DSA

While the Democrats as a whole lost seats, the DSA expanded its faction of elected state officials with victories by Kristen Gonzalez and Sarahana Shrestha, ...

Maisano writes that the DSA must try to prevent a repeat of January 6th by “joining coalitional efforts to support local- and state-level Democrats against Republicans in general elections, even when those Democrats are not part of our movement.” He continues, “For the foreseeable future, we are left with continued contestation of Democratic primaries and uneasy relations with factions in the Democratic coalition who are opposed to many of our goals.” On the other hand, it has also seen the continued cultivation of far-right forces in the US and internationally. Under these conditions, there exists increasingly little operating space for the DSA—or any other organization attempting to reconcile the working class’s interests and capital—to mask the true nature of bourgeois democracy. The pretense of the DSA’s oppositional stance has crumbled as the Biden Administration seeks to rescue capitalism amid an intractable social and political crisis. The replacement of Cuomo by Kathy Hochul, whom Featherstone now cites as an obstacle to the DSA’s agenda, was previously heralded as an acceptable compromise by the party faction which opposed the former governor. “I think that, given how progressives really organized and helped deliver that margin [for Governor Hochul’s narrow victory], I think that there very much is room for a conversation to be held here about how we can restructure how the party is selected and established.” In May 2022, the entire slate of DSA Congress members quietly backed a bill that gave $40 billion to escalate the US/NATO war against Russia. In fact, far from stopping the “era of austerity,” the Democratic Party at all levels is advancing attacks on the working class amid the most profound social crisis in decades. In early December, Congress overwhelmingly passed legislation to outlaw strike action and impose the terms of a rotten labor contract on 120,000 railroad workers across the country. It calculates that an alliance with this “Progressive” wing will bolster its bid for influence over the party leadership as a whole. At the state level, Democratic Governor Kathy Hochul narrowly survived reelection, while her party lost five seats in the State Assembly and one in the State Senate. Gonzalez won the primary by a margin of 30 percent in the newly created Senate District 59, containing portions of western Queens, northwestern Brooklyn, and the East Side of Manhattan.