The Anarchist-Style Politics of DSA

From Counterpunch by Aron Gupta 

What exactly is the Democratic Socialists of America? It’s not a vanguard party or revolutionary socialist organization. It’s not a single-issue movement. It carries out a lot of electoral campaigns, but it’s not a political party like the Democrats or Republicans. It has some similarities with labor unions, or at least the NYC-DSA chapter does, but it does no real labor organizing itself.

Then it struck me: DSA* shares many commonalities with what passes for American anarchism. Having reported on social movements since the 1980s, I have been in the thick of anarchist-led or anarchist-style movements such as the squatter and anarchist scene in the pre-Giuliani days in the East Village, Youth Greens, the antiglobalization movement, Occupy Wall Street, Occupy ICE, climate justice activism, antifa, BLM movements in Portland and Seattle, and most recently the campus movement for Gaza.

(*Officially it’s “The DSA,” but when I was in DSA in the early 90s, everyone called it DSA, and using “The” sounds as clunky to me as saying “The Facebook.”)

When I explained this to a friend, they said, “Is that a bad thing they are like anarchists?” Not necessarily. DSA’s anarchist-like qualities of decentralization, volunteerism, and horizontalism have contributed to its success. The problem is DSA is falling into the same trap as anarchists by going all in on one tactic as its theory of change — canvassing. Like anarchists, DSA values action over a thought-out strategy and by default it elevates one tactic to a strategy. Because none of the anarchist movements had a plan B, they crumbled when their tactic hit a dead end. DSA risks a similar fate.

Canvassing is the motor of DSA’s theory of change. To its credit, DSA has created a virtuous cycle. The more it canvasses, the more elections it wins, the more new members join, and the more talented candidates it attracts. This kickstarts the cycle anew. DSA stalwarts believe this is how it will force the Democratic Party to the left, put democratic socialism into action, and then it is free ponies for everyone.

In June, Zohran Mamdani summed up the thinking after three candidates he endorsed won primaries for congressional seats, saying, “a democratic socialist can get elected anywhere across this country for any position.”

DSA’s strategy, however, is fatally flawed: It assumes the Democratic Party is a shell and its leaders are incapable of stopping a takeover. There is no need to recount how liberals spawned the post-war Red Scare and unleashed COINTELPRO on the left, or how Clinton and Obama embraced a hard-right agenda while bashing the left. But many leftists forget that in 2024 Democrats showed they would rather lose to Trump than end the Zionist genocide, and they are doing it again in 2026. Rather than make the midterms about inflation, climate chaos, data centers, or the disastrous Iran war, many Democrats are embracing Islamophobia by using Abdul El-Sayed and Hasan Piker as proxies to attack the left (and Zohran Mamdani and Ilhan Omar before). It’s more evidence we don’t need that Democrats prefer fascists to the left every time.

Despite the Democrats’ history as an organ of the ruling class, many lefty journalists fantasize the party is a level playing field. One imagines “the vacuum left by Democratic Party fecklessness is being filled by … an anti-establishment revolt from below” that promises to “kick out capital.” Another thinks “if a random businessman can … run a neoliberal campaign on the Democratic line, why shouldn’t a socialist use the same tools?” A third says “the dream of having an organized faction inside of the Democratic Party that can pull it left in a systematic and irresistible way, in a way more powerful than futile appeals to morality, is on the cusp of becoming a reality.” The Nation hallucinates that “Insurgents are revitalizing the Democratic Party.” Jacobin, which acts as DSA’s house organ, is full of magical thinking, but that is grist for another article.

ANARCHY IN THE USA

So how is DSA similar to anarchist-style movements? For the sake of brevity, I use anarchist as shorthand for anarchist-style or influenced, and I am talking about actually existing anarchism rather than tediously debating what is and isn’t anarchism. I am not claiming that Black Lives Matter or the Palestine solidarity movement are anarchist, but on the ground they often looked remarkably similar to recent anarchist movements.

Much of my evidence comes from a history I wrote of U.S. social movements since the 1990s that was published in the 2025 edition of The Socialist Register. I started by observing that for over a decade a similar slogan popped up across different movements: “All day, all week, occupy Wall Street” for Occupy Wall Street; “Stay together, stay tight, we do this every night,” for the George Floyd movement, “Disclose, divest, we will not stop, we will not rest,” for the student-led movement for Gaza.

In each moment there was an imperative to act with little self-reflection. In the 1960s, Theodor Adorno dismissed this as actionism: “a self-defeating and exhibitionist commitment to political practice.” The three moments above also employed an existing tactic that made the movement real: occupying, campus protests, and anti-police brutality marches. A shift in society and ideas, and the state being caught flat-footed, allowed the tactic to take hold and spread rapidly. In the end, the tactic became the strategy. That tactic was how the desired change would happen, instead of being one arrow in a quiverful of tactics changing according to the forces, conditions, and goals. Each movement lived and died by its tactic, unable to adapt. (Some buzzkills will retort that Adorno once called the cops on students protesting his lectures in Frankfurt, but Adorno can both be right and an asshole.)

DSA shares many similarities. Chief among them is a focus on canvassing, elevating it to strategy, actionism, and no plan B. Now, DSA’s anarchist quality is in practice, not ideology. It differs significantly from anarchists. DSA is organized, eschews anarchists’ love of direct action and spontaneity, has elected leaders, and seeks state power, which for anarchists would be like becoming a cop to fight police brutality. At the same time, numerous DSA members grumble that power often resides in opaque self-selecting networks like it does among anarchists.

TURNING TACTICS INTO STRATEGY

A key feature of anarchism in practice is turning a tactic into a strategy. Before the “Battle of Seattle” in 1999, other anarchist movements revolved around a tactic, such as squatting, monkeywrenching and tree sits for forest defense, and street parties to protest rampant urbanization, often organized by Reclaim the Streets and the Ruckus Society. For the climate justice movement a decade ago, the tactic was blockades of oil pipelines, trains, and ships (known as “kayaktivism”).

The tactic is the one weird trick to change everything. During the antiglobalization years, the tactic was convergences, such as in Seattle. Activists hopped from city to city, chasing after the G7, World Bank, IMF, and the World Trade Organization. The strategy, if it could be called that, was to amass enough protesters to shut down a summit with the idea that it would create a crisis for capitalism, perhaps fatal. Naomi Klein and others criticized the tactic as “summit-hopping.” The logic of Occupy was the same. Create enough occupations, and we will build the new world in the shell of the old. With the George Floyd movement, the strategy was to get enough people in the streets and we can overwhelm the police state.

The idea that all we need is more people doing the same thing at the same time is a horizontalist fetish. That is how canvassing works. Everyone can do it, they do it at the same time based on election calendars, and many do it relentlessly. DSA canvasses for candidates, for legislation, and for signatures. It tables in public spaces and lobbies in the halls of power, which are kissing cousins of canvassing.

Like anarchists, DSA’s only strategy is to scale up. I get lots of emails from NYC-DSA about canvassing (and begging for money). I can canvass for get out the vote, canvass door-to-door for the “Delivery Protection Act,” canvass to inform neighbors about ICE operations, and canvass other DSA members to vote. I can table, a form of canvassing, for “Green Schools for a Healthier New York City” or ending weapons shipments from JFK to Israel. I can phonebank, another type of canvassing, for “Tax the Rich.” A proposal for “fast and free buses” in Brooklyn calls for “canvassing of both ride[r]s and businesses along important bus corridors.”

For this article, I talked to half a dozen DSA activists across the country. They raised two objections. They said not everyone agrees with the electoral approach and DSA does much more than electoral politics. That is true. Nearly all my contacts are skeptical of the electoral strategy, but they are outnumbered by DSA’s electoral wing — often called the right wing. As DSA wins more elections, it selects for new members who agree that elections are the way to build power, tilting power further toward the electoral wing.

As for what ele DSA does, there are beach days, book swaps, picnics, “coffee with comrades,” singles mingling, sing-alongs, soccer, and a running club, as well as committees on antiwar politics, immigrant defense, socialist-feminism, labor, trans rights, the environment and more, but it’s hard to figure out what these committees do apart from meeting and, well, canvassing.

INSIDE-OUTSIDE

While some claim DSA is pursuing an inside-outside strategy, the outside is a mirage. DSA committees such as NYC’s Anti-War Working Group have organized a few small protests in the past and some DSA chapters are active in local tenant-rights movements, but there is no coordinated national campaign around any issue, much less a dual-power strategy. This is a marked divergence with communists and anarchists, both of which pursue dual power. DSA activists confirmed that after a decade, DSA has not built a single national campaign or movement around any issue.

Protests and movement work have none of the scale or centrality to DSA that canvassing does. NYC-DSA alone organized hundreds upon hundreds of canvass operations in the past year. There are one-off events such as court support for immigrants being deported, a DSA tenants rally and protest in June at the Rent Guidelines Board, and DSA elected officials speaking at a protest in June at City Hall denouncing Mamdani’s plan to hire 580 more NYPD cops, which he later walked back. But this is precisely the problem: random protests do not make a movement. DSA committees and chapters also endorse and publicize rallies such as on May Day or the No Kings parades, but this is not organizing. DSA also likes passing resolutions at its conventions to support campaigns and movements, but that is no substitute for launching a campaign and committing organizers, resources, and strategy to it.

Compare DSA’s approach to the anti-Iraq War movement. Every antiwar group, which regularly brought out hundreds of thousands of people in the streets for years, was led by Marxist-Leninist or Trotskyist parties with cadre numbering in the hundreds. (I detail some of this history in The Socialist Register.)

If an organization with 120,000 members can’t organize one national movement after a decade, that is a feature, not a bug. DSA is a one-trick electoral pony.

The lack of strategy is compounded by decentralization — DSA chapters have considerable autonomy in projects they pursue — and volunteerism; work is determined by those who show up and do it. Anarchists have a similar free-for-all approach, which differs from socialists and communists who seek “unity in action” and develop disciplined cadres who execute a collectively determined strategy. Network strategies like the ones DSA and anarchists employ make them more resilient to state repression than top-down groups, but it comes at the cost of having no developed strategy.

DSA’s voluntarism extends to study. It has no mandatory political education. Socialist organizations usually require collective study so everyone has a shared language and knowledge of world history, left history, Marxist theory, and present conditions. In 2024 I took a course on fascism at the NYC-DSA Academy. It was engaging and useful, but only a couple dozen people, or about one out of 400 members, attended all four sessions. DSA treats education like it does organizing: random, disconnected, and voluntaristic. It leads to lowest common-denominator politics like anarchists that select for repetitive action over strategy.

LABOR DISORGANIZATION

No area indicates DSA’s underdevelopment more than labor organizing. Many contacts claim DSA does labor organizing. That is simply not true. DSA labor committees do strike support, publicity, and create space for networking and discussion. It’s valuable, but it’s a far cry from organizing workers. In the 1960s, many communists and socialists decided to “turn to industry.” The International Socialists, for one, achieved an astonishing record in unionized workplaces despite having only 500 cadre at its peak. One former organizer writes, “The IS itself initiated and sustained over thirty-five local rank-and-file groups.”

When I asked one union organizer if DSA has organized any rank-and-file caucuses, they said, “We have been debating whether to turn to industry for the last 10 years!” DSA’s existing rank-and-file strategy smacks of anarchist individualism: get a union job and “foment badly needed class struggle.”

Same with salting. DSA members I have talked to who say they are salting workplaces are confused about the concept. One labor organizer said many DSA members think rank-and-file work is salting when it really means you work under the direction and often the pay of a union to get a job at a non-union site with a strategy to unionize it. Instead, DSA encourages individualism devoid of any strategy to systematically build working-class power like the IS did. One source says that a new labor organizing project coming out of DSA decided to be independent because DSA is “a bureaucratic mess.”

Another big difference with anarchists, who focus on direct-action tactics, is that DSA shuns direct action. For decades, social movements have been marked by direct-action ruptures like Seattle, Occupy, BLM, and Gaza that change public consciousness and catalyze movement building. But DSA chapters rarely lead marches, protests, direct actions, unionizing, blockades, strikes, and so on. That makes it unlike any other activist left organization that has existed for generations.

DSA did not appear ex nihilo. Given that anarchist-style politics have dominated social movements for decades, it makes sense that DSA is shaped by this history. That’s not to say this is planned. Much of how DSA operates is a result of stumbling onto successful practices, decisions by default, and an orientation toward the Democratic Party baked into its founding from the merger of two organizations in 1982.

DSA is ultimately a hybrid organization. It functions as a left electoral force within a Democratic Party hostile to it. It adopts practices from unions, such as paid staff and organizers who mobilize members to pressure politicians and the policy process. And it mimics anarchist movements with a single-minded tactical focus based on a flawed premise.

DEAD END?

Occupy Wall Street was an incredible moment that exemplified the danger of doing the same thing over and over. After major occupations began being ousted in October 2011, activists kept trying to occupy for a year. They occupied parks, schools, homes, and government buildings but the state was not going to be caught by surprise again and responded violently. Activists futilely tried the same tactic until the movement petered out from police violence, criminal sanctions, frustration, and infighting.

In Portland, I had a front-row seat to the George Floyd and Occupy ICE protests, both of which made national news. They each clung to one tactic as they spiraled into a maelstrom of infantile politics, rage, and internal warfare. After capturing attention in the spring of 2024, the campus movement for Gaza tried the same tactics in the fall, but it was unable to adapt to repression and harsh sanctions meted out by the administrators.

Nonetheless, these movements had a real impact. Bernie Sanders credited Occupy Wall Street with his surprisingly popular 2016 presidential campaign. That in turn transformed DSA from an old man’s debate club into the electoral force it is today. Before a backlash, Black Lives Matter made defunding the police a majoritarian issue in the summer of 2020, with 67 percent of the public supporting the movement. In 2024, university students galvanized world opinion against the brutality of Zionism, provided Palestinians facing genocide with a profound source of hope, and led to the only suspension of US weapons shipments to Israel. But in the end, all these movements collapsed, unable to adapt while retaining popular support.

There is another danger facing DSA. When movements enjoy success and rapid growth, it can lead to unrealistic triumphalism. Activists are convinced they will win. This cuts in two contradictory ways. One is that to sustain a mass protest in the face of elite hostility and state violence, activists need absolute faith in their cause. Students at the campus occupations for Gaza fervently believed they could end their university’s complicity with Israel and even stop the genocide. That hope drew in thousands of others and campus protests spread like wildfire. But the other way it cuts is that activists are so convinced they have found the secret to success that they never develop other strategies to build power. When they find their path blocked, they perish in the wilderness.

That is the path DSA is currently on.