The DSA is a joke.
The DSA's right wing is poised to purge all that distracting "identity politics", like BDS, police abolitionism, BLM, disability rights, trans rights, criticism of western imperialism, and anything about 'minority' representation in politics generally or within the DSA itself.
The DSA now stands for Medicare for All and that's about it. In other words, they're Rockefeller Republicans.
Harrington drew his influence from middle-class white liberals unhappy with the pro-Vietnam-War, pro-big labor Democrats of the sixties and seventies. He wanted to capture that disaffection for the DSA, but stay linked to Democratic Party politics. And that's what the DSA was/is.
A lot of younger people came into the DSA since the mid 2000s wanting something more radical, and seeing the DSA as the most viable electoral party on the left. They are now being ejected from the DSA; the graft didn't take.
The DSA was never in the least radical. That was a misunderstanding of its founding, nature, and purpose. It was only minimally social democrat, much less "socialist" in any recognizable way.
I pretty much always thought the DSA was a waste of time.
Anyway, here we are.
(I don't know what isn't a waste of time, politically, though)
Isn't resolving that dialectic in the org in for communism an important fight though? The whole of society is rife with contradiction but just abstaining from it because it's not perfect would be absurd. Would the same not apply to the largest and most active left wing organization in the US?
It is, and there's probably a better chance of actually making the DSA Socialist than say, Militant had in the Labour Party. The fact many of the most active cells are RevSoc dominated is very positive.
But, and I admit I'm not clear on this, there doesn't seem to be any acknowledgement from revolutionary factions that RevSoc involvement with the DSA is inherently an entryist project, and that there's a goal that ends in supplanting the leadership of the organisation and breaking with most if not all Democratic candidates.
I mean, that's what they want right? A mass Socialist organisation with a revolutionary, or at least a hard-reformist program. Not just a few more members of the squad and a few more SocDem mayors?