Building a Marxist Mass Politics

To overcome ultraleftism we need to get our own house in order

“Can We Meet the Moment?” The question posed by Tom Goodkind in his analysis of the 2025 DSA Convention spurred debate and discussion on the left. To sharpen our collective thinking, The New Liberator is publishing a series of responses, rejoinders, and hot takes. Here, Eric Blanc responds.

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By Eric Blanc

Many thanks to Tom Goodkind for writing an excellent overview of the strategic debates and stakes of DSA’s recent convention. On all the fundamental political questions, I agree with the case he puts forward and I hope that many more DSA members start taking seriously his warnings about the danger that ultraleftism poses to our organization.

Since it would be redundant and not particularly interesting to list off all the points I agree with in Goodkind’s piece, what follows are a few critical thoughts made in the spirit of comradely discussion. One limitation in Goodkind’s article is that it doesn’t provide an explanation for why ultraleftism was so prevalent at this DSA convention. For example, he notes in passing that “the spontaneous tendency among the majority of that [non-caucused] ideological center was to lean towards the ultraleft,” without probing more into why. Ultimately, this non-caucused, left-leaning milieu held the balance of power in a convention where the relative strength of left, center, and right caucuses was almost the exact same as in the past few conventions.

One hypothesis suggested by Goodkind is that DSA’s ultraleftism reflects its “petit-bourgeois middle strata” social base, just like the New Left of the 1960s and 70s. This suggestion is a bit off: it minimizes the extent to which college-educated middle strata have become proletarianized in the past half century. Though it’s true that the DSA’s (disproportionately college-educated and white) social composition leaves much to be desired, DSA’s problem is not primarily that we have too few wage workers. Rather the main issue is that most chapters are still too small, and too weakly rooted, for political debates to have real stakes on their lives and that, relatedly, we recruit primarily self-selecting activists who join for ideological reasons, not because we’ve won them some material changes in their lives — or because we have recruited them in the process of an organizing fightback. A lack of organizing experience combined with a lack of power and lack of immediate personal stakes create potentially fertile ground for ultraleftism. But this isn’t an inevitability: this same demographic voted in a mass-politics majority at multiple DSA conventions following Bernie’s 2016 campaign.

As a delegate myself at our recent convention, it seemed very clear to me that the reason for this spontaneous ultraleft tendency was anger at the Democratic Party’s active support for the genocide in Palestine. In the minds of the left caucuses (and the un-caucused center who leaned towards them), an intransigent fight against “reformism” was done fundamentally in the name of Palestine. I agree that their policies towards Palestine are far less effective than those of mass-politics-oriented DSA caucuses as well as the Uncommitted movement — see my interview with Bashir Abu-Manneh and Hoda Mitwally on this. But we should acknowledge that it’s not particularly suprising that relatively new and inexperienced activists, with almost no positions of real power and responsibility, veered far to the left when witnessing a Democrat-funded genocide livestreamed daily onto the phones.

Just like Lyndon Baines Johnson’s support for the Vietnam war contributed to the ultraleft implosion of Students for a Democratic Society, one of the ways our movement pays for the crimes of establishment liberalism is via the growth of ultraleftism as an (over)reaction to liberal leaders’ complicity in imperialist horrors. Whereas new DSA members after 2016 took much of their lead from Bernie himself, new members who have joined since 2023 largely did so in a context marked by the genocide and a social-media fueled (and mostly unfounded) perception that Bernie and AOC — to say nothing of the rest of the Democratic Party — were inconsistent allies of the Palestinian people.

The reason this matters — and I offer this as more of a comradely question than a clearcut affirmation — is that perhaps some advocates of a Block and Build strategy sometimes underestimate the downsides of radicals being associated with the Democratic Party, and of the need for socialists to not excessively melt ourselves into the broader progressive movement. All strategies, including our own, carry real trade-offs. My point here isn’t to suggest we should orient to building a third party (a non-starter in our party system in a period of deep political polarization) or shy away from united fronts against authoritarianism. But as we do this we should be always crystal clear about the importance of having a very visible expression of socialist politics in this process. And we should not shy away, when necessary, from hard fights with the Democratic Party establishment — in part because we need to win radicalizing youth towards mass-oriented Marxist politics, rather than various iterations of ultraleftism and sectarianism. Balancing both sides of the equation effectively is very challenging and I don’t think there are timeless formulas for how to do so — it all depends on context and the correlation of forces. I’m sure comrades with a “Block and Build” orientation are aware of these dilemmas, yet I sometimes get the impression that this strategy is articulated as if it were trade-off free. And perhaps the emphasis in practice has sometimes been clearer on the (anti-authoritarian) “Block” side of things than on the (independent politics) “Build” part of the equation.

One concrete manifestation of this, I think, has been a partial reluctance to fully participate in DSA. I think it’s great that comrades like Goodkind have recently joined DSA and seem to now be engaging more with our organization’s politics. But it’s telling that this convention report was written from an outside convention observer, not a delegate. And it’s unclear to me why comrades with Goodkind’s politics did not join DSA in 2018 once it was clear that DSA was becoming by far the largest socialist organization in the US. One of the secondary reasons for the prevalence of ultraleftism in DSA is a break in political-generational continuity with the best battle-tested socialists from the New Left, who learned long ago many of the lessons that the rest of us have had to learn the hard way since 2016. And I’d add that while critiques of ultraleftism are necessary and useful, the primary mechanism for isolating ultraleftism in DSA is to out- organize it — if more DSA chapters led by mass-politics oriented comrades could double or triple in size nationwide (not just in NYC), the composition of our leadership and organization would look considerably different.

Along these same lines, my experience in DSA and beyond is that ultraleftism tends to become somewhat less of an issue to the extent there is a compelling mass-politics alternative into which activists can pour their energy (and, in the process, accumulate a real feel for organizing among and with people who aren’t already radicals) — something on the national scale of Bernie’s campaigns, the Occupy movement, the 2006 immigrant rights mega-marches, or, within a city, Zohran’s electoral campaign. In that sense, it’s hard to separate DSA’s ultraleftism from the overall weaknesses of organized labor (which has so far astoundingly failed to meet the moment) and of the broader progressive ecosystem, much of which remains dominated by risk-averse, small- scale, staff-heavy, siloed NGOs.

It is far from self-evident what specific steps organizers and DSA members should focus on at this extremely urgent moment to stop Trump’s authoritarian grab. All of the suggestions raised by Goodkind are good and necessary, but they’re a bit of a laundry list when what we need above all is one or two big mass-scale nationwide fightbacks that can galvanize a wide and deep enough opposition to stop Trump. It’s of course beyond the scope of Goodkind’s article to lay out in detail what an effective fightback against Trump should look like — but I’ve yet to hear or read compelling concrete proposals for where we should concentrate our energy to stop the authoritarian onslaught. What should be the next escalating steps proposed to the approximately 7 million people who took to the streets for the recent No Kings protests? Just saying people should get involved in local organizing is true enough but very insufficient at this moment.

In an article of mine published earlier this week I lay out two ideas for scalable anti-Trump organizing campaigns that could meet the moment. I’m very worried that most unions and progressive organizations, despite saying the right things about Trump, are mostly still sticking with their (siloed, small-scale) business as usual despite a rapidly accelerating authoritarian offensive.

My hunch is that we need to ASAP start experimenting with non-violent disruptive initiatives that are easily replicable and that have the potential to go viral from below nationwide — something in the same distributed and wide-scale spirit as Occupy, Black Lives Matter, or the 2006 immigrant rights marches and walkouts. The hardest question is what specific tactics and demands have a realistic chance at catching on widely enough to generate sufficient power to slow down and defeat Trump. DSA could play a crucial role in helping spark or spread such an explosive grassroots movement. But to meet this existential challenge — and on this I’m sure Goodkind and I agree — our organization needs to immediately pivot away from ultraleftism.

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Eric Blanc is an assistant professor of labor studies at Rutgers University, a member of Rutgers AAUP-AFT, and a cofounder of the Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee. The author of three books on the labor movement—including his latest We Are the Union: How Worker-to-Worker Organizing is Revitalizing Labor and Winning Big—Blanc’s writings can be found at his substack laborpolitics.com