organize within the “belly of the beast.” In order to more fully explain our positions for this year’s convention, this document provides further analysis of why we are prioritizing specific resolutions and issues.
Organizing for Palestine
At this year’s convention, we support resolutions that would affirm DSA’s support for the people of Palestine (R01-A01 at p.167), fight against Zionist colonialism (R22 at p.239), and commit the organization to working with labor organizations to cut off material aid to the State of Israel (R42-A01 at p.309). Opposition to the genocide is not just a matter of rhetoric, but requires correct analysis of the problem and tangible action to end the genocide.
Among other things, these resolutions would clarify that the people of Palestine have the “right to resist their occupiers, by all available means, including armed struggle.” For too long, the organization and its elected representatives have been bogged down in endless discussions regarding the scope of Palestine’s legal right to defend itself. This should not be the case, because Palestine’s right to self-defense is already clearly recognized under international law. The 1979 United Nations General Assembly resolution 34/44 provides that international law:
Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial and alien domination and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.
Reaffirms the inalienable right of the peoples of Namibia and Zimbabwe, of the Palestinian people and of all peoples under colonial and alien domination to self-determination, national independence, territorial integrity, and national unity and sovereignty without external interference.
Similarly, the 1983 United Nations General Assembly resolution 38/17 states that international law “Reaffirms the legitimacy of the struggle of peoples for their independence, territorial integrity, national unity and liberation from colonial domination, apartheid and foreign occupation by all available means, including armed struggle.”
It is appropriate and necessary that DSA recognize Palestine’s legal right to armed resistance against the genocidal state of Israel. It is important to clarify this because the legal right to self-defense has been misrepresented and denied by elected officials, and muted by various levels of DSA leadership. For instance, Rep. Alexandria Ocasio Cortez has repeatedly condemned acts of armed self-defense by the people of Palestine, and instead stated in an April 20, 2024 press release that she “believe[s] strongly in Israel’s right to self-defense,” and therefore “support[s] strengthening the Iron Dome” weapons system of the genocidal state of Israel. Likewise, Sen. Bernie Sanders has repeatedly condemned acts of armed self-defense by the people of Palestine, while also arguing on the floor of Congress that “I support the Iron Dome, to protect Israeli civilians.” This is precisely backwards, materially supporting the so-called “self-defense” of the aggressors rather than the victims of aggression.¹
On July 19, 2025, DSA appropriately confirmed the organization’s total opposition to “any and all funding to Israel as it continues its genocide,” including the “Iron Dome” funding that has been supported by Rep. Ocasio Cortez and Sen. Sanders. Standing in opposition, Rep. Rashida Tlaib — together with allied Reps. Ilhan Omar, Summer Lee, and Al Green — appropriately voted to cut this military money to Israel. We view this year’s 2025 convention as the appropriate forum to further clarify the organization’s recognition of Palestine’s legal right to armed resistance against the genocidal State of Israel. Recognizing this legal right, and rejecting the tired approach by elected officials of “condemning both sides” in this struggle, is very necessary if we want to move forward. Moreover, it is important to clarify that individuals who have “knowingly provided material aid to Israel” will be deemed to be “in substantial disagreement with DSAʼs principles and policies.”
In addition to clarifying the organization’s position on the legal right to self-defense, we fully support resolutions that would re-orient DSA toward working with unions to disrupt the supply of military aid to the genocidal state of Israel. In July 2024, a group of labor unions (AFA, APWU, IUPAT, SEIU, UAW, UE, and NEA) jointly called on President Biden “to immediately halt all military aid to Israel.” We can further build on these demands, and work to materially cut off military aid to the genocidal state of Israel, if we commit to it as an organization. The International Court of Justice (ICJ) has found, and the UN General Assembly (UNGA) affirmed, that all states are obliged to cut off all military and economic support for the state of Israel’s genocide.
Fighting for Palestine will require taking risks and being bold. We acknowledge that some of the elected officials associated with DSA might not want to recognize that Palestine — like Yemen and Iran — has the legal right to physically resist the genocide, and some in our organization might be more timid on this issue. However, if we are allowing the careerist ambitions of some elected officials to drive the conversation, then we will endlessly find ourselves asked to clarify how much we “condemn” the people who are fighting back for their own survival. At this year’s convention, we can clarify that we are uninterested in those conversations and concentrate our work on materially ending the genocide.
Abolishing ICE
The issues of imperialism and immigration control are closely intertwined. We currently live in a world where capital moves freely across borders (for the most part), but labor does not. The United States uses its powers to sanction and abuse the populations of other countries, benefitting from devalued sources of labor abroad and exploiting so-called “illegal” immigrants within its own borders (using their legal status as a weapon to suppress wage demands). The Democratic Party — with the electoral support in 2024 of some DSA-affiliated elected officials — has taken an approach of leaning into the issue of border imperialism, with the official DNC platform critiquing Donald Trump for being insufficiently harsh on the issue of immigration.² The imperial core — represented clearly by both the Democratic and Republican parties — always gravitates toward projecting imperialism abroad while offering some “rewards” to those living inside the United States. This year’s DSA convention gives us the opportunity to decisively reject this type of “reformist” approach.
The DSA platform already appropriately calls to “demilitarize the border and end all immigrant detention and abolish ICE.” At this year’s convention, we support a resolution (R26 at p.256) to commit the organization to further fighting against ICE. In recent years, the Democratic Party and its supporters — particularly under the Biden/Harris administration and 2024 presidential campaign — have muted opposition to ICE and embraced an approach of complicity with the growing movement towards fascism. They have hoped that they would not need to fight against this growing tendency, but could instead wait for it to get worse and then count on the Western left — including DSA and its affiliated elected officials — to rally under the Democratic Party’s banner in the 2028 Presidential election as the “lesser evil” (or under some “united front” theory that puts the Democratic Party in a position of leadership). This is not our approach.
This year’s resolution will clarify that the racial capitalism embraced by both political parties is the primary motivator for the currently escalating fascism both in the United States and globally. We can commit ourselves to militant organizing against these growing tendencies, developing strategies to protect targeted communities, supporting “sanctuary cities” against attacks from both political parties, and engaging in political education. This work is necessary and must become an important part of the DSA program if we are going to decisively break with the reformist tendencies inside the “belly of the beast.”
Internal Structure
We strongly oppose a resolution (R25 at p.254) that would — in an echo of the strategy of Michael Harrington — commit DSA to the so-called “democratic road to socialism.” This resolution falls into the trap of overestimating the power of bourgeois elections within the United States, and fails to acknowledge that electoral politics is only one aspect of DSA’s approach.
The most significant Marxist leaders of the past century have had deep and important class analyses underlying their strategies. Unfortunately, this year’s proposed resolution lacks any kind of deep analysis of the class structures we face in the United States (an imperial superpower) today. It fails to grapple with the economic structure of the United States and its various populations (the finance capitalists, the service sector workers, the shrinking industrial sector, the precarious migrant workers, the landlord class, the bureaucrats, etc.). It likewise fails to grapple with the problems caused by imperialist transfers of wealth, which have been used to bribe and deradicalize segments of the working class. Instead, this resolution simplisitically offers that our movement needs to be “popular” and organize a coalition of “working class” groups to win more and more elections over some unspecified time period. The resolution also condescends to what it calls “the narrow swathe of the already radicalized” (presumably a reference to Marxists), suggesting instead a formation where DSA subsumes itself into a broader “coalition” (presumably under the leadership of more traditional Democrats and nonprofits).
The phrase “democratic road to socialism” is pregnant with other implications. It is essentially a re-hash of the older Michael Harrington form of “democratic socialism,” which led the organization down the path of Western chauvinism and complicity with the Democratic Party under a failed strategy of “realignment.” We cannot repeat those patterns. We need to grow up as an organization.
Winning elections is not enough to achieve socialism. Socialism requires a much deeper changing of society. We cannot forget that certain unelected institutions hold great power and will resist structural reforms. We have seen the failures of Spain’s popular front government and Salvador Allende’s socialist government in Chile when they were violently overthrown in military coups. Likewise, we have seen the United States support violent right-wing coup attempts by the deposed classes in Venezuela even after the Partido Socialista Unido de Venezuela (PSUV) repeatedly won elections. No ruling class willingly surrenders its privileges and power, which is why Marx and Engels emphasized the “dictatorship of the proletariat” in their analysis of revolutionary change. Of course, we need to find our own path within our own concrete circumstances inside the United States, and can’t simply follow a formula. However, that is all the more reason to reject the inadequate formula provided by the so-called “democratic road to socialism” that we know has historically been a failure. Of course, there have been positive examples like the Movimiento de Regeneración Nacional (Morena) in Mexico, and more complicated examples like the Movimiento al Socialismo (MAS) in Bolivia, but there is always severe institutional backlash when these political parties threaten certain class interests, and there is always much more to contend with than simple electoralism.
International Solidarity
We have seen much encouraging progress from the organization over the years. DSA wisely chose to leave the so-called “Socialist International” (a terrible Euro-centric organization with a terrible anti-Communist history) in 2017, and has repeatedly rejected proposed resolutions that would have obscured or downplayed the extraction of wealth from the Global South. It is encouraging to see that some of the past resolutions on this topic have not been reintroduced, and that some of the proposed resolutions and amendments this year have explicitly acknowledged the social role that imperialism plays in the present day.
At the same time, various resolutions and amendments offered attempt — often in subtle language — to undermine this growing anti-imperialist consensus within DSA. This includes repackaging of resolutions that previously failed to pass. For instance, this year there is a broadly-worded proposal (CR02-A02 at p.72–74) stating that DSA “should not reflexively and uncritically celebrate” certain (unnamed) entities or countries just “because of their opposition to United States imperialism.” The authors don’t give any examples of who they have in mind, or reckon with how opposition to anti-imperialist forces could strengthen imperialism, but instead provide some very general guidance that DSA should always oppose entities that stand in the way of “democratic rights” or restrict the formation of “political organizations.”
The pretext of protecting “democratic rights” and “political organization” has a dirty history within DSA and the Western left. This is essentially the same formulation that DSA’s founder Michael Harington used to criticize the Vietnamese people who were fighting against U.S. aggression, and the formulation that the Western left (including DSA-backed elected officials) used for “condemning” Palestinians fighting for their freedom. Of course, it’s fine to have a nuanced viewpoint of historical events and contemporary actors. We’re certainly not saying — as the caricature offered by these resolutions’ authors suggests — that every “nominally” socialist or communist authority should be above criticism or beyond discussion. However, an open-ended invitation to organize with unnamed groups that are opposing socialist governments (the authors presumably have China, Cuba, and Venezuela in mind) is a terrible idea. This resolution will give cover to bad-faith actors who will be able to point to the resolution in order to justify destructive work.
It also is worth emphasizing that various non-socialist countries and organizations have stood up to the genocidal state of Israel. These include Yemen, Iran, Syria, and Lebanon. This proposed resolution would effectively say that it’s not appropriate to celebrate their “opposition to United States imperialism” unless we water down those comments with some form of “criticism.” That kind of formula, however, simply doesn’t work. The authors of this resolution apparently don’t want power so much as to endlessly critique the imperfect actors who are standing up to United States imperialism. We need to seriously reckon, however, with the very real impacts of endlessly critiquing those who stand against U.S. imperialism. Are we strengthening U.S. imperialism by manufacturing consent against anti-imperialist forces? These are important and nuanced discussions. We cannot simply write them off in one fell swoop with this resolution.
In addition, we have seen how “atrocity propaganda” is often used as a tool, to manufacture horror stories about socialist and communist organizations and then launder criticisms through Western backed NGOs to make the argument that certain entities don’t respect “democratic” or “political” rights. We should not leave our organization an open-ended invitation to fall for this tired trick.
Finally, this proposed resolution would “re-affirm [] that the NPC has the authority to exert political oversight over the IC, and make final determinations about any statements or policy positions developed by the IC.” There is a history of the NPC watering down the correct positions put forward by the IC and other organizational bodies in the past. This most notably came to a head when the independent BDS working group was dissolved by a prior NPC due to its justified criticism of former Rep. Jamaal Bowman’s material support for the genocidal state of Israel. The trend in recent years has been that the NPC would intervene to water down and mute statements of the IC, and this resolution would further sanction these harmful interventions.
The proposed amendment to this resolution (CR02-A01, formerly R28, at p.68) is likewise problematic. This amendment does have some positive aspects, including language that prioritizes anti-imperialism within the United States, reiterates the organization’s opposition to the proxy war in Ukraine, and condemns the votes by certain elected officials like Rep. Ocasio Cortez to expand the NATO military alliance. However, much like the resolution itself, this amendment vaguely rejects “uncritical diplomatic support” for (unnamed) socialist formations overseas and urges DSA to participate in some kind of “struggle of the working class against self-serving bureaucratic layers within these organizations.” It’s not clear what exactly the author is referencing here (which is a big problem in itself), but it appears to be a veiled criticism of Cuba. The amendment also suggests a “big tent” approach towards other countries in a potentially harmful open-ended commitment.
Context matters. Sizable segments of DSA have advocated for weapons shipments to Ukraine, embraced anti-China propaganda, denounced Venezuela, and bent over backwards to add “nuanced” critiques (usually cloaked as “pro-democracy” or “anti-violence”) to those who seek to use force against imperialism in Palestine and the Caribbean. We find these proposals misguided and rooted in the kind of vague “idealism” used by individuals like Michael Harrington in the past to justify harmful positions. DSA is an independent organization that can provide specific analyses of specific world situations, but we cannot pry the door open for the problematic, bad-faith Western left critiques of the past. International solidarity work is incredibly important to our organization. We can’t feed the “belly of the beast” with more of what it needs to sustain itself. We need to fight our way out.
¹ This type of rhetoric is, sadly, reflective of the dark days of DSA under Zionist Michael Harrington. A rabid supporter of Israeli’s acts of aggression, Harrington took the position that “the US should supply Israel with the necessities for defending itself,” and generally viewed his role as trying to keep the socialist left “pro-Israel.” Much like his atrocious position on Vietnam, Harrington utterly failed to view the role of imperialism and colonialism as it was unfolding in this context. DSA as an organization cannot go back to this kind of so-called “democratic socialism.”
² The 2021-24 Biden administration managed to deport more people than the 2017-20 Trump administration. Failed presidential candidate Kamala Harris — who was supported by both Rep. Ocasio-Cortez and Sen. Sanders — infamously gave a speech to the people of Guatemala, where she warned: “Do not come. Do not come.” It is clear that the Democratic Party has taken an anti-immigration stance, which cannot be ignored or quietly accepted as part of an “alliance.”