Within DSA

I join many groups of interest in order to see the newsletters … at least for a while. I joined Nick Brana’s Peoples Party initiative for a while; Andrew Yang’s Forward Party initiative; Working Families Party; etc.

During my twenties (1970s) I identified as a Trotskyist and joined both the Socialist Workers Party and the Spartacist League. But I also (for the newsletter) joined Michael Harrington’s DSOC (Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee). In 1982 it merged with the New American Movement to become the DSA (Democratic Socialists of America). So I technically became a founding member of DSA. There was no Trotskyist activist group in my area at the time. So I worked with the Princeton chapter of DSA.

I left DSA in 1990 to devote all my activist time to the Green Party. And the decision was of negligible importance because DSA was floundering. It was a marginal factor on the social change scene most of the time between 1990 and 2016. But when Bernie got big and promulgated the idea of “democratic socialism,” DSA exploded and became suddenly relevant. So I joined up again; this time both to get the newsletter and also to make the “Red to Green” case to the young activists.

What I see in my readings and my interactions is that some of them have in mind to try to eventually help establish a Labor Party. It would not be like the ossified Labor parties of the UK, Australia, Israel, etc. It would espouse democratic socialism. This has, of course, been the orientation of many socialist leftists for many years. Tony Mazzocchi made a serious attempt during the 1990s. His own premature death derailed the initiative.

There could be room on the left for both a Labor Party and a Green Party. But I doubt the efforts to establish the former will succeed. The efforts are based on a retrograde paradigm of social change. The Green Party idea represents the wave of the future.