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)
DSA is a membership driven organization first and foremost. Its focused on building a pro-socialist environment by local organizing and education. Its structurally more like the NRA than any other organization.
Trying to compare it to vanguard socialist orgs like SAlt or PSL is like comparing the NRA to the libertarian party. DSA's not a vanguard party, and it has no delusions that it could be. Vanguard parties see DSAs 90k membership and wonder what they could accomplish with those numbers. But DSA wouldn't be as big as it is if it wasn't big tent and multi-tendancy.
SAlt already has a caucus within the DSA to push DSA to make a socialist/labor party but that's more likely to be an offshoot of DSA not a transformation of DSA itself.
Ok, so it's an AgitProp/Lobbyist/Funding org like the NRA. That's not a terrible strategy as long as people realise its limits are shitposting at the cracks in the political system in the hope they widen far enough to shove someone in there and making politicians afraid for their lives, or worse, their wallets.
The NRA is of course far more unified and vicious (and arguably lead by a political vanguard that couped the sports shooters in the 70s.) It would be nice to see the DSA take a similar road.
That's basically what the NPC wants it to be and how its structured. They don't really care what members do beside pay their dues.
Local chapters however do whatever organizing they think is most relevant to their community. Whether that's tenant unions, labor unions, mutual aid networks, political agitation, reading groups, pipeline protesting, etc. is up to the members of the chapters.
Its that multi-tendancy, base-building strategy that explains why DSA has continued to grow even after the Sanders campaign. That growth is something vanguardists continually fail to understand. There's no point to a vanguard party if there is no socialist movement to begin with. And the only vanguard party model that can make its own socialist movement are Maoist peoples army which haven't worked in the imperial core.
That's is why SAlt is mostly irrelevant and PSL even more so. Do the local chapters of these organizations actually have any outreach programs or do they just show up to protests with a banner?