The moral arc of the universe is not shaped by a slow societal awakening bent towards justice, but by the sharpening of material contradictions under a failing imperial empire. Over the last decade millions entered the streets; from the George Floyd uprisings to the Gaza solidarity encampments, there is a clear recognition amongst the populous that conditions are deteriorating. For those with privileged backgrounds accustomed to relative security under US capitalism, engagement has taken the form of anger at being increasingly excluded from the material and social privileges empire once guaranteed. For others, it is now more obvious than ever that bootstrap economics is a lie. Responses to these social contradictions are uneven and often contradictory in their own right, but together they signal a deeper crisis, the weakening of capitalist institutions’ ability to secure consent and contain discontent, even among those who once benefited most from the system.
The largest socialist organization in the United States has attempted to answer this moment in many ways. One such answer, focused on electoralism, continues to rear it's head during periods of heightened struggle or mass mobilization. Some sects with the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) orient their members toward the Democratic Party ballot line, promising that this time will be different, this campaign more strategic, this alliance more disciplined. These orientations are consistently justified as pragmatic responses to unfavorable conditions or as temporary compromises meant to “meet people where they are.” In practice, however, these compromises are never temporary. Arguments that independent parties are too difficult under U.S. election law, that the path to power runs through Democratic primaries, or that socialists can eventually take over the party from within function less as strategic assessments than as standing rationalizations for indefinite retreat.
Yet the outcome has been remarkably consistent. Enormous energy is poured into elections that socialists do not control, as popular anger is funneled into safe institutional channels. When figures like AOC, or now Zohran, inevitably accommodate themselves to the constraints of the Democratic apparatus, it is framed as a personal failure or betrayal. But what it really represents is a political system functioning exactly as designed, deploying “left” candidacies as a form of controlled opposition to absorb, defuse, and redirect insurgent sentiment. It is leaving the working class high and dry once again without durable working-class organization.
This reflects the unresolved disagreements, or what I'd call a two-line struggle, about the purpose of a socialist organization like the DSA, whether its role is to act as a pressure group within existing political structures, or an independent force oriented toward the long‑term construction of working‑class power. These disagreements are often obscured beneath the language of unity and tactical flexibility, but they surface in decisive moments: which campaigns to prioritize, which alliances to pursue, and which forms of political activity are treated as legitimate, marginal, or disruptive.
Within Kansas DSA chapters, this right-wing deviation is most clearly articulated by the Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC). Their aim is not the construction of an independent workers’ party, but the gradual utilization of the existing capitalist Democratic apparatus, running socialist candidates within the DNC. The expectation is that socialists will inherit the party rather than break from it. But how can that happen when even milquetoast progressives like David Hogg are being forced out of his national vice chair seat when trying to primary Democrats who work against the party's interests?
This strategy is incapable of meeting the moment facing workers in Kansas today. I’ll also be showing how the Kansas-wide conference, organized by members of the Socialist Majority Caucus and their allies, was to “root out” the “Ultras,” not provide opportunities for party work. In practice, they hope to anchor statewide work in Democratic-aligned electoral campaigns, managing internal dissent as a problem of “ultras,” and sidelining any serious discussion of political independence.
My goal is not to indict individual comrades to bad faith or personal failings. I want to demonstrate that the current direction of the organization will limit the growth of a working-class movement. I'm coming from a place of comradely criticism, and hold no animosity towards anyone part of SMC from what I've seen, a great deal of their comrades have done tremendous work as organizers. What follows is an attempt to map a different path. By tracing how the Kansas conference was built, how its political line was articulated, and how dissent was handled. This article will argue against the strategy of becoming a more progressive wing of the Democratic coalition, but instead I hope to advocate for the necessity of independent working-class political organization rooted in labor, mass struggle, and an uncompromising break with the parties of capital.
State Conference
This January, the Wichita chapter of Kansas DSA, working closely with other statewide leaders mostly associated with the Socialist Majority Caucus, will host the first Kansas-wide DSA conference and training of its kind. Framed as a moment of consolidation and forward motion, the gathering was advertised as to bringing together members from across the state to share skills, coordinate campaigns, and establish a clearer sense of collective direction.
On its surface, the conference reflected a genuine desire to move beyond fragmentation and inactivity, and many of its individual components addressed real needs within the organization. Sessions addressed tenant organizing, security and protest marshaling, rapid response to ICE and police, queer liberation, and basic chapter operations. These topics matter. They reflect real pressures facing working-class communities in Kansas and a genuine desire among many members to move beyond insular discussion toward concrete action.
But once you start looking into the conference a bit deeper, like the speakers, topics, and the way the conference was structured, reveals a different picture. With keynote speakers like Genevieve Rand, SMC Steering Committee member, Colleen Johnson, current Co-Chair of SMC and former NPC member, Melinda Lavon, current Kansas DNC chair and SMC member, and Jason Maymon, newly elected Co-Chair of the Lawrence DSA and SMC member. While organizers of the conference claim there was an open invitation to anyone to have space to present, they clearly stacked the slate in their favor regardless.
To get a clearer picture of the organizers' aims, leaked group chat messages surfaced from key organizers discussing the need to “get moving on organizing regional bodies” before the “ultras” could do so, tying the urgency of the conference to a race over who would control emerging statewide structures. Going as far as to suggest they rewrite their bylaws to exclude those who may be further to the left than they are.
They know, as much as I do, that this conference in Wichita will mark a turning point for Kansas DSA chapters in the direction of the organization. For the first time, SMC organizers set out to gather chapter leaders and comrades from across the state under a single banner, with the explicit goal of defining a shared “Kansas electoral project” and aligning local work behind it. They decided on a “good campaign to focus on” that could unify chapters, to challenge the constitutional amendments proposed, such as SCR 1611 and HCR 5004.
These measures, one reshaping judicial selection, the other entrenching a redundant “citizens only” voting rule, do carry immediate stakes. But only within the narrow terrain of liberal-democratic rights. Even if successfully defeated, they offer limited pathways for developing durable working-class organization, deepening class consciousness, or advancing political independence. The concern is not that these fights exist, but that they are being undemocratically selected in advance as the unifying anchor for statewide work. By building a conference around them, SMC effectively defined the horizon of “serious” Kansas work as defending the institutional framework of Kansas liberalism rather than organizing to confront the capitalist class directly.
The SMC Political Line
In falsifying Marxism in opportunist fashion, the substitution of eclecticism for dialects is the easiest way of deceiving the people. It gives an illusory satisfaction; it seems to take into account all sides of the process, all trends of development, all the conflicting influences, and so forth, whereas in reality it provides no integral and revolutionary conception of the process of social development at all.”
- V.I. Lenin, State and Revolution.
The focus here is not on individual personalities but on a political line that now structures Socialist Majority’s strategy nationally and increasingly at the state level. To understand the direction being proposed for Kansas DSA chapters, that line and the caucus that carries it, it has to be examined scientifically. Or, to borrow a phrase from Michael Brooks, the task is to “be kind to people, be ruthless to systems,” and SMC is no exception.
Within the DSA, there are a myriad of caucuses each organized by "tendency" representing a common political line. Every caucus expresses its own theory of how socialists should relate to the state, to labor, and to the Democratic Party. Socialist Majority (SMC) and Groundwork occupy a reformist electoral flank. Others on the Left flank, such as Marxist Unity Group or Red Star, argue for a break with Democratic dependence and the construction of a more explicitly revolutionary, independent working‑class politics.
Socialist Majority has come to define what “mainstream” or “responsible” strategy looks like in much of DSA. Its leaders, trainings, and publications set the tone for how questions of political independence, coalition, and party alignment are framed for a wide layer of members. Most importantly, SMC defines the structure and outlook of the upcoming Wichita DSA conference and its attempts to guide Kansas DSA chapters toward a statewide electoral strategy.
Let's take Genevieve Rand, the former (she could no longer attend) keynote speaker of the Kansas conference, and her latest article *No One Is “Politically Independent”. *Rand frames those within the DSA, especially those to the left of her, as people driven by a “lizard‑brain” search for dopamine, pursuing independence as a self‑isolating goal rather than a strategic necessity. Political independence for Rand is treated not as a material relationship built through struggle, but as an abstract or premature demand. She makes it sound like independence from the Democratic Party is somehow only principled on paper but cuts the left off from “real” politics and coalitions.
Rand’s wordplay here is doing a lot of quiet political work. She leans heavily on a kind of dictionary formalism: she declares political independence “oxymoronic” because no force is ever totally outside relations with others, then spends most of the piece policing how the word is used instead of engaging what her critics actually mean. As Sylus from the Cosmonaut correctly points out in his response, this allows her to avoid the substance of the question, whether the working class needs its own party or not.
When Rand dismisses “political independence” as a liberal, individualist fantasy, she is not correcting some new ultra‑left deviation; she is directly reversing the position Marx and Engels fought for. For them, independence meant that the workers’ party “must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its own policy,” a line written in the 1800's precisely against the idea that workers could hitch their fate to an existing liberal party and gradually take it over.
We want the abolition of classes. What is the means of achieving it? The only means is political domination of the proletariat. For all this, now that it is acknowledged by one and all, we are told not to meddle with politics. The abstentionists say they are revolutionaries, even revolutionaries par excellence. Yet revolution is a supreme political act and those who want revolution must also want the means of achieving it, that is, political action, which prepares the ground for revolution and provides the workers with the revolutionary training without which they are sure to become the dupes of the Favres and Pyats the morning after the battle. However, our politics must be working-class politics. The workers' party must never be the tagtail of any bourgeois party; it must be independent and have its goal and its own policy.”
-Marx 1871
But luckily for us, we can see their stance on electoralism without any of the wordplay. In Don’t Abandon the Democratic Party, Take It Over, SMC leadership spells out the strategy plainly. The main obstacle to a independent socialist party “isn't the capitalist class but our electoral system.” They go on to suggest the first‑past‑the‑post electoral system supposedly leaves socialists no choice but to run on the Democratic ballot line and ultimately “become the Democratic Party” rather than break from it.
Do you hear how absurd that argument is? Because the capitalist ruling class has designed an electoral system that makes independent parties difficult, we are told our only serious option is to abandon the project of independence altogether and learn to play by their rules. In this telling, the problem is not the power of the bourgeoisie, but our refusal to adapt ourselves to the institutions they built to secure that power.
For Marx, Engels, Lenin, and every serious current of revolutionary socialism that has built a proletariat state, the point of building an independent workers’ party was never simply to “win” elections inside a neutral playing field. It was to organize the class as a class, to expose the limits of liberal democracy, and to prepare the conditions for a break with the existing capitalist order. Not to reconcile the working class to it under a different, more progressive management.
Taken to its logical conclusion, the SMC roadmap asks socialists to treat the Democratic Party not as an instrument of the capitalist class, but as raw material to be patiently reshaped. Yet the party’s leadership and biggest donors are those most invested in preserving existing economic relations, such as Warren Buffett, Michael Bloomberg, Bill Gates, etc. They all depend on keeping profits safe and unrest manageable. Their aims will never be to abolish wage labor and exploration, but to administer it more smoothly.
In that arrangement, the DNC plays the role of “good cop” to the GOP’s openly reactionary “bad cop.” Republicans escalate attacks on workers, migrants, and oppressed nations; Democrats normalize and fund the underlying machinery. Under both parties, ICE budgets grew, with Obama increasing the budget by $18 billion and Biden increasing it by $8 billion on top of Trump-era funding. The U.S. continues to underwrite colonial and imperial ventures abroad, while at times with different rhetoric, but rarely with different material outcomes.
The genocide in Gaza is a clear example. While Republican leaders backed Israel’s assault in explicitly genocidal terms, leading Democrats who once branded themselves as opponents of “forever wars” ultimately voted for sending billions in military aid packages. Even as she acknowledges that Israel is committing a genocide in Gaza, AOC has repeatedly refused to break with the U.S Military support, voting against an amendment that would have cut $500 million from the Iron Dome. AOC and Zohran have even denounced protesters outside synagogues who were hosting events to sell illegally stolen Palestinian Land.
Social democrats, like SMC, accept this basic arrangement and try to make the best of it. Their strategy treats the mass death and dispossession imposed on people in the imperial periphery as an unfortunate cost of doing business. They become topics to be criticized in statements, but ultimately tolerated so long as it does not derail incremental gains at home. In practice, that means hundreds of thousands of lives in Gaza, Yemen, or the broader Global South can be sacrificed so long as the Democratic coalition remains intact and a few domestic reforms seem to move. The message to the working class is consistent: you may choose the tone in which your exploitation is justified, not whether it continues.
Against this backdrop, the idea that socialists should pour their limited capacity into “saving” the Democratic Party, into giving a crisis‑ridden vehicle of capitalist rule a new, more charismatic face borders on absurd. Every hour spent rehabilitating the party’s legitimacy is an hour not spent building the independent organizations workers will need when that legitimacy finally collapses. The question for Kansas DSA is therefore simple: will it dedicate its best organizers to patching holes in a sinking ship, or will it help construct the vessels that can actually carry the working class beyond the horizon of capitalist rule?
What should we do instead?
It is worth starting off by saying electing socialists can be useful, but only when the campaigns confront the forces bearing down on working‑class life. The two constitutional amendments that Kansas SMC plans to campaign around may carry real stakes inside the narrow terrain of liberal legality, but neither speaks directly to the realities most people are facing: quasi‑occupational police and immigration forces tearing through neighborhoods, landlords and bosses tightening their grip, and a bipartisan federal government deepening austerity and war. As organizers, every campaign we run has to be judged by a simple standard: does this help develop class consciousness and organization among the working class, and does it move the needle toward a socialist future? Or, does it just train people to see their highest political task as defending institutions that are administering the fascist state they see today?
If we are serious about building a socialist future, our starting point has to be different. We have to choose campaigns that name the enemy plainly, and involve those most targeted by U.S. fascism to give them an organized way to fight back that doesn't depend on the goodwill of the Democratic Party. The same Democrats who tell us to “defend our institutions” are sending cops to protect ICE raids and break up anti-ICE and Palestine protests. Just as the SPD sent police to tamp down on the communists during the rise of the Third Reich, claiming to be guardians of “democracy” against Hitler. Liberal anti‑fascism treats the repressive apparatus as legitimate and the only objective. Socialists have to start from the opposite assumption, that this apparatus is the shield of capitalist rule, and that any strategy built around trusting it, or the party that commands it, will end up defending the very system we need to overthrow.
Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”
-V. Lenin in “What is to be done?”
One of the first things we must do as socialists in Kansas is to take political education seriously and break with the ideas that quietly limited our horizons. Cold War anti‑communism and decades of Red Scare propaganda still shape what people think is “realistic.” This Doctrinal Warfare, as the CIA puts it, dominates the acceptable ideology, pushing movements toward safe moral appeals and electoral respectability instead of confrontation with capital and the state. Without a materialist framework, anger gets channeled into compatible forms of politics that can be absorbed and neutralized. Revolutionary theory, especially dialectical and historical materialism, is a social science about learning how to analyze power, contradiction, and change in our own conditions. Used this way, it helps us see how repression at home and imperialism abroad are connected, why capitalism produces both liberal reform and fascist backlash, and how to build strategy rooted in the actual struggles of workers, tenants, migrants, and students in Kansas rather than in social‑media narratives or the demands of the next election cycle.
If education is what helps keep us from drifting back into becoming a part of the compatible-left, a real dirty break strategy is what gives that education a direction. An actual workers’ party, no matter how small, can set its own program, run its own candidates on its own line, decide when to engage or boycott elections, and take positions on imperialism, policing, and labor that are not filtered through the needs of Democratic “unity.” Without our own political vehicle, every struggle is eventually forced back into institutions we do not control. By having our own independent party, we shift elections from being an end in themselves to a tactical tool that helps build working-class power.
If independent working-class politics is going to be real, it has to be rooted in unions and workplaces, not in an abstract notion of “the working class.” Much of U.S. labor has been tied to the Democratic Party for decades, blunting its capacity to act independently and limiting workplace struggle. A different direction requires rebuilding from below through a rank-and-file direction where socialists become active shop stewards and organizers within unions like SEIU, AFT, GTAC, and others, to assist in the struggle for real workplace democracy. When that kind of organized layer exists, it can link workplace struggles to a dirty-break strategy, giving labor a political home outside the Democrats rather than funneling every fight back into a party committed to managing capitalism.
The question then is what to do with the energy that so often gets burned up in elections once the ballots are counted. That energy does not vanish; it must be redirected into struggles that build a lasting organization. Tenant organizing remains one of the few areas where DSA chapters have shown they can root themselves materially in working‑class life. Expanding efforts like KC Tenants into places such as Lawrence and Wichita would confront landlord power directly, develop new leaders through real fights, and create organizations that persist beyond any single campaign cycle. Similarly, organizing for sanctuary‑city policies, ICE‑response networks, and security trainings acknowledges the increasingly repressive conditions we face and meets them head‑on. These campaigns do not depend on access to friendly electeds or promises of future reform; they build collective capacity, mutual defense, and political clarity through struggle itself. In this way, non‑electoral work stops being free‑floating “activism” and becomes the living foundation of independent working‑class power.
I am certainly not radical enough. One can never be radical enough; that is, one must always try to be as radical as reality itself.”
-A conversation between Lenin Valeriu Marcu 1917, from a book on the life of Fernando Pessoa
We are living through the rise of fascism while the planet’s ecological systems are being pushed closer and closer to collapse. Capitalism has proven incapable of sustaining human life, let alone providing dignity or freedom. This is not an abstract future threat; it is the reality of our moment. And if we take that reality seriously, then our response must be equally serious. As Rosa Luxemburg warned, it is socialism or barbarism.
Fortunately, people across the country are already meeting this moment with the kind of radical action it demands. Communities are organizing to stop ICE from abducting their neighbors, building rapid-response networks and collective defense rooted in solidarity rather than fear. Protesters are developing marshal teams, legal observers, and building armed self‑defense formations in the tradition of the original Black Panther Party. Indigenous water protectors have confronted extractive corporations head-on, putting their bodies on the line to defend land, water, and life itself from Standing Rock to countless struggles since. This is what it means to be “as radical as reality itself”, to match the scale of crisis with forms of struggle that refuse to treat fascism and imperialism as just more issues for the next election cycle.
The task before us will not be easy, and at times feel like we're Sisyphus, condemned to rolling the boulder up the hill only to watch it slide back down. But moments of resistance matter; they accumulate, they teach class consciousness, and they cannot remain isolated forever. Each successful eviction defense, each disrupted ICE raid, each shop‑floor fight that wins even a small concession adds weight to our side of the scale and trains a new layer of people in what collective power feels like. The point is not to romanticize the boulder, but to keep pushing in ways that connect these scattered efforts into a force capable of cresting the hill altogether.
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