DSA: For a Clean Break Now!

As the 2025 DSA National Convention approaches, the Just Break Already caucus calls on all revolutionary-minded DSAers to fight for a clean break from the Democratic Party. We fully endorse Comrade Isaac R.’s resolution, “The Clean Break: Declaring Independence from the Democrats,” which both lays out the deleterious effects of DSA being in this party of Palestinian genocide and economic ruin and charts a course to immediately break that link. Although it fell short of the necessary signatures to be brought before the Convention, we urge clean break supporters to continue to circulate and discuss this resolution, which provides the strongest arguments for a clean break to date. As the Convention approaches, these discussions will be essential to cohering a solid bloc of clean break delegates at the Convention and beyond to demand the resolution get a hearing.

As the resolution makes clear, a major reason why Trump was able to win workers over in 2024 was because there was no significant, truly independent working-class opposition to Biden-Harris. At the time, JBA pushed DSA to start out on the path to fill this void and offered a means to do so: critical support to PSL’s presidential campaign, which drew lines against capitalism and lesser-evilism. Instead, DSA spent months embroiled in the Democratic Party primaries in the form of building the “uncommitted” movement, which closed up shop in advance of November to rally behind Harris—with the bulk of DSA following suit. This dragged the name of socialism through the mud and did nothing to distinguish DSA from the liberals, whom workers hate.

By promoting the Democrats as the answer, DSA has played a major role in widening the gap between the working class and the left. This gap must be closed to mobilize urgently necessary defense against Trump’s torrent of attacks on workers and all the oppressed. But the precondition is to drop all affiliation with the Democratic Party and reconstitute DSA independently of it. There are plenty of self-described Marxists in DSA, but the only way to actually be a Marxist in DSA is through fighting at every opportunity for an immediate break with the Dems. Those who cling to this imperialist party, notably including advocates of the dirty break strategy, only aid it at the expense of the socialist cause.

Dirty Break: A Road to Nowhere But the Democratic Party

The idea of the dirty break can be summed up as: DSA will use the Democratic Party to secure the election of “socialists” who can pass legislation on behalf of the working class and engage in other activity to build the basis for an independent workers party. It is a strategy rooted in the self-delusion that the Democratic Party is the horse and DSA the rider manipulating this major institution of the most powerful capitalist class on Earth into making itself an incubator for socialism. Nonetheless, this is the majority position in DSA today and the main obstacle preventing the organization from positively contributing in any kind of way to building a workers party.

The notion that these electeds are the key to winning reforms for working people and the oppressed is a dead end. AOC was elected to “abolish ICE” and fight for Medicare for All and a Green New Deal. What has she done? Parlayed these lying campaign promises into a bigger seat in the Democratic Party (smearing pro-Palestinian protesters, hustling for Biden/Harris and so on), not delivered anything to the working class. Now she tours the country with has-been Bernie Sanders to “fight oligarchy.” But like her past promises, this is little more than an effort to corral discontent with Trump back behind her section of the oligarchy.

Universal healthcare will be won through hard class struggle, not by convincing the capitalist parasites in the halls of Congress to care about people who don’t have access to life-saving drugs or medical treatment. Allying with representatives of the capitalist class like Bernie and AOC forecloses the possibility of getting anything. The two of them wouldn’t even fight the Democratic establishment on something as popular as expanded Medicare. The idea that these liberals would put up a fight to build a workers party is laughable.

The electeds aren’t allies of the oppressed, either, but rather gravediggers of living struggles. Take Rashida Tlaib, who retains widespread support among the DSA Left. Last year, she acted as the primary link between the pro-Palestine movement and the liberal wing of the Democratic Party. She provided the Democrats an invaluable service through her effort to keep outrage over the genocide in Gaza contained within the party fold. This culminated in the “uncommitted” swindle, which proved quite committed to Kamala Harris. To win a lasting ceasefire and free Palestine, workers action was and is needed to stop arms shipments to Israel. But none of these elected “socialists” called for anything remotely resembling such action and posed no threat whatsoever; instead, they continued to drum up hope in the Democrats, who were carrying out one of the worst crimes of the 21st century. If they wouldn’t break over genocide, they never will.

A more “left-wing” version of the dirty break argument (preferred by the Marxist Unity Group and Reform and Revolution) raises criticisms of the electeds, only to propose to put them under “DSA discipline” or to run openly as socialists against the Democratic Party on the Democratic Party ballot line. As this argument goes, abiding by “DSA electoral discipline” and voting as a Democrat against other Democrats will ensure a strong socialist force can be birthed before splitting from its capitalist parent. But this is beyond fatuous. The Democratic electeds can easily be replaced if they don’t toe the party line or otherwise provide some useful function to the liberal imperialists. There is no shortage of examples where the Democrats have simply sabotaged a campaign when the wrong candidate won the primary or put up another candidate against an incumbent (see the fate of Cori Bush). The whole idea that “actual socialists” can be elected as Democrats to organize and lead a split with the Democratic Party is the stuff fantasy series are made of—and would by design keep socialists running around in circles chained to the Democrats while the world burns around them.

At bottom, the dirty break is an expression of DSA’s big tent politics, which put a premium on unity between the Democratic Party’s open agents (the DSA Right) and those who see themselves as revolutionaries of some variety or another (the DSA Left). The big tent binds these elements together, entirely to the benefit of the Democrats and the capitalist ruling class. It allows the Right, with its Democratic Party connections, to dominate the organization and gives the Left a cover whereby it can talk about socialism in the sweet bye-and-bye and criticize the more egregiously liberal crap pushed by the Right. All this does is obscure the fact that, at the end of the day, the Left’s differences with the Right are not fundamentally principled, but tactical in nature.

Whereas the Right openly calls to support the Democrats as the lesser evil, the Left recognizes the unpopularity of the Democrats and so couches this support with “socialist” language. Reform and Revolution wants to run a “socialist” slate of Congressional Democratic primary candidates in 2026, for example. How is this any different from AOC and Tlaib calling themselves socialists? It isn’t, despite all the claims that these Democrats would be different because they would allegedly take their orders not from Hakeem Jeffries, but from the DSA NPC (which couldn’t even oppose Harris in last year’s election). Of course, Reform and Revolution itself called for a vote to Harris in swing states—giving away the whole dirty break game outlined in its resolution, “For a Socialist Party in Years, Not Decades,” which is to say, never a socialist party. The dirty break is disaster on repeat for the socialist movement and an expression of the liberal-reformist program widely prevalent in DSA, including among the Left.

Because of this, breaking with the Democratic Party in and of itself would not make the DSA a revolutionary party. But it would further the process of political clarification and provide a real avenue for revolutionaries in DSA to expose the bankruptcy of liberal-reformism and fight to win the best elements of the Left over to a revolutionary perspective. The Right would quit to follow the Democrats? Good—let them go where they belong! A DSA without the Democrats and the elected traitors would put the program of the Left to the test, as they would have no Right-wing to blame for their inability to win what working people need. The alternative is to keep walking down a road that promises only to widen the gulf between working people and socialists, driving the former further into the arms of reaction and ensuring the latter never have any impact to speak of.