"Capitalism is our top recruiter"

Photo from DSA Facebook page

Interview with Seattle-based Democratic Socialists of America activist* Whitney Kahn

*speaking in a personal capacity

The Democratic Socialist of America now has 55,000 members, the largest socialist organisation in decades. Jess Spear speaks with Whitney Kahn, a DSA activist based in Seattle about DSA’s explosive growth, the debates within it, and what the priority should be over the coming year.

How did the DSA grow from something like 5,000 members in 2015 to 55,000 today?

I think it's really something that we have the biggest socialist organisation in the US since the radical 1960s. How did it happen? Capitalism. Capitalism is our top recruiter.

People understand that their lives are not what they once were and are not gonna get better. We have climate change, police brutality, immigrant incarceration and abuse, and wealth inequality which is now the worst in the world.

People wanted change, but there was no one responding to that, until suddenly in 2015 you have Bernie Sanders give a voice to these issues and offer solutions.

When Sanders came in saying we will fight for free college and a $15 minimum wage nationally, that climate change should be treated as an emergency, this got people excited and wanting to get active in the campaign.

Bernie called himself a democratic socialist, so when these supporters looked it up, they found the DSA. The new members are mostly young people. They are getting organised and wanting to change the world, because they know it's necessary.

What role did Alexandria Ocasio Cortez’s (AOC) election play in building the DSA?

The day she won her primary election was the biggest one day jump in members of DSA. It would have been bigger if she was actively saying ‘join DSA’ -- I actually think she should have done that -- but people saw that she ran as a DSA member, and it helped her knock out a 20-year incumbent who was actually quite a heavy hitter of the establishment.

And, even though she is not that active, the fate of what she's for and what the DSA is for are linked. We have to remember that even though she's just an individual politician, the way she does politics is completely different than what most are familiar with. I mean, on her very first day in congress she went to a sit-in for a Green New Deal in [Speaker of the House of Congress] Nancy Pelosi’s office. This shows it’s possible to do politics in a different way, and people have taken it and run with it.

I would also say that her election in general showed that the momentum for Bernie Sanders presidential campaign in 2016 wasn’t just about Sanders. It was about the issues, and it shows that we can keep building this movement for the kind of society we so desperately need.

You recently had a national conference in which 1,000 delegates participated, what were the main lines of debate?

You know it's interesting. There were 89 different resolutions considered by the conference. It was a real exercise in how to have a democratic organisation. For many, it was their first experience of what that actually looks like.

Remember we’ve never had a working class party here in the US, and few have experience in a participatory organisation that we democratically control.

So it was incredibly exciting to see an explosion of people trying to steer the organisation.

The discussion and debates were varied and fascinating. The biggest and most significant was on what the role of our national leadership should be? How much power should it be authorised to have? Should we just have loosely connected autonomous locals or empower a national leadership to propose a strategic direction for the organisation? This larger debate summed up many of the resolutions being put forward. 

The other major debate was what to do about Trump and the 2020 elections. The main debate was whether the DSA should support any Democrat that runs against Trump or should we only support Bernie Sanders.

What passed were 2 things. First, DSA has decided that if Bernie loses the primary, we won’t endorse any other candidate. This speaks to the understanding that there's a fundamental difference between Bernie and all the other candidates. That he’s for building movements, is staunchly supportive of trade unions, and fundamentally for a different method of change, not the politicians, but the millions of people in the street organising for ourselves, that’s what will bring change. The reality is that there are 20 different politicians running and 1 organiser, Bernie Sanders.

Secondly, we also passed an aspirational goal that DSA stands for building an independent workers party, a political party without corporate influence.

Some of the more relatively conservative folks within DSA wanted to take that out. They are more open to the idea that we can reform the Democratic Party. But others said no, we need to build a workers party, we need our own party to bring about change. It was definitely the biggest and most heated debate. But it was exciting to see 1000 people there from around the country collectively debating the future for our movement.

What do you think should be the main focus of DSA over the next year?

That’s a really good question. There are, in terms of burning issues, there are so many that Trump is pushing into overdrive. At the moment immigration is extremely pressing because there are thousands of undocumented people being torn from their families right now; and not only that, there are thousands in detention camps, which some are calling concentration camps, and rightly so.

US immigration policy is all about fear. It’s about deterring people from coming here. So, they want to make it as horrible as possible. In doing so, it's absolutely disgusting how much they've blown human rights out of the water. This needs to be immediately addressed.

We’ve got also biggest wealth inequality in history, institutional racism and sexism which divides us and keeps us down. I'm an educator, i see it all the time in our schools.

But i think the biggest impact DSA can make in the coming year is engaging in the election for Bernie Sanders. While I think Bernie’s campaign should be our number one priority over the next year, that does not preclude getting involved in all of these other burning issues that we face. They are interlinked.

Rather than encourage people to get involved in his campaign directly, though, we’ve organised our own campaign to elect Bernie. We decided that we’re gonna run our own campaign, we’re gonna talk about movements, and we’re gonna help people get organised.

So many people, who are getting radicalised by Bernie’s campaign are interested in socialist ideas. We in DSA want to be there to help them get organised and stay organised, beyond Sanders. When he says, it's not me, it’s us, that means getting organised in a bottom up organisation like the DSA.