In July, over twenty people, new to DSA, fit themselves snugly in Chicago DSA’s chapter office, to attend an orientation called “The Socialist Program.” They were given a printed copy of DSA’s 2024 program, Workers Deserve More (WDM) to discuss together. According to Chicago DSA Co-chair Sean Duffy, participants excitedly talked over the strategy of revolutionary reforms and socialist vision WDM outlines, how closely it tracks with their beliefs, and how easy it is to read.
Chicago DSA plans to host “The Socialist Program” monthly going forward, and since WDM’s launch the chapter has distributed over 1,000 pamphlets and program-inspired palmcards at chapter town halls, the 2024 Democratic National Convention, and elsewhere. “Probably the most rewarding question is ‘how would the policies in the program impact your life?’” Sean says. “We talk a lot about all that we’re fighting against in DSA, but it is really refreshing to talk about the positive vision of the world we’re fighting for.”
We put forward “R34: Workers Deserve More, Forever” for the upcoming DSA National Convention to build upon WDM’s ongoing successes, inspired by the creative ways that chapters like Chicago DSA have used it in their organizing. “Workers Deserve More, Forever” outlines a practical and democratic path to revise and build on our existing WDM document to build a coherent and continuous program for DSA.
The Role of a Party Program
Party programs serve three major purposes:
- Declare party principles by providing a moral critique of the existing system and presenting an alternative vision of society.
- Conduct an analysis of the period we’re living in and outline the strategy and tactics needed to achieve our vision and principles.
- Provide common reference materials for campaigns across all the party’s fields of action.
A party’s program should provide a shared language for external political messaging and provide a basis for the membership’s political education with coherent language, a theory of change, and a set of shared goals. It should arm its members to fight for socialism across shifting political terrains and sites of struggle.
There are dozens of examples of socialist political programs. Perhaps the most canonical program (excluding the Communist Manifesto) was the Erfurt Program, published in 1891, was the primary organizing document for the German Social Democrats before World War I. It inspired other mass workers’ parties to adopt similar programs. In 2017, the UK Labour Party’s For the Many Manifesto under Jeremy Corbyn’s leadership played a similar organizing role, pointing out a new, even if short-lived, direction for the party. Around 28% of Labour voters in 2017 cited the party manifesto — which called for increased taxes on the wealthy, an expansion of social services and pensions, and the renationalization of key services like water, energy, mail, and rail — as the main reason they voted for Labour.
None of DSA’s numerous program-like documents has ever served a similar function. DSA’s Constitution has a “Purpose” section, which is a good statement of basic principles but is vague and is a poor substitute for an outward-facing document. DSA’s 2012 Where We Stand is more substantive, but it lacks a concrete policy platform. In 2020, the DSA for Bernie campaign provided a minimal program that turned Bernie’s main policy planks into a number of useful slogans. We plastered them on all of our literature, and created vivid iconography that we used on flyers, posters, and buttons. But after the end of Bernie’s campaign it lost its usefulness.
At the 2021 convention, DSA finally drafted and adopted our own formal political platform. Unfortunately, our platform suffers from a number of problems. Unlike the succinct, readable, but still vague Where We Stand statement and our constitution’s purpose section, the platform is excessively detailed (it runs over 9,000 words long) and it is an unwieldy list of all sorts of minimal and maximal demands. Most DSA members would likely support the majority of its contents if polled one by one. But a party program should not simply list everything we support. Unfortunately, the 2021 DSA political platform document has not proven to have the necessary focus to be a useful tool to recruit and build our party. Crucially, it cannot serve as an electoral program that our candidates and officials champion to the world, due to its length and confusing lack of distinction between immediate demands and long-term vision.
The continued lack of a public-facing program that our candidates and socialists in office can use to define themselves and shape their own campaign platforms would be a serious problem, and one which would continue to hobble our ability to fully act like a party.
Workers Deserve More 2024: A Needed Departure
Fortunately, DSA’s 2023 Convention voted overwhelmingly to establish the For Our Rights Committee (FORC) as part of a plan to “Fight the Right Through Political Independence.” FORC was mandated to develop, roll out, and integrate into our other work, a program for the 2024 elections. The rationale was that we needed a clear and accessible left-wing program to serve as a positive alternative to both the fascistic Republicans and the neoliberal Democrats. FORC drafted what became DSA’s Workers Deserve More 2024 Program and successfully collaborated with DSA staff to print and distribute 10,000 copies nationally.
The Workers Deserve More pamphlet has become one of DSA’s most popular pieces of literature, and the paper copies have long been sold out. In 2024, YDSA chapters received copies of Workers Deserve More in their Fall Drive organizing kits from the national office and many chapters used them in member recruitment and political education. YDSA leaders from the University of Oregon and SUNY Binghamton told us that the printed programs were useful in tabling and talking to interested students about DSA’s orientation toward the election and the policies that DSA supports. Mid-Hudson Valley DSA’s “Solidarity Circle” political education series devoted a session to Workers Deserve More. At that session, the program’s preamble and points were discussed collectively, concluding with participants writing “I’m a socialist because…” elevator pitches on note cards based on what they read from WDM. Pittsburgh DSA voted at its chapter convention to foreground Workers Deserve More in its organizing. According to Sarah Melton, a member of Pittsburgh DSA, at past organizing fairs the chapter “gave away a ton of the Workers Deserve More brochures and used Workers Deserve More in our messaging. I think it helped to set us apart from the other progressive orgs.”
Chapters throughout the country have even found creative ways to make use of the program’s design elements, creating inspired variations on the artwork and branding. Louisville DSA has taken the various demands, design icons, and language from Workers Deserve More and developed Louisville-specific recruitment palm cards. Bluegrass DSA, a new chapter in Kentucky organizing in the Kentucky Bluegrass region, recently produced Workers Deserve More shirts. An enterprising comrade in Seattle DSA now makes Workers Deserve More bumper stickers and give them out at public events, and will send them to socialist campaigns and chapters on request.
Workers Deserve More, Forever
We are inspired by the clear success of Workers Deserve More as a model and as a creative tool for organizing across DSA chapters. Rank-and-file members have truly made Workers Deserve More their program. DSA would be making a big mistake to let that brand popularity and this organizing momentum die out, instead of doing what we can to support it and ramp it up. We need to foster that existing loyalty to, and energy around, Workers Deserve More. Clearly WDM has shown that it is the program that DSA members really believe in and want to use.
Our convention resolution, “Workers Deserve More, Forever,” is designed to ensure that this successful program outlives 2024.
We believe that an effective political party should not throw away its work just for the sake of something new. “Workers Deserve More, Forever,” asks this year’s convention to embrace Workers Deserve More as the basis of a longer-term program. It asks our organization to continue to popularize a program that has become one of our cherished brands and tools. We want DSA to support more chapters in creative, program-centered organizing and education, like what Chicago and Louisville have done. By adopting “Workers Deserve More, Forever” we can recommit to having a grassroots, big-tent program document that really represents DSA at the center of our political message — a program we can use to show the world who we are and what we are committed to doing as well as our collective vision for the future.
The resolution calls for an organization-wide program committee to be formed immediately after convention that includes leaders from key national committees, elected representatives of DSA’s rank-and-file membership, and our national political leadership. The program committee’s task will be to revise Workers Deserve More to reflect key convention decisions regarding campaigns, policies, priorities, and political statements. Crucially, the resolution asks that the new edition of WDM be similar in length and style to the 2024 program. Along with the production of Workers Deserve More, the committee will be responsible for making trainings, political education, and a distribution agenda to ensure nationwide outreach. The resolution also requires that candidates seeking endorsement and socialists in office with endorsements from National DSA must promote and use the program as a condition of our future support.
Against Amendment R34-A01
It may be traditional for party congresses to dramatically pass whole platforms on the floor. However, DSA conventions are exceptional in the wide-reaching nature of their debates, where the granular details of labor and electoral strategy are debated, budget commitments are passed, political leadership is elected, and multiyear campaigns are born, all by decision of around 1,000 delegates. The sheer scope of what can be agendized at convention and the fact that any single member in good standing can propose items for debate sets DSA’s decision-making apart from many other less-democratic congresses and party gatherings.
The nature of DSA’s conventions however poses a couple of issues for the amendment to our resolution. The “R34-A01: A Fighting Socialist Program for DSA” amendment to WDM Forever from our comrades in the Reform and Revolution and Marxist Unity Group caucuses is a full-blown program. But its many, many details cannot be debated on the convention floor with any thoroughness, given our packed agenda. For this reason we oppose the amendment, because substituting our proposal with this item will shortchange the kind of extensive political deliberation we think any revised program for DSA should have. Second, if Workers Deserve More is replaced by the “Fighting Program” via amendment, the resulting document will be disconnected from the rest of the decisions made at convention, making it one more document that — like our 2021 Platform — lacks the kind of commitment and democratic buy-in needed to have wide appeal.
Given DSA’s defining quality of mass democratic participation, we believe the process outlined in “Workers Deserve More, Forever” is best set up as is to foreground what the membership has debated and actively committed ourselves to politically at convention. This we believe is superior to creating an on-paper declaration that has no substantive attachment to plans made at convention and to DSA members’ current and future organizing work. Making our program reflect our real commitments makes it more concrete and therefore more likely that all of our party, from the rank and file to our socialists in office, will do our best to not only declare but follow through on these commitments.
