In politics, it is sometimes necessary to draw a hard line. Pauline Slaughter argues that the time to draw a line in the Democratic Socialists of American has arrived.
The Chinese-American Planning Council (CPAC) is a non-profit organisation based in New York City (NYC) that administers community service care programs. They service 8,000 people daily with over 50 programs at 30 locations citywide. The programs are primarily socially reproductive, such as early childhood education, youth services, workforce development, aged care, disability care, and home care.
Home care work involves workers staying for extended shifts at a patient’s home to support them with daily tasks and meet their needs. The needs of patients vary on a case-by-case basis; however, it is not uncommon for them to require 24-hour, round-the-clock care. Such as a patient with bed sores needing to be rotated every hour to prevent injury. This need does not result in rotating shifts for care workers, but instead impossible 24-hour shifts. These shifts are physically ruinous for workers who sometimes have to work multiple 24-hour shifts in a row. Despite working day in and day out, these workers are only paid for 13 hours of their work. The workers are formally guaranteed 11 hours of rest, for which they are not paid; however, since these patients require 24-hour care, workers are forced to work through their unpaid rest period, resulting in 24-hour shifts for only 13 hours of pay.
The stress put on a human being working for 24 hours is incomprehensible; the human body is not made for such tasks and the experiences of workers who’ve worked these shifts is harrowing.
Another worker says “From working 24-hour shifts, I’m mentally fatigued and hurt all over, my hands, my fingers, my shoulders and my back. Years of 24-hour shifts, pushing wheelchairs, running their errands really takes a toll on you. My joints hurt all the time and I frequently need headache relief medication. Sleep is so difficult. I wake up frequently in the middle of the night.” The unceasing brutality drains the workers of their vitality, the injuries they suffer are with them for life, and it isn’t long until they need 24 hour care themselves. Yet who will care for these workers? Other home care workers who, in a few years, will need 24-hour care themselves?
Two class-action lawsuits have been brought against CPAC by their own workers. Despite being brought forward over a decade ago, these class actions are still ongoing. The strategy of the CPAC is to drag out the case as long as possible and to force workers into arbitration whilst making active efforts to divide up the class-action into individual cases to isolate workers. The people put through this decade long legal torment are overwhelmingly elderly migrant workers, with chronic injuries and health problems which means if the lawsuit is delayed another decade, they are unlikely to be around to see it through.
Despite the brutal working conditions and blatant attack on the class, the CPAC has in some circles a progressive, even socialist-lite, reputation. In fact Wayne Ho, the CEO and President of the CPAC, is a member of Zohran Mamdani’s Transition Team. Comrade Wayne Ho serves alongside noted figures such as open Zionist Comrade Joseph Potasnik who compared student protestors campaigning against the genocide in Gaza to the builders of Nazi deathcamps.
Recently, comrades in various local branches of the NYC section of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) attempted to pass an internal bill calling for support of the No More 24 bill, which would limit the working day for careworkers to a measly 12 hour shift. With the expectation of elected DSA members to speak openly in favour of the bill, DSA communications to openly condemn the 24-hour workday and to “highlight the Chinese-American Planning Council’s exploitative practices, urging full restitution of Home Care Aides stolen wages.” The NYC-DSA’s labor working group was to encourage turnout to pickets, protests, and similar actions around the abolition of the 24-hour workday. Finally, the motion would include a question for candidates seeking NYC-DSA endorsement on the topic of wage theft and employee abuse.
This bill was in effect crushed by the NYC-DSA Citywide Leadership Committee (CLC) who amended the bill to keep only a moral condemnation without any concrete actions for NYC-DSA to undertake. The obligation to organise around pickets and protests gone, the endorsement required for candidates gone, the support for the no more 24 gone, and the mentions of the CPAC role in the exploitation of home-care aides gone. Comrades, as we all know, it is only on the last 12 hours of 24-hour shifts that struggling non-profit organisations can make their money back!
The decision for a socialist organisation not to oppose 24-hour shifts is unsurprising, considering it is their comrades that these workers are organising against. Comrade Wayne Ho alongside Comrade Joseph Potasnik and Comrade Jessica Tisch are part of the cross-class alliance that makes up Mamdani’s mayoral administration. It is an impossibility to oppose capital whilst managing the capitalist state. DSA is now pulled in two directions — when workers strike, and the police break the strike they’ve got comrades on both sides of the picket line.
The response to the CLC has laid bare all the thinly veiled deficiencies of a broad socialist formation. The Revolutionary section of DSA, alongside the vacillating low-activity independents have rightly attacked the cowardice of the CLC, whilst DSA Right has defended their comrades in Mamdani’s administration.
The DSA Right
The position of the DSA right is laid bare in Comrade Joe W’s article Political Disagreement in NYC-DSA: Breaking down the no more 24 vote and ensuing discourse.
Comrade Joe opens his article by vaguely writing about a prominent political faction that “has spread a narrative rife with intentional misinformation designed to elevate their position and obscure their minority status in the chapter”. This faction is not named, nor are any concrete examples given of the misinformation this unnamed faction presented. Allusions to complexity and nuance are constantly made with nothing to back them; instead Comrade Joe chooses to complain about the fact that “much of this factional attack happened on X, a public forum filled with bots, bad actors, and sectarians outside the organisation…” — as if it is the fault of the unnamed faction that Twitter is the most viable means for public discourse. It shouldn’t be a surprise that socialists, including dastardly outsiders and sectarians, may have opinions on the actions made by the largest section of the largest socialist organisation in the beating heart of capitalism. This should be especially unsurprising for Comrade Joe since he is a member of Boston DSA, not NYC-DSA.
Further, what is the point of factions if they are not able to openly disagree with one another? Factions must attack and debate one another to gain a majority for their position. Furthermore, these attacks should occur in public for the entire class to bear witness. To quote Lenin, “For there can be no mass party, no party of a class, without full clarity of essential shadings, without an open struggle between various tendencies, without informing the masses as to which leaders and which organisations of the Party are pursuing this or that line.“ Twitter is obviously not the ideal platform, but the internal DSA forums are not accessible to the class, the only way for the class and the socialist movement to express its views publicly is the already existing public infrastructure, which is unfortunately Twitter. When a viable alternative exists, then the socialist movement and the class should use it.
After his attack on the unnamed faction, he moves on to defending the CLC decision arguing that the no more 24 bill, which caps shifts at a measly 12 hours, would mean that their funding would be inadequate to fill the remaining 12 hours that was previously unpaid. Comrade Joe is correct that the passing of this bill would create financial problems and a care crisis. However, he fails to consider that those who are exhausted to the point of collapse are not capable of effectively providing dearly needed care.
The task of DSA is to heighten the class struggle, to fight for free healthcare and an expansion to Medicare, whilst fighting to end 24-hour shifts. Comrade Joe sees an emerging crisis and the exploitation of the working class and retreats, when he should instead expand the fight against capitalist domination.
Another argument put against the bill is its ties to progressive councillor Chris Marte. To be clear, Chris Marte is not a socialist; he does not fight for the universal liberation of humanity. He is a progressive who happens to have a lot of home care workers in his district and an interest in getting re-elected, thus he has taken the No More 24 bill as a pet project of his. It should not come as a surprise that Chris Marte supports the No More 24 bill; it is entirely within his interests to do so, and he may even have a personal belief in its importance. What should be a surprise is that a socialist organisation doesn’t.
Mamdani advertised himself as a socialist mayor through his platform of rent freezes, construction of new affordable houses, free bus fares, and free childcare. Reforms that will, if implemented effectively, improve the conditions of the working class in NYC. This is being done whilst closing a $12 billion deficit. Yet there is a cost of doing business; for Mamdani to achieve this program, he has to work with the bourgeoisie not against them. This cost is not paid by Mamdani but is instead paid by the most vulnerable section of the working class.
The reason for DSA’s unwillingness to commit to the no more 24 becomes obvious once we see who they are breaking bread with. To manage the capitalist state, you must bring to the table figures such as Comrade Wayne Ho or Comrade Joseph Potasnik, you must turn the other cheek when the NYPD bash protestors. The DSA right feels they must appeal to the progressive bourgeois and abandon the working class and socialism, to ensure the bourgeois is willing to help balance the budget.
The most important skill of Mamdani is not to raise the consciousness of the working class and to be a tribune for that class as it regains its strength, but instead is to defuse the class, to consolidate with the bourgeoisie, and to swindle the working class, betraying the efforts they made to bolster your campaign. Mamdani’s rhetoric here has been clear: the language of class war and fighting for a new world is out and the language of fiscal responsibility and cross-class alliance is in.
Part of the problem with Mamdani is that he is effective as a mayor. The budget for NYC is balanced. He’s fiscally responsible and manages the capitalist state better than any of his competitors would. Yet no budget can be balanced to work for both Wayne Ho and the 130,000 home care workers in NYC. Fully paying these workers for the hours worked and establishing two 12-hour shifts would be ruinous for the budget, Mamdani might even be forced to cut some of the $6.14 Billion dollars of funding for the NYPD!
The Left outside DSA
The socialist movement beyond DSA is comprised of various sects such as the Freedom Road Socialists Organisation (FRSO), the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL), the Communist Party of the United States of America (CPUSA), Socialist Alternative (SAlt)1, Revolutionary Communists of America (RCA), etc; The sect form representing a political immaturity of the socialist movement and the continuing crisis of world capital combine to put the question of party on the table. To comrades on the revolutionary wing of DSA many argue that DSA in of itself could become the party required yet in terms of active cadre the numbers of revolutionaries outside DSA is larger then the number inside.
DSA has not yet succeeded in bringing the various sects together and cohering them into a singular organisation, there is no guarantee that it will ever do so. Individuals do dual card and some sects such as the Spartacist league operate an internal caucus. Some sects have attempted to enter DSA with the result of losing members to the DSA. Yet there exist vast layers of revolutionaries and militants that simply do not engage with DSA. And who can claim to be surprised by this? Even if we do recognise the strategic error in not working within DSA, it should not be a shock that committed revolutionaries do not want to work within an organisation breaking bread with Zionists, Police Commissioners and CEO’s waging war on the working class.
What could be said to be the DSA’s greatest success, the enormously successful election of New York Mayor Mamdani, who is seemingly quiet regarding No More 24 despite his prior support of the campaign and late last year he apologised to the NYPD for his harsh comments. Mamdani has met with noted child rapist and genocide enthusiast Donald Trump. Recently, he joined Barack Obama to sing to pre-schoolers. Thankfully, none of them were Libyan! The failure here is not that Mamdani met with other politicians but that he met them as a fellow manager of the capitalist state seeking to negotiate. Mamdani shouldn’t have met with Obama and Trump to delude the working class that they can achieve their emancipation via the capitalist state but should’ve used his meeting to act as a tribune raising the rallying cry, and by extension the consciousness, of the working class.
It is difficult to point to the exact numbers of the revolutionaries outside of DSA. Sects such as FRSO were raided by the FBI in 2010 and since then does not publish its cadre numbers. The RCA claims to have a membership of 800 and SAlt claims to have just under 1,000 members. DSA, unlike the sects, does not require members to be active to stay within the organisation; thus, DSA has vast numbers of in-active members who pay dues but do not attend meetings and do not proactively engage within the organisation. The number of cadres within the sects are comparable to the numbers of active DSA members, especially when you consider that a number of active DSA members are themselves in sects such as those within the Spartacist League.
The formation of a communist party worthy of the name within the US will require a serious engagement with the sects and all revolutionary forces outside of DSA. The DSA could, hypothetically, grow into such a size that its sheer gravitational weight forces the sects to join, that its sheer bulk acts as a consuming mass dragging the RCI, PSL, and FRSO into DSA kicking and screaming, yet this is not guaranteed. DSA numbers have fluctuated with membership declining throughout 2021 to 2024. It is a strategic error for these sects not to involve themselves with DSA; ironically enough, their involvement would mean that the revolutionary wing of DSA would have a stable majority and could exert its will over the right. Yet not engaging with the sects outside of DSA is as much of an error as waiting for the craven sects to finally discover the necessity of joining DSA. The revolutionaries within DSA must be engaged with the revolutionaries outside it.
A split is coming to DSA, the formation of an independent Dues system by the DSA right alongside the creation of various front groups within an already federalised organisation are clear signs. The state loyalists and revolutionaries within DSA are incompatible, and with each passing crisis, this becomes clearer and clearer. The task of the revolutionaries within the DSA is not to prevent a split but to ensure they emerge victorious. The question becomes who controls critical resources within DSA, such as leases for offices, mailing lists, membership contact numbers and finances? The right of DSA will cry splitter yet they already do so at every chance they get. A newly formed organisation representing the revolutionary wing of the DSA, say the Revolutionary Socialists of America would be capable of forcing the question of party upon the sects and would be able to begin the decades-long process of building a communist party worthy of the name. This party would make no alliance with zionists or police commissioners, nor would it betray the working class to maintain good relationships with CEOs.
The right of DSA by their alliance with the bourgeoise have forced a split already; no longer can DSA claim to be in opposition to the enslavement of the working class, no longer can DSA say it stands against genocide, exploitation, slavery, and all forms of domination. For DSA stands with the slavers, with the exploiters, with the genocidal. The right has forced DSA to split from the working class and it is an absolute necessity that the revolutionaries within DSA organise to crush the right. As Lenin says “Unity with the social-chauvinists means unity with one’s “own” national bourgeoisie, which exploits other nations; it means splitting the international proletariat.”
- Note: Socialist Alternative does not refer here to an entirely separate organisation in Australia with a distinct political lineage. ↩︎
PARTISAN! 
You must be logged in to post a comment.