by Gregory Lebens-Higgins
At the end of August 2024, the Democratic Socialists of America released the 2024 Program: Workers Deserve More! This document is the result of a resolution passed by the 2023 DSA National Convention, titled “Defend Democracy through Political Independence.” The resolution called on the National Political Committee to “prepare for the 2024 national election by putting forward a positive program modeled after our 2020 DSA-For-Bernie campaign platform.”
“Neither major party is capable of advancing a positive program for the 2024 elections that meets the needs of the majority of Americans,” reads the preamble. “That’s why [DSA] is presenting a bold alternative course of action. In our 2024 program, ‘Workers Deserve More,’ we hope to bring together millions of people throughout the U.S. to fight for a true democracy where working people have control over their own lives, their government, and the economy.”
The program presents a series of essentially legislative proposals, including Medicare For All, a Green New Deal, reduced military spending, and elimination of the Electoral College. As a presentation accompanying the program elaborates, Workers Deserve More “represents our vision for a new workers’ party and what socialists could do if we are elected into office at every level of government.”
The realization of these policies would not on their own “achieve socialism.” Indeed, they do not radically exceed the policy proposals of Bernie Sanders’s presidential runs, and the program itself has been criticized from within DSA as “advanc[ing] a reformist vision of socialism.” So, if Workers Deserve More presents only moderate goals for the socialist movement, does it hold any value?
The “Minimum” Program
As Jean Allen recently asserted in Red Star, “With a clear platform, our conversations can start to be about programmatic issues facing the left, rather than interpersonal squabble. With a clear platform, we will no longer have to filter our political differences through interpersonal loyalties. With a clear platform, we could unite the left in a substantive way.”
Various tendencies within the socialist movement have competing visions for “actually existing socialism.” But arguments about the higher stage of socialism—a prospect that appears discouragingly far in the future—are evocative of utopian thinking that provides no clear path toward its realization. To orient the movement to its task and explain its cause to the masses, a program must define clear and achievable goals.
These immediate goals comprise the “minimum” program. While the minimum program does not contend an immediate break with capitalism, it heightens the contradictions of capitalism and represents a step toward its dissolution. The achievement of each minimum demand fundamentally transforms the field for the next stage of the battle.
While reforms are criticized for their potential to be co-opted by capital, these “non-reformist reforms” present a direct challenge to the dominance of capital. “The struggle will advance,” said proponent of this theory, André Gorz, as “each battle reinforces the positions of strength, the weapons, and also the reasons that workers have for repelling the attacks of the conservative forces.” Revealing new possibilities, each campaign is an opportunity to organize an increasingly conscious working class toward further objectives.
The labor struggle unquestionably remains the core of the socialist movement. It is workers, as producers of value, who have the ability to cut off the capitalist class from its source of power: profit. It is workers who hold the revolutionary potential to overcome the conditions of their exploitation by seizing the means of production. But as Marx recognized, the “organization of the proletarians into a class, and, consequently into a political party, is continually being upset again by the competition between the workers themselves.”
While workers are equalized toward the same relative position under the domination of capital, they are alienated from one another by the compulsion to market their labor. In the words of business guru Tom Peters, “We are CEOs of our own companies: Me Inc.” Success under neoliberalism requires the personal branding of curated LinkedIn profiles alongside callous ambition. Simultaneously, capitalist propaganda cultivates conflicting interests, fears, and identities among the working class. Despite this fracturing, the organization of the proletarians “ever rises up again, stronger, firmer, mightier,” predicts Marx.
The working class is variously oppressed along these differing lines of identity. Unfortunately, reactionary elements within the socialist movement would sacrifice marginalized groups in favor of a purely economic struggle. Lenin recognized the importance of organizing across these lines, declaring in What is to Be Done, “Agitation must be conducted with regard to every concrete example of . . . oppression,” which “affects the most diverse classes of society [and] manifests itself in the most varied spheres of life and activity—vocational, civic, personal, family, religious, scientific, etc.”
“Any and every manifestation of police tyranny and autocratic outrage, not only in connection with the economic struggle,” says Lenin, “is not one whit less ‘widely applicable’ as a means of ‘drawing in’ the masses” (emphasis in original). The minimum program identifies which levers can be pulled to relieve pressure from our collective oppression.
The “Maximum” Program
It is no secret that the transition to socialism must go beyond these minimum demands, fundamentally changing the incentives by which the necessities of society are produced and distributed. The aim of the socialist movement is no less than the universal emancipation of humanity without distinction of sex or race, as Marx announces in the preamble to the Programme of the Workers Party (1880).
A maximum program “represents the final goal of the party that will be attained after a period of economic reconstruction and social transformation,” explains Donald Parkinson in his defense of the minimum-maximum program for Cosmonaut.
“It describes the general aim of human emancipation and that this must be achieved through the proletariat and its party coming to power and collectivizing the means of production. In other words, it proclaims the long-term goal of moving beyond capitalism into a communist society.”
The realization of the maximum program signifies collective ownership of the means of production, production directed toward meeting need rather than accumulating profit, and halting imperial expansion and unrestricted resource extraction. “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs,” per Marx. In short, the achievement of actually existing socialism.
The “Minimum-Maximum” Program
The socialist movement must be able to articulate both its immediate demands, and a call for the final overthrow of capitalism. A “minimum-maximum” program provides a roadmap for the achievement of this vision. Such a program “Allow[s] us to build a majority that is aware of what it is fighting for,” says Pakinson, while “exclud[ing] revolutionary phrasemongering and empty calls to action.”
While we are working toward the establishment of socialism, we must work within the material conditions of our current moment. Minimum demands present clear tasks for the socialist movement, while providing for flexibility as conditions change. The selection of campaigns through debate centers democratic participation, and facilitates an analysis of which minimum demands will help to achieve maximum goals. Legislative proposals also create clear red lines to hold DSA electeds accountable.
The socialist movement is not currently positioned to win a presidential election, establish a proletarian dictatorship, and immediately “seize the biggest 100 corporations.” A socialist society will not be birthed, wholly formed, following the proletarian revolution, but must be built. ”Between capitalist and communist society lies the period of the revolutionary transformation of the one into the other,” as Marx describes in his Critique of the Gotha Programme (1875).
While Workers Deserve More is based primarily around minimum demands, its preamble contains a nod to our maximum vision, namely, “To fight for a true democracy where working people have control over their own lives, their government, and the economy.” We must be sure that all our minimum demands function toward achieving these ends.
In our political moment, “Neither major party is capable of advancing a positive program for the 2024 elections that meets the needs of the majority of Americans.” While Republicans tap into the resentments of the precariat, they are incapable of mitigating the material conditions of exploitation, and instead scapegoat minorities. Democrats gesture to working class credentials, but consistently capitulate to their donor class. Workers Deserve More serves to heighten these contradictions, articulating what the socialist movement can achieve. Let us demonstrate this potential, so we can raise hopes and expectations to as yet unimaginable heights.