Mass Politics Are Revolutionary Politics

It’s not reform vs. revolution, but grounded strategy vs. “revolutionary phrase-making”

“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, Max Elbaum responds.

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By Max Elbaum

I welcome Tom Goodkind’s article, DSA’s 2025 Convention: Can We Meet the Moment? It offers an insightful analysis of the damage being done to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) by an ultra-left tendency whose central mistake is failing to put defeating MAGA’s drive toward fascism at the core of left political strategy.

Below I want to supplement Tom’s analysis by adding a few points to his critique. While many people think of DSA as divided between “reformist” and “revolutionary” wings, my central argument will be that this is a mischaracterization. What makes a strategy revolutionary is an accurate identification of the main enemy of working-class advance at each stage of struggle and an action program to assemble the social forces who are capable of defeating that enemy and reconfiguring the landscape to the left’s advantage. By this yardstick, DSA’s “mass politics” tendency—often critiqued as reformist—is engaged in revolutionary politics, while the self-described “revolutionary” tendency is making strategic errors. These include:

1. Magical thinking about how the structure of the US electoral system affects the way mass movements mature from protest to politics.

Since Bernie Sanders’ breakthrough 2016 presidential campaign, there has been grudging recognition on the part of major sections of the ultra-left that their longstanding strategy of engaging elections solely via “third party” campaigns is a dead-end. They have shifted to saying it is acceptable to support candidates on the Democratic Party ballot line, but only if they are explicitly socialist and the effort is seen as a step toward forming a working-class based socialist party fully separate from the Democratic Party.

This is a tactical shift that comes nowhere near grappling with the full implications of how the structure of the US electoral system (extensively examined by both mainstream and radical analysts here, here, here, and here) affects progressive movements. The Republicans and Democrats are not “parties” in the classical sense, because primaries governed by state and federal law rather than party structures control who their candidates for office are. This leaves these “parties” “porous, penetrated easily by social forces with popular backing and significant resources at their command.”

The result is that social movements that want to move “from protest to politics” are strongly incentivized to enter and fight on the terrain of a major party; and they can do so without surrendering their capacity to build structures that can exercise independent initiative (and function in most ways like “parties” in the classical sense).

This dynamic has been manifested in US politics for the last decade in two inter-related ways. First, since Trump consolidated the GOP around MAGA in 2016-2019, the sections of the population who want to throw MAGA out of power (correctly) regard voting for Democrats as the only practical way to do so. Second, movements based in sectors of the population that want progressive structural change see the potential for electing social justice champions via Democratic primary victories and simultaneously increasing the chances of beating MAGA.

There have been setbacks along this road, among the most serious MAGA taking the White House, Senate, and House in 2024 and the defeat of Cori Bush and Jamaal Bowman. The problems of the mainstream forces in the Democratic Party (which range from ineffective opposition to fascism to outright collaboration with it) are largely responsible for such setbacks. But the fact that corporate Democrats are going to behave like corporate Democrats does not mean that the process of contention on Democratic Party terrain has run its course. Zohran Mamdani’s primary win in NYC is the most dramatic evidence that any such assessment is off base. And while every progressive understands that today mass resistance that includes non-compliance and disruptive protest is essential, there remains no way to “seal the deal” of ousting MAGA except Democrats beating MAGA candidates up and down the ballot.

This is where the difference in a strategy based on “concrete conditions” vs. one based on magical thinking comes in. A grounded strategy is one that propels socialists into the thick of the fights underway and works to push them to their limits. The ultra-left line is rooted in the belief that because socialists understand that at some point the kind of electoral coalition we are in today will shatter, our propaganda can convince broad masses to skip over this stage. And that the main reason masses do not skip over trying the fight-within-the-Democratic Party route is because “misleaders” “sheepdog” them into the Democratic fold.

This is a kind of magical thinking that has long been critiqued by revolutionaries – including the hero of most of today’s ultra-left, V.I Lenin – as not recognizing that what is obsolete for the socialists only becomes obsolete for the working class after it has learned this through large-scale direct experience. In the present moment, taking this course means the left both self-marginalizing itself and standing aside from the central challenge of keeping fascism at bay.

2. Ineffective strategy for ending the Israeli genocide and defeating Zionist settler-colonialism

DSA embracing anti-Zionism and taking up BDS and other campaigns in solidarity with Palestine was a major step forward for the organization. But it has not been accompanied by embracing an effective strategy to conduct solidarity work. Parallel with its overly narrow conception of what forces it wants to gather in electoral work, the ultra-left has too narrow a conception of who can and must be mobilized to end US support for the current genocide and Israel’s settler colonial project in general.

A key lesson for all international solidarity since the 1960s came out of the surging movement against the Vietnam War. Partly based on the experience of a new generation of revolutionary-minded young people in a truly mass-scale antiwar movement, and partly based on guidance from the Vietnamese themselves, a strategy summarized as “the tighter the core, the broader the front” was impressed upon the left. Yes to building a cohort that has a deep analysis of US imperialism and the systemic roots of the US intervention in Vietnam (and across the globe). But that core should avoid the narrowness of trying to build a purely anti-imperialist antiwar movement; the priority is to look outward to build with all potential opponents of the US war, even wavering ones. And it worked: a movement that went way beyond the political Left made a huge contribution to that war, ending in a Vietnamese victory.

In the ensuing decades, this kind of “tight core/broad front” combination was promoted to their US supporters by the revolutionary leaderships of the freedom struggles in Central America, the Philippines, and South Africa. To the extent there were successes, these correlated closely with how broad a front was able to be built in opposition to US policy. Concerning Palestine, supporters of the Marxist Left within the Palestinian movement threw themselves into the 1980s Rainbow Coalition and Jesse Jackson presidential campaigns, which for a time catapulted a challenge to the Israeli narrative into the center of national politics. .

The ultra-left within today’s DSA is committed to building a strong anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist cohort that takes up Palestine solidarity. But it is pursuing that in a way that damages rather than boosts its capacity to build the necessary broad front. The emphasis on disciplinary measures related to Palestine work, and its stance toward AOC in particular, is the sharpest illustration of this problem.

AOC is one of only 46 (at last count) Congresspeople who are co-sponsors of measures to block the shipment of offensive weapons to Israel. She is a top target in AIPAC’s gunsights. But she has voted to support Israel’s Iron Dome program and justified her vote on the grounds that it is a defensive rather than offensive weapons system. This is on its face an indication that she does not fully share the anti-Zionist, anti-imperialist politics that DSA has embraced.

For the DSA ultra-left, this means two things. The first concerns AOC’s membership in DSA: at a minimum they advocate censuring her; preferably she would then leave, or even face expulsion.

There is a certain logic to this stance if one holds a conception of the “tight core” as necessarily small and monolithic. But once an organization has reached 70-80,000 members, including thousands who may share her view, does that really make sense? Wouldn’t those thousands see such steps as a sign they are not welcome in DSA and leave? Isn’t it a mark of an organization’s strength that people who do not agree with its full program want to be members? Doesn’t their membership increase the capacity of those with a firmer anti-Zionist stance to move them in that direction?

But the ultra-left stance is not solely about purifying the core. It’s not like they recommend sitting down with AOC and saying “listen, you are an important figure in the fight against US support for Israel; ”we have your back against attacks from AIPAC. But since you don’t meet our criteria for being fully anti-Zionist, you should leave DSA and we’ll work together on a united front basis.” Rather, the attacks on AOC are that she is actually a collaborator with genocide and Zionism and as such is not part of the front we want to build.

That kind of stance would not just target AOC but every Senator and Congressperson who has voted to block some arms shipments to Israel except Rashida Tlaib and possibly Ilhan Omar (as well as tens of thousands of people who have taken some kind of action to protest Israeli mass murder).

Doing so is not the way to take advantage of the groundswell of pro-Palestine sentiment that is sweeping the country and turn it into a force that can change US policy. A large section of the Democratic Party leadership is proving itself to be diehard backers of Israel. But sentiment among the Democratic voters has shifted dramatically and the pressure is showing results: for the first time, a majority of Senate Democrats voted to block shipments of some weapons to Israel, and a report just issued by mainstream Senators Chris Van Hollen and Jeff Merkley is titled “The Netanyahu Government Is Implementing a Plan to Ethnically Cleanse Gaza of Palestinians. America is Complicit. The World Must Stop It.” The shifting landscape opens up huge opportunities for those who are clear on the history and impact of Israeli settler-colonialism; it is a time to go broad, not to self-marginalize.

3. Misuse of Lenin

Most of the DSA ultra-leftists argue that their approach to politics is a US application of Marxist-Leninist strategy. At best this represents a cherry-picked reading of socialist theory and politics. Whatever one’s view of Lenin’s politics and legacy, enlisting him to justify sitting out an electoral battle against a serious autocratic threat when these battles are not led by socialists (as the DSA ultra-leftists did in 2020 and 2024) is thoroughly unwarranted.

During a time in Russian politics (1906-1907) when “Black Hundred” ultra-nationalist reactionaries threatened to roll back the political space that had been opened up by years of working-class struggle, Lenin emphasized that “The political education, training, and rallying of the masses of the proletariat are inconceivable without political freedom.”

As to what that meant for socialist policy when the only way to defeat ultra-reactionaries electorally is to vote for bourgeois liberals, Lenin wrote:

“When a socialist really believes in a Black-Hundred danger and is sincerely combating it – he votes for the liberals without any bargaining and does not break off negotiations if two seats instead of three are offered him…We have no second ballot in Russia, but we may get a situation analogous to a second ballot in the second stage of the elections. If out of 174 electors, say, 86 are of the Black Hundreds, 84 Cadets and 4 socialists, the socialists must cast their votes for the Cadet candidate, and so far, not a single member of the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party has questioned this.”

Of course, no citation from Lenin or appeal to any other alleged source of authority can or should determine what stance US socialists should take on elections here. But understanding the actual stance taken by Lenin and other Russian socialists under conditions that resemble those in the US today ought to blow a big hole in claims that refusing to vote for Democrats to defeat MAGA candidates is the one and only “revolutionary” position.

4. “Revolutionary phrase-making.”

At the heart of all the above errors is the failure to root revolutionary strategy in a “concrete analysis of concrete conditions.” Socialists hope to get to a point where the fight between partisans of socialism and defenders of capitalism is the main axis of politics. But that is not the state of politics in the US (or almost any other country) today. And it is where battle-lines in society are actually drawn—not where we wish them to be drawn—that needs to shape our political strategy.

Right now, the main axis of conflict in the US is between a MAGA bloc driving toward fascism and a larger but more politically and organizationally fragmented opposition. The central task of socialists is to unite and galvanize the anti-MAGA majority so that it defeats the MAGA bloc and moves the country to terrain more favorable for working-class advance. As a host of articles advocating that view have argued (see for example here, here, and here), that requires socialists and progressives to fight for influence within the anti-MAGA front. We counterpose our goal of a post-MAGA coalition government fighting for a Third Reconstruction to the establishment Democrats’ program of just tinkering with the pre-Trump status quo. Sitting out the electoral component of the anti-MAGA fight with the claim that voting for Democrats is pursuing a “reformist” as opposed to a “revolutionary” route to defeating fascism is following a negative tradition in the Left that Lenin dubbed “revolutionary phrase-making”:

“Revolutionary phrase-making…is a disease from which revolutionary parties suffer…when the course of revolutionary events is marked by big, rapid zigzags. By revolutionary phrase- making we mean the repetition of revolutionary slogans irrespective of objective circumstances at a given turn in events, in the given state of affairs obtaining at the time. The slogans are superb, alluring, intoxicating, but there are no grounds for them; such is the nature of the revolutionary phrase.”

5. Defeating Ultra-Leftism: Mass Politics Are Revolutionary Politics

For at least a hundred years now, revolutionary-minded activists have grappled both theoretically and practically with the problem of overturning capitalism in “advanced” capitalist countries with established electoral systems. No one has succeeded or even come particularly close. So it would seem prudent for all of us to approach questions of revolutionary strategy with a degree of humility. None of us have a blueprint to accomplish this task.

Still, all these years of working-class struggle, the victories that have increased working-class power, the bitter defeats that have set us back, do offer important insights socialist leaders have noted along the way.

One is that building working-class power proceeds through, not around, a fight for consistent democracy: equal rights for all those suffering racial, national, gender, or other special oppression; the importance of universal suffrage and fair, every-vote-counts-equally elections.

A second is the importance of alliances even with forces who will one day be our enemies. Only militant, “good trouble” made by those in the bottom layers of society’s class ladder can drive meaningful change. But to turn mass upsurges into lasting structural gains requires both uniting with non-working-class allies and taking advantage of divisions within the ruling elite.

Third is that there are no shortcuts. A divided and unorganized working class cannot rise up as a unified force to overthrow its exploiters. The maturation of a working class to the point where it is capable of taking power and ruling society proceeds in zigs and zags. Socialism is not on the agenda at each stage. What is most important is determining what is possible at a particular stage, mobilizing to achieve it, marking success or failure, and, if successful, moving along to the next stage.

Fourth, an outward-looking vision is crucial to staying grounded in the realities of the society in which oppressed people live. On this Lenin had an opinion that is not particularly “Leninist” but has been shared by effective radical leaders of all persuasions: “politics begin where millions of men and women are; where there are not thousands, but millions.”

We may not know exactly how capitalism will eventually be overcome. But these insights tell us a lot about what constitutes practice that has a revolutionary character along the way. It is that practice which assembles the social forces that can accomplish the maximum possible at a given stage of struggle and reconfigure politics in a way more favorable for working-class advance.

By this yardstick, it is the “mass politics” wing of DSA that can and should claim that they are engaged in revolutionary politics, and their opponents are practitioners of the “revolutionary phrase.”

There may be activists in the “mass politics” tendency who harbor illusions about what it will take to eventually overturn the most powerful ruling class the world has yet seen. And there are people in the “revolutionary phrase” wing of DSA who are doing work that contributes much to moving working-class politics forward even if their overall strategy is problematic. The struggle between these tendencies, after all, is not between good or bad people, or people who are more committed vs. those who are less committed. It is a struggle between two different political lines. Keeping that in mind does not make the stakes in this line struggle any less; as Tom wrote, DSA could go in the direction of mass (revolutionary!) politics or sectarian paralysis. But it does offer clues about how this struggle over strategy ought to be waged.

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