03.09.2026

Going through the left

The DSA has grown significantly since 2016 and has recently won a string of congressional nominations. Communists have won increasing influence too. Matthew Campbell-Strupp discussed the perspectives of building a mass Communist Party in America at the opening session of CU 2026

What is the path to the mass communist party we need? Something we in the USA learned from the CPGB, which was an attractive answer to us and which we are still pursuing, is the idea of going through the existing left to get us to the mass communist party we need - regrouping self-identified Marxists in a programmatically unified party through open polemic.

Achieving unity in this way, we can have the sort of collective social weight and legitimacy as an alternative political force in order to get a snowball effect of growth, resulting in a communist party becoming a hegemonic political expression of the working class. This is in opposition to small groups of competing communists attempting to go to the class directly, either through agitation or by attempting to lead the economic struggle directly without having first achieved unity on a political basis.

In the US there was something called the ‘base building tendency’ and an organisation called Marxist Center that promoted the latter position. What became the Marxist Unity Group around the magazine Cosmonaut instead embraced building a political alternative and promoted the idea of programmatic unity. Those of us in MUG have attempted to follow this path primarily through engagement with the Democratic Socialists of America - an organisation which has regrouped both individuals and organised tendencies from across the various Marxist and more broadly leftwing traditions and which has also captured and developed significant layers of newly organised socialists in this country in both of its major growth phases from 2016 to 2020 and from the 2024 election to the present. At the same time, the DSA shifted significantly to the left after 2016, with its embrace of the ‘boycott, divestment and sanctions’ movement and exit from the Socialist International in 2017, and its ‘Bernie or bust’ position on the 2020 presidential election.

What became the Marxist Unity Group began intervening in the DSA around the 2021 convention, and since then we have had a significant effect on the organisation’s overall political character, and have fought to democratise it and make its debates more clear and open - though its basic structure was already fairly democratic, compared to leadership-centric, left-populist or entrenched bureaucratic party structures that exist in some other contexts. Not everyone in the DSA thinks of it as an embryonic mass communist party, but over time we have worked to make this a widespread vision for the organisation that formations from the anarchists in the Libertarian Socialist Caucus to class collaborationists in the Socialist Majority Caucus now often have to frame their ideas within. Internationally, the word ‘partyist’ has come into use to describe groups inspired by the thinking of the CPGB, especially Mike Macnair’s book, Revolutionary strategy, but in the DSA, MUG’s usage of the term has led to its adoption as a widespread self-description among multiple factions that do not share our political influences.

Some recent victories for our vision of the DSA as a mass communist party include the passage of the resolution we authored titled ‘Principles for party-building’ at the 2025 convention, and the political content of the DSA’s new version of its political programme, called Workers deserve more, which was adopted this summer. ‘Principles for party-building’ laid out 10 principles meant to guide the sort of party the DSA is striving to embody and become, the first of which reads: “The fundamental purpose of a socialist party is to be a mass association of the working class formed for collective political action. The party will be united around a democratically created programme that outlines goals that, enacted together, will allow the working class to rule and end capitalism.”

Ruling class forces

This was a way of stating simply what a party is for and what the character of its programme is. On the issue of how the party orients toward other class forces, point eight reads: “DSA orients itself in opposition to all ruling class political forces. DSA’s project is to unite workers to win the battle for democracy and bring about socialism, not to seek a governing coalition with a perceived lesser evil under the current undemocratic political system.”

This is meant to articulate that the DSA sees itself as an opposition party that engages in political struggle in order to make its political programme hegemonic in the working class, so that we can gain majority support for a revolutionary programme for working class rule through radical political democracy, and implicitly repudiates the idea of working as junior partners to the liberal wing of the capitalist class - as was a major thread of the DSA’s orientation in the first couple years of the Biden administration and around which new divisions are now emerging. The fact that a majority of delegates in 2025 approved of this resolution, which so clearly laid out some of what we see as key features of a Marxist party, gives a good sense of how much of an appetite there is among the DSA’s membership for the organisation to play the role of a mass communist party.

We were able to use the declaration about the role of the party’s programme in ‘Principles for party-building’ to influence the drafting of the DSA’s revised political programme as well. Some would have leaned toward making the programme a short list of reform demands or so-called transitional demands, but we made the case that the resolution meant there was a convention mandate for something more ambitious, something “outlin[ing] goals that, enacted together, will allow the working class to rule and end capitalism”. Having framed the drafting process this way, we also used our voices in the responsible committee and our votes on the national leadership to ensure that we included an articulation of the maximum programme - a fully liberated, classless future - and most of the key democratic demands of the minimum programme like abolishing the senate, the imperial presidency and the supreme court, proportional representation in elections, and the right of self-determination for oppressed nations. The programme was written with a sharp focus on economy of language and comprehensibility, and was negotiated among different tendencies, but we consider it a major victory that the DSA now has a programme which includes this political content and frames it in revolutionary terms:

The Democratic Socialists of America is building a party whose goal is a democratic society of the working class. Our enemies are not just individual bosses, but the entire global system of capital; not just this or that cop, judge or president, but the entire anti-democratic structure of our society. We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.

The fact that this programme was formally adopted at a time when the DSA’s visibility is higher than ever due to its candidates’ victories in several congressional primaries and other elections, means that this vision is getting an intense amount of attention in the capitalist press and the DSA’s identity is becoming tied to a specific revolutionary political programme in a way that it never has before. While candidates themselves have sometimes sought to distance themselves from the programme, the attacks from the right wing have made it quite popular among a broad progressive base, and DSA spokespeople have done an admirable job defending its various aspects in the face of hostile interviewers.

Broad engagement

So that is the DSA, but what about other self-identified Marxists, and what about those comrades in countries without an equivalent organisation on which to centre their activity? It must be admitted that MUG has not spent nearly as much of its time or publishing capacity addressing the sects outside the DSA as, for example, the Weekly Worker has with the groups in Britain. One of the reasons is that the size of these organisations pales in comparison to the DSA and any given extra-DSA tendency on the left often has some sort of expression, organised or not, within it, where its ideas have to be weighed in the form of concrete proposals for the organisation and put in conversation with the ideas of others. That is more conducive for debate than addressing groups whose own internal reasoning for their ideas is obscured by their bureaucratic centralism - the only expression of which that is available to contend with is its bastardised, external agitational form.

That is not to say that MUG could not do more to engage with the ideas of these groups, as both the Party for Socialism and Liberation and Socialist Alternative have recently suffered major splits, in which the curtain of their internal strategic thinking was pulled back a little, leaving room for generative engagement. The Communist Party USA has also experienced multiple waves of growth since 2020 and tendencies coming out of their younger guard have joined the fray in the DSA, with Geese Magazine coming to embrace a form of Gramscian left populism, which has been picked up by members of the DSA right as a theorisation of their existing practice.

I am aware that the idea of creating a ‘British DSA’ has become a topic of conversation on the British left, and I think that multiple features of the DSA that do not necessarily have to go together end up getting mixed up in these conversations. The feature of the DSA that should be picked up by any left regroupment project in Britain is its internal democracy, the presence of multiple organised trends, and progressive development of a culture of open debate in the organisation. However, while the DSA is moving towards greater coherence and programmatic clarity, its historic lack of clarity and muddled programme is sometimes pointed to as desirable.

Hopefully, the huge impact that the DSA’s new programme has had is because it is fairly ambitious and clearly shows the value of taking seriously the question of what we are fighting for. Others seem inspired by the specific model of the DSA’s successful electoral campaigns. On one level, the DSA’s campaigns truly are well organised and we have developed an apparatus for field organising that is qualitatively different from how other political forces operate in the US. On another level, the US primary election system and the DSA’s legal existence as a tax-exempt, non-profit organisation without a state-recognised ballot line (the one upside of which is that our candidate selection does not have to go through a state-run primary election and can be decided by our membership, as in political parties outside the US) is relatively unique and would be difficult to replicate.

MUG has become recognised as an important and legitimate political actor in the DSA and some of our ideas have become part of the fabric of the organisation, but there is still quite a ways to go before it fully embodies our ideal of a mass communist party, which can stand independently, uncompromisingly and coherently for the interests of the international working class. Thus the need for a partyist faction narrower than the party - united around both programmatic perspectives and an assessment of the specific organisation around which our struggle is centred - remains.

With several new DSA-endorsed socialists entering Congress next year, dissatisfaction with the Trump regime mounting, and the contradictions of a declining US imperialism shown more starkly than ever, we can only hope that our ability to both articulate our long-term perspectives and flexibly adapt our tactics to an ever changing situation can pass the muster required by our historical period.