IN THE PAST MONTH, we have seen the devastation the second Trump administration has wrought. Trump has diverted funds to increase immigration enforcement and encouraged even greater cruelty towards migrants. He plans to ethnically cleanse Gaza. Trump and Musk’s coup of the federal government, including arbitrarily shutting down government agencies and laying off federal workers en masse, has been nothing short of devastating to the people of the DMV.
And yet despite all this, the Democratic party seems almost deliberately incapable of substantively opposing Trump’s will and some have even called for embracing some of the most horrific of Trump’s plans. There are many theories as to how this happened —the Democrats are a centrist party too beholden to norms, the American voter has become increasingly right wing, social media has further polarized the populace. And it isn’t just Democrats and liberals, us fellow socialists have also failed to move the country in our direction as well.
Since the 2016 Democratic primary in which Bernie Sanders emerged as a national political figure and uttered the words “Democratic Socialist,” people have joined DSA in hopes of changing this. The solution for years, in DSA, has been to primary establishment Democrats and put up our own candidates to push for real, working-class progressive policies. To some extent, this has been successful but limited in both the gains made by DSA elected officials and the growth of the organization as a result of it. We still have not stopped the genocide in Palestine. We are as far away from universal healthcare as when the policy was anchored by Sanders’ first presidential campaign over a decade ago. Climate change continues unabated.
As a member of DSA’s Communist Caucus, I would like to share our analysis of what the current moment's underlying problem is and how that analysis can apply to our chapter's work.
I believe the core problem to our lack of success is overcoming “proletarian disorganization.”
A concept developed by the Communist Caucus, proletarian disorganization refers to our loss of working class institutions and movements that could challenge the status quo and advance our class interests. Before the 1970s, the working class in the US were part of and participated in organizations like labor unions and left-wing civic organizations. But over 50 years of capital strikes, capital flight, and neoliberal policies have decimated these organizations. At its height, union membership in the US was 33%, now it is less than 10% and the number keeps on dropping year after year.
These groups helped workers organize collectively to fight against exploitation and injustice, but workers are divided and more focused on individual survival now that these institutions have been weakened or disappeared. This has left many of us without an instinct to organize or act collectively. Think about how you or others around you behave at work. What do you do if you have a bad boss or poor working conditions? Is your immediate response to organize with your co-workers? Do you reach out to a labor union or march on your boss with demands for improved working conditions? Do you take actions to improve your workplace?
Or do you open your laptop and start sending out job applications? Do you start “networking” with other professionals instead in the hopes that you find a different workplace that treats you better?
When we act individually, we tend to do so in all spaces of our lives. We move if we have a bad landlord, we share a GoFundMe for a family in Palestine, and we vote in elections every two or four years. These actions may alleviate the problem for us temporarily, but rarely address its source. This is not to say that workers don’t want unions. In fact, studies have shown that nearly half of all workers would vote to unionize their workplace if they could, but along with legal and political barriers, we have largely lost our habit of acting collectively.
This type of inaction is even more pronounced among the “professional class” that makes up the majority of our chapter’s membership. White-collar workers — while still suffering the under exploitation of capitalism — experience this exploitation to a smaller degree than our working class comrades in the area who work in construction and service work. Professionals often have more opportunities to improve their salaries by switching jobs; they have organizations that encourage networking as a way to get ahead; and they have staff who focus on lobbying the government for better conditions for their profession. These are not opportunities that most of our working class comrades of color often have — their schedules are not as fixed, their pay is much lower, and they regularly need to take on more than one job to keep their heads above water.
As comrade Sam G points out in his excellent article on our chapter’s professionalism problem, these differences can keep us disorganized. Our young, white-collar bubble leads to a disconnect with the area’s working class that not only keeps them from being able to participate in DSA, but also keeps us from being able to make common cause with them as workers. By focusing on rebuilding working-class organizations, we can bridge these differences.
Proletarian Disorganization and Its Impact on the Left Today
There are three main arenas in which proletarian disorganization presents itself as a major challenge in our present political moment—electoral politics, social ruptures, and socialist organization.
Electoral Politics
Since 2016, DSA’s electoral strategy has been based on the Bernie Sanders model of running socialist candidates and challenging the Democratic Party through primaries. We won major victories—electing Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC), Rashida Tlaib, Ilhan Omar, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman to Congress. This doesn’t even begin to include the dozens of socialists that have been elected to state and local governments across the country. Locally, we have successfully elected DC Council members Janeese Lewis George (JLG) and Zachary Parker, Maryland State Delegate Gabe Acevero, and Prince George’s County Council member Shayla Adams-Stafford. Nevertheless, this model has shown limitations.
The DSA's current electoral strategy rests on four assumptions:
Regrettably, the past decade has shown these assumptions to rarely hold true. The idea that a small group of elected socialists could push through major reforms and spark class organization has not been realized. The first challenge being that major reforms socialists fought for were not passed—police budgets have increased, there is no universal healthcare, housing has become more expensive, and wages remain stagnant.
Furthermore, the Democratic Party has shown itself to be actively hostile to the Left. The party closed ranks around Joe Biden in 2020 to ensure that he won the primary against Bernie Sanders. They have spent millions of dollars to protect centrist incumbents (e.g., Henry Cuellar and Byron Brown) or to primary a progressive and replace them with a centrist (e.g., Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush). Those who remain are often forced to compromise on their radical proposals or forced to take votes that run against socialist principles. Both JLG and Zachary Parker voted in support of the DC “Crimnibus” bill that expanded repressive policing measures, even as they advocate for better pay, social housing, childcare, and DC autonomy.
In both of these instances, the lack of an organized working class prevented structural reforms and the socialist takeover of the Democratic Party. With the Democratic Party even further entrenched in the neoliberal bog, it could only move slowly toward any reform—large investment in green energy, but offset by an even larger investment in fossil fuel extraction on public land; student loan forgiveness, but only for a tiny group of people and easily overturned by the Supreme Court. With a working class playing no role in these reforms, and the reforms being so marginal, only the most politically engaged individuals even knew what the Biden administration had even done. Come 2024, they only had one line for their critics on the left, “Look at all the amazing things we’ve done for you! Now be grateful and shut up and vote!” Is it any wonder that the GOP was able to take advantage of people’s anger at the state of the country?
Bernie Sanders’ unique situation allowed him to navigate some of these problems, but that moment is over. Attempting to repeat his success without understanding the unique conditions that allowed it is a mistake.
Social Ruptures and Disorganization
Social ruptures—moments of intense, widespread discontent like riots, uprisings, or mass protests—can undoubtedly shake the political landscape. These ruptures are often unpredictable, and can sometimes open new possibilities. The 2016 election, while not considered an uprising, still posed a legitimacy crisis to the liberal order. Unfortunately, a disorganized working class led instead to the rise of the far right.
In 2020, we saw the George Floyd uprisings and the largest protest movement in the history of the US. While the movement had moments of extreme militancy and grassroots energy, much of its political direction ended up being shaped by liberal activists and institutional forces. Instead of pushing for radical systemic change, the movement was captured and funneled into demands for reform, representation, and symbolic changes within state institutions, including police reform. While some socialist abolitionist groups connected with the movement, the largest influence came from liberal forces who managed to turn the movement into a platform for electoralism and institutional reform. This was the time when “DEI” entered the corporate lexicon, all sorts of corporate brands were rushing to proclaim “Black Lives Matter,” and the Democrats used the uprising to push for greater police funding to expand “implicit bias training” and a “bad actors registry.” And now in Trump’s second term, many of these “gains” are being rolled back anyway.
This has organizational implications for DSA as well. DSA sees its membership swell in times of social ruptures — it was an organization with only a few thousand members prior to 2016. We saw these swells after the two Bernie campaigns, Trump’s elections, and the genocide in Palestine, only to struggle to maintain those membership numbers after the moment of crisis is over. Both the national organization and local chapters have worked to address this challenge, with varying levels of success.
The crucial lesson here is that any moment of rupture enables political change, but to move in the direction of overthrowing the capitalist system requires an organized working class to exist, so that they can be mobilized to exploit that moment. To make such a transformation, organized social forces are required. But this kind of organization has to be built before a rupture occurs, not in the heat of the moment when the energy of rebellion is already dissipating. The absence of a robust, organized working class meant that when social rupture did occur, it could be easily redirected or contained by political forces with more strategic direction. I believe that by engaging the working class in long-term struggle and patiently, but deliberately building proletarian organizations, we can reverse this trend and sustain our membership numbers.
Socialist Organization
Without an organized working class, socialist organizations like DSA run the risk of being co-opted by liberal elites who can divert more of our work into political advocacy — focused on building relationships with capitalist elected officials to support tepid reforms. This can take the form of both direct advocacy as DSA, or allowing local nonprofits to lead on social issues. By doing so, we can lose our own credibility as socialists who are connected to the working class.
In stark contrast, but equally ineffective, some socialist groups will try to focus on offering “revolutionary leadership” during moments of struggle. This might mean attempting to lead isolated protests, or turning up and flyering at a picket line asking workers to join the socialist movement without actually connecting to their struggles. This can also take the form of being more focused on building the right “structure” of an organization or developing the correct “lines” as DSA as a way to avoid having to organize the working class. While developing the right ideas and structures is important for a socialist organization, doing so without connection to the broader working class can lead to the same disconnect that the professional bubble creates, as described above.
In each case, the lack of working-class organization means that these actions are often disconnected from each other. The broader disorganization makes it difficult for these moments to build into sustained, coordinated action.
The task before us today is clear: building proletarian organization that can serve as a vehicle for class struggle and act as a foundation for both revolutionary and reformist politics. To do so requires an understanding of the historical shifts in labor, housing, incarceration, and broader social conditions that have shaped the current landscape of class struggle.
While mass proletarian institutions, like unions and tenant associations, are essential for building power, it’s crucial to recognize that these organizations cannot simply be resurrected in the same form they existed in the past. The conditions of labor and life have fundamentally changed, and the working class today faces new contradictions and challenges that require fresh approaches to organization and struggle.
To build a powerful labor movement today, we must first reverse the decades-long decline of unionism, pushing for militant labor organizing in both established unions and new forms of labor organization. The goal is not merely to reassert traditional forms of unionism, but to adapt to the evolving conditions of work, ensuring that unions can fight effectively within the modern, often precarious, economy. DSA and the United Electrical, Radio and Machine Workers of America (UE) project — the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) — is a great example of this type of flexible organizing that attempts to respond to these evolving work conditions and needs. Metro DC DSA is currently establishing a local EWOC that can more immediately connect with the working class in the DMV.
Another important area for proletarian organization is the tenant unionist movement. With more workers trapped in perpetual tenancy, building tenant unions offers a powerful way to organize against rent extraction and real estate-driven accumulation. The tenant movement is still in its formative stages, but with sustained support and strategic direction from socialists and communists, it has the potential to become a significant site of proletarian struggle. As housing and the real estate market continue to dominate people's lives, the tenant movement could grow into a key front in the battle for working-class power. You can already see examples of this in our own chapter’s tenant organizing project, Stomp Out Slumlords.
These are not the only ways to rebuild proletarian organizations. Other campaigns like No Appetite for Apartheid are exploring ways to build Palestinian solidarity by connecting with local businesses and workers to create Israeli boycott zones.
When the working class is organized in dense, militant institutions, the strategic possibilities multiply. Reform becomes a real, achievable goal when workers have the capacity to fight for it—and revolutionary change becomes possible when this capacity is strong enough to confront and transform the capitalist system.
In this way, reform and revolution are not mutually exclusive but can become complementary forces in the struggle. Reforms may be a stepping stone towards revolutionary change, and revolutionary organizing can strengthen the political will of the working class to win reforms. A well-organized proletariat can push forward reforms that, in turn, generate the confidence and power needed to take more radical steps toward transformation.
Rebuilding proletarian power will not be easy. Like a person in physical therapy learning to use their legs again, we have been separated from our rich history of proletarian organization for decades and it will take time to develop a strong organizing muscle again.
It will require humility and sustained effort to build the infrastructure for class struggle. But it is the only way forward now. As organizing begins, the class struggle will transform in new and powerful ways. The working class, when organized, can change the balance of power and build the foundation for a socialist future.
The historical opportunity is still available to us, but it will require real, focused action. The time for rebuilding the left is now, and the first step is clear: we must begin by organizing the proletariat. Only through such reorganization can we hope to unlock the potential for both reform and revolution in the future. Our chapter’s local Communist Caucus cadre is focused on building these proletarian organizations and all of our members are involved in labor and tenant organizing.
If you are interested in learning more about proletarian disorganization or getting involved with the caucus, feel free to contact Andrew C (he/him) in Slack or ask Washington Socialist to connect you to the author via email at washingtonsocialist@mdcdsa.org
