Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City has thrust the socialist movement in the United States into the spotlight.
David Duhalde is a long-time democratic socialist organizer who has held leadership positions with the Democratic Socialists of America and its non-profit organization, the DSA Fund. He currently works as a public service trade unionist in New York City.
Yet American socialism is neither new nor obscure: over 100 years ago, the Socialist Party of America was an important, explicitly socialist formation that scored a number of electoral success in its heyday. Today, by far the largest socialist organization in the US is the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), whose members include Mamdani and several progressive members of Congress.
Mamdani’s victory in New York is as good an occasion as any to explore the history and present of this, as journalist John Nichols calls it, “American tradition”. To this end, David Duhalde undertakes an ambitious comparison of the “old” Socialist Party with the “new” Democratic Socialists of America in this new study from the Rosa Luxemburg Foundation’s New York Office.
Duhalde avoids ideological platitudes or sectarian point-scoring, instead tracing the most important debates and controversies then and now. In doing so, he shows that the Socialist Party led by Eugene V. Debs already debated many of the issues and controversies that are still relevant today, such as trade union work, the relationship between party and movement, and participation in elections.
At the same time, we learn a great deal about the relevance of socialism in the US in general and about the most important debates within the DSA in particular. His descriptions of the different currents and caucuses within the DSA are also very useful, especially for an international readership. As Duhalde concludes: “The leftists of different stripes that make up DSA today will have to work together to resolve the questions and debates, like the SP before it. Opportunities and challenges are best handled together —
not separately. Democratic unity, not organizational unanimity, will be the best pathway forward to holding the socialist tent together.