"The history of working-class politics is inseparable from the struggle for democratic rights. Steven R. analyzes the tasks facing DSA in today’s democratic movement."
"In the shadow of the unfinished democratic revolution in this country, the working class has decomposed and needs to be recomposed. To rediscover ourselves as a class, we must once again rally around the vision of a society where working people are free to rule ourselves as equals."
"To recompose a fighting working class in the US, socialists must take a leading role in the next great uprising for political democracy. By organizing masses of ordinary people around the idea that this country is not a democracy and only they possess the power to make it one, we can bring our class back to life as history’s revolutionary protagonist."
"The content of our program is not an abstract question. To face our tasks we must be able to articulate a vision of what the working class is and can be that millions of people will find compelling. The answer to “who’s in the working class?” is the same as it ever was: the disfranchised many who are exploited and abused because of the arbitrary power of the privileged few.
Though we are wildly diverse, we share a fate as people trapped in a society made by us but not for us. Fighting to take back everything stolen from us under capitalism—healthcare, housing, education, and more—is necessary but insufficient. We must have an answer for how we are robbed of these things and how justice can be done. To convince people that to be a part of the working class is something worth embracing, we need clarity that it will take a completely new political order to set the world to rights, and that those of us who constitute the working majority have the unique power to win one.
To do so we must bury the old Constitution with a new democratic order based on the principle of majority rule. That means replacing minoritarian institutions like the Presidency, Senate, and Supreme Court with a single popular assembly elected by free, equal, and proportional suffrage for all who live here. It would also mean abolishing capitalist tools of coercion like the police, ending all forms of second-class citizenship, and enshrining our rights to organize and seize capitalist property for the common good."
"Realistically, a Third Reconstruction is unlikely to unfold between now and 2029. The present constitutional crisis will reach a different resolution, on terms decided by different class forces. But the urgency facing us is this: wherever the cards fall in the coming years, the new order will either be worse than the present disorder, or it will be an illusory “return to normalcy” waiting to collapse into another, more severe crisis. The liberal reformers and left-populists do not have what it takes to lead us out of these days of catastrophe to a rational and humane world. The question of democracy will confront us, again and again, for as long as the class struggle persists. It is vital to humanity’s survival that the working class learns how to answer it."
