Over the course of little more than a week, DSA’s internal tensions were staged for a national audience. On ABC, Jonathan Karl read Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) a list of demands from the organization’s recently adopted program: defund the Pentagon, close U.S. military bases overseas, abolish the police and prisons, abolish the Senate, and bring essential corporations and industries into public ownership. Did she support them? “No,” she answered. People could organize around those ideas if they wished, but her responsibility as an elected official is to win healthcare and address the “immediate economic problems” facing working people. Earlier in the interview, responding to Karl’s reference to demands that emerged around the George Floyd uprising, she waved away the period with the remark that “Woke 1 was crazy.”
Fox put the same political program on-screen during an interview with DSA National Co-Chair Megan Romer and demanded a rapid series of true-or-false answers. Abolish the Senate? True. Abolish ICE? Absolutely. Borders? As a long-term goal, yes. Prisons? Again, in the long term. Public ownership of major corporations? Absolutely. The format did exactly what Fox intended: It reduced DSA’s program to a succession of alarming-sounding demands while denying Romer the time to explain the struggles and experiences that have led people to question those institutions in the first place.
The effect was to divide socialist politics into an “acceptable” and an “unacceptable” form. AOC appeared as the practical socialist who understands the responsibilities of governing, while Romer appeared as an ideologue carrying around a collection of distant and extreme goals. Republicans used Romer’s answers to portray DSA as an existential threat; liberals can point to AOC as evidence that progressive politicians who actually win office do not take the program too seriously.
Eric Blanc’s WNYC interview gave that contrast an interpretation from within DSA. Blanc, a member of Bread and Roses who describes himself as mostly sympathetic to the right wing of DSA, said that this sector identifies with “mass politics”: making socialism legible to millions, recruiting on a large scale, and electing candidates who can improve people’s lives. According to Blanc, the so-called left wing sees itself as more consistently revolutionary and less vulnerable to co-optation, but in his view its lack of experience with mass politics leads it toward doctrinaire positions — above all, abolishing the police and prisons — that isolate DSA and burden its successful candidates.
But what he calls mass politics adapts DSA to what elected officials can defend inside the Democratic Party, rather than asking how electoral advances can help the masses become more organized, conscious, and confident in their own power.
The Political Logic Behind Blanc’s “Mass Politics”
Behind the controversy over Romer’s answers lies a real debate about how to connect DSA’s goals to present struggles against police violence, deportations, war, and undemocratic institutions. The program itself does not answer that question. It places immediate reforms alongside radical goals without explaining how today’s struggles can build the social force needed to win them, or how DSA can possibly confront the state and capitalist interests while remaining electorally tied to the Democratic Party.
Blanc’s argument starts from a legitimate concern: socialists should not simply repeat radical slogans without thinking about how to reach broader layers. But he makes electoral reach the principal test of a correct political line: the chapters that recruit the most members and elect the most candidates are assumed to have found it. Instead of asking how those electoral advances can be transformed into an independent force capable of organizing its own power, forcing elected officials to answer to its demands, and confronting them when they become obstacles, his framework revises the program around what those officials can plausibly defend while governing and running as Democrats.
This framework also explains why Blanc goes so far as to reject police and prison abolition even as long-term goals: “There’s not a mass movement right now to defund the police or abolish prisons,” Blanc argues, describing the position as reflecting “a lack of engagement in mass politics.” For a strategy like Blanc’s, centered on elected officials governing as Democrats within the existing state, abolition cannot appear as a practical objective; it appears as an ideological burden on those officials. The absence of such a movement today thus becomes evidence that abolition should be removed from the socialist horizon, rather than a strategic problem of how a movement capable of dismantling those institutions could be built.
However, the fact that police and prisons cannot be abolished as isolated institutions while capitalism survives because they defend private property, repress strikes and uprisings, and enforce the racial and class relations on which the system rests does not mean waiting for socialism.
Socialists should fight now to remove police from schools and mental-health responses, dismantle repressive units and surveillance, defend protesters, reduce incarceration, and transfer resources toward housing, healthcare, education, and services that are democratically controlled by workers and communities. And in the process of those struggles, socialists should use all the means at their disposal — whether it is a political campaign, a speech at a picket line, or even an interview — to denounce the racist nature of the police and the system they protect, as millions of people did when they took the streets in 2020.
The alternative to repeating “abolition” without explanation is not erasing the conclusions generated by mass struggle. It is connecting immediate anti-carceral fights to the need to abolish the capitalist system these institutions defend.
Nor are these questions external to the political opening Blanc wants to protect. That opening was itself created by struggles that pushed beyond the limits elected officials now treat as politically realistic. It did not emerge by separating immediate economic concerns from questions of police violence, imperialism, or the state. Sanders’s campaigns mattered, but so did the George Floyd uprising, the movement for Palestine, resistance to ICE in Minneapolis and elsewhere, and a new wave of labor organizing. People want healthcare, affordable housing, and higher wages; many of the same people have watched Democratic officials repress protests, defend Israel, administer deportations, and side with employers. These experiences do not produce a uniformly revolutionary consciousness, but they make it impossible to dismiss repression and imperialism as questions that exist only “down the road.”
Our Time Put Blanc’s “Mass Politics” to the Test
What to do with this political opening was not an abstract question. After Mamdani’s victory, Our Time offered one answer. The organization was launched to channel the energy of a campaign that had mobilized roughly 100,000 volunteers. On paper, it seemed ideally suited to the kind of mass politics Blanc advocates: broader and easier to enter than DSA, focused on Mamdani’s popular affordability agenda as the cost of living squeezed New Yorkers, and freed from the ideological and programmatic disputes that supposedly repel ordinary people.
Its central campaign was “Tax the Rich,” aimed at pressuring Albany to fund universal childcare, free buses, and other promises. Yet when Governor Kathy Hochul opposed raising taxes on the wealthy and corporations, Mamdani declined to attend Our Time’s major Albany rally while preserving his negotiating relationship with her. More than 1,000 people came — a meaningful turnout, but a fraction of the electoral army the organization claimed it could reactivate. Within months, nearly all its staff had resigned. In August, less than a year after launching, Our Time announced that it would close.
Its collapse was not caused by “Tax the Rich” being too radical, nor can it be reduced to organizational mistakes. The crisis was political. Hochul’s opposition could have become a reason to escalate the campaign. Instead, because Our Time was built around Mamdani’s governing strategy within the Democratic Party, his decision to hold back set the limits for the movement as well. It had gathered supporters for the mayor, but had not built a force capable of acting when their demands conflicted with his negotiations.
The adaptation meant to avoid alienating a broader layer ended up emptying out its political role. People who had knocked on doors believing they could change the city became a base of maneuver: called upon when pressure helped the mayor and stood down when it complicated his strategy. That is alienating, too, in its own way: when people’s aspirations are continually narrowed to what an elected official believes can be negotiated, their energy does not necessarily become more moderate. Often, it simply dissipates.
“Tax the Rich” could have become the starting point for another kind of mass politics: organizing workers and tenants around the cost of living, keeping decisions in their hands, and preparing them to confront every force standing in the way. Instead of a pressure campaign whose timing was determined by Mamdani’s negotiations, it could have organized workers, tenants, parents, and transit riders independently of City Hall through committees rooted in unions, workplaces, schools, and neighborhoods.
Hochul’s refusal would then have posed the real strategic choice: reduce people’s demands to what the Democratic Party would accept, or widen the struggle against the corporations, real-estate interests, and state institutions protecting them. That is how the masses become protagonists of politics rather than an mass audience around elected officials.
From Electoral Enthusiasm to Independent Power
Blanc starts from the assumption that revolutionary socialists give up aspirations to organize the masses for ideological purity. But the primary question for socialists is how to organize working-class anger at the system and a rejection of leaders who uphold the status quo into a social force capable of fighting in its own interests. It is not about finding the right electoral calculus that upsets the fewest people, but about fighting to create and nurture spaces where the working class comes together and decides for itself how to carry our struggles forward.
DSA is an organization that is uniquely positioned to play this kind of role. Thousands of people are flocking to the organization, inspired by the success of progressives in the Democratic Party primaries or by wins such as Mamdani’s in New York. Many are joining DSA not simply to be another foot solider in a political campaign, but because they are inspired by an alternative to capitalism and because they want to take an active role in struggles against exploitation and oppression.
After Mamdani’s victory, campaign volunteers could have been brought together with union members, tenants, students, anti-ICE organizers, and activists from the movements for Palestine and against police violence. Assemblies and committees across the city could have discussed how to fight for the affordability agenda, what to do when Hochul refused to tax the rich, and how to respond when Mamdani’s negotiations conflicted with the movement’s demands.
Such bodies could coordinate workplace meetings, demonstrations, tenant actions, and preparations for strikes. They could demand that Mamdani and other DSA representatives report back, explain their negotiations, and submit strategic decisions to open debate. These institutions would be broader than DSA because participation would not require prior agreement with socialism. But they would also offer much more than a politically diluted pressure campaign: they would allow people to become active participants in determining the struggle.
Within these bodies, socialists could openly argue for class independence, opposition to imperialism, the dismantling of the repressive state apparatus, and a break with the Democratic Party. They would not have to conceal their program in order to achieve unity, nor would they demand agreement with it as a precondition for common action.
In this way, such bodies take on a life of their own, enabling them to overcome the limits imposed by accepting bourgeois democracy as the only way to win demands for our class and strike back at our class enemies. When our struggles are not tethered to initiatives in City Hall or Congress, then we can organize to fight until we win, not until a politician decides we’ve gotten enough, either through concession or repression. That is how we realize our power and that is how we convince more people to enter the struggle, coordinating on larger scales and adding fuel to the fight.
This is what mass politics should mean: not merely reaching millions, but helping those millions become more organized, conscious, and confident in their own power. Electoral victories can contribute to this process, but only if they are subordinated to developing struggle from below.
Angie Nixon’s victory in a red state like Florida shows how wide the opening for doing mass politics may be. At the same time, AOC’s recent trajectory shows the pressure to contain it, and Our Time shows how quickly an electoral mobilization can dissipate when it lacks an independent organization.
In this context, Blanc is right that we have to reach millions. But the measure of mass politics is not how many votes a campaign wins. It is how much independent power it leaves behind.
The post What Does It Mean to Engage in Mass Politics? A Response to Eric Blanc appeared first on Left Voice.
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