1. Political independence. We want DSA to free itself from the Democratic Party and all other capitalist influences.
Marxist Unity Group strives to transform DSA into an independent socialist party. Independence means establishing a distinct public profile for DSA with our own platform, branding, and rhetoric. It also means building our own institutions and our own party discipline in the halls of power. We would stand with unwavering confidence in our cause, never watering down our socialist vision or subordinating our interests to those of a capitalist party.
Together, we would cultivate a popular mandate for revolution by running militant socialist candidates for public office—while simultaneously organizing grassroots institutions of working class power. We would create party-affiliated media, community services, mutual aid and defensive organizations. Within the labor movement, we would fight the existing labor bureaucracy, build militant and democratic unions, and strive to win these unions to socialist politics. As we nurture a vast ecosystem of socialist-allied institutions, our socialist party will simultaneously become a mass movement: a party-movement.
Marxist Unity Group calls for immediate steps towards political independence. We become a party by acting like one. For us, the ‘break’ with the Democratic Party is a continuous process that must begin in earnest right now. This will require courage and faith in our ability to succeed as an independent movement, but we believe that the socialist movement is worthy of that faith. We support a transition towards independent campaigns wherever ballot access laws make this readily achievable—even if this causes a temporary decrease in our number of electoral victories. Building a distinct socialist constituency is the paramount task of our political era, and independent campaigns help us cultivate loyalty that is completely disconnected from loyalty to the Democratic Party.
2. Programmatic unity. We want DSA’s platform to guide its political work.
To achieve political independence, we must learn to act with greater unity and determination. We want a disciplined, self-reliant organization that is run democratically by its rank and file members. Members will be free to publicly voice disagreement with any majority decision, as long as they can accept the decision as legitimate and assist with its implementation. This is the true meaning of democratic centralism.
Now that DSA has an official platform, we want to give it legs to stand on. Ultimately, we would like to make ‘platform acceptance’ the basis of DSA membership. Acceptance does not mean agreeing with everything in the platform. It simply means being willing to fight for the platform as an expression of the movement’s democratically-elaborated aims. Members would have the right to organize for specific changes to the platform at conventions. This approach is called programmatic unity: unity based on common struggle for essential political goals, rather than on dogmatic purity or vague slogans that obscure our true objectives.
We view the distinction between a ‘minimum’ and ‘maximum’ program as essential. The minimum program refers to the party’s comprehensive platform: the policies that it will immediately implement upon taking power to cement working-class political rule and place society on the path of a socialist transition out of capitalism. The maximum program refers to the results of this process: a world free of the market, borders, classes, and all other oppressive structures that exist under capitalism—in a word, communism. We want DSA to arm itself with both elements of a minimum-maximum program. Centering programmatic politics will restore the sense of unity and purpose that socialists enjoyed during the Sanders campaigns. However, our program will have much more ambitious aims, and instead of belonging to a single candidate, it will be developed democratically by the entire socialist movement.