The “Economic” Is Political

Across DSA, questions of how to organize at points where the working class has the potential to exercise coercive economic power against the capitalist class are taken increasingly seriously. 

This is an extraordinarily positive development, after decades of the US Left being unmoored from a clear class basis and analysis. While many comrades acknowledge the centrality of building sufficient working class coercive economic power to defeat the capitalist class, few have sufficiently integrated this knowledge into their practice or theory. 

At no point can this question fall by the wayside. As exciting as drafting the perfect program or electing another socialist to office may be, the most well-thought out political program or party platform does not, itself, produce a working class that is more empowered, organized, and capable of acting politically. 

However, the election of Zohran Mamdani, followed by further electoral victories in New York City, Washington, DC, and Colorado, has led to DSA becoming the largest socialist organization in US history, showing definitively that DSA’s growth is driven by electoral events that put us in the national spotlight. 

So, the fact that nearly every other national caucus in DSA has its eye trained firmly “upwards” on the state and electoral terrain can, to some extent, be forgiven. A huge fraction of the working class in this country understand “politics” and “voting” to be synonymous, and thus tend to think of political organizations like DSA in relation to elections, legislative politics, and the state. If we want DSA to be a mass organization, we have to incorporate these facts into our recruitment and retention strategies. 

While elections might be the sort of work that helps us grow fastest, they are not the type of work that most directly increases the power, organization, and self-activity of our class. This is why we in DSA must put a premium on building independent, class-struggle, durable proletarian organizations capable of wielding coercive economic power against the capitalist class. The construction of such collective coercive economic power is not separate from “politics.” 

Ultimately, the presence or lack of such power is what will determine whether the politicians we elect, or the programs we draft, stand any chance of accomplishing their stated goals. This argument follows from an analysis of our present moment: After a half-century of relentless neoliberal counter-revolution, the proletariat’s ability to inflict economic pain on the capitalist class has been profoundly weakened in the US.

The argument put forward by Communist Caucus is not quite, as comrades in Marxist Unity Group (MUG) have put it, that “the working class must be ‘formed as a class’ (read: organized) before the formation of a party and determination of its program” (emphasis added).¹  This is not a question of sequence (first organization, then program/party), but a question of emphasis in our present historical moment.

Though overly dogmatic conceptions of “the party” could lead to farcical imitations (conscious or otherwise) of late-19th-century German Social Democrats or Lenin’s Bolsheviks, DSA should still consider how to build organizations that allow for the coordination of working class militants across geography, sector, and identity to unify around particular demands and tactics (a party) and put forward clear demands and plans to the broader working class (a program). 

In a time of profound proletarian disorganization, however, the most effective forms of political practice do not begin from a formal organization debating and arriving at the correct ideas. Instead, they begin from the day-to-day struggles of workers and tenants. A party can primarily orient itself to those struggles, so this is not an explicit objection to a “party” as such — although most self-described “partyist” formations in DSA still appear to emphasize correct ideas over day-to-day struggles.  

MUG has done the most of any tendency in DSA to articulate what a “partyist” approach to shop-floor struggles might entail. The tendency, as currently articulated and practiced, runs the risk of a quixotic frontal ideological assault on the institutions that represent capitalist state power in this country, such as the US Constitution and the most odious institutions it created to enshrine rule by economic elites (including the Senate, the Supreme Court, and the Electoral College). The sheer amount of national media coverage of DSA’s new “Workers Deserve More” program demonstrates that comrades in MUG, and others focused on DSA having a clear program, are tilting at some of the right windmills (and that the release of the program was extraordinarily well-timed with our recent primary victories). 

There’s nothing wrong with plainly and clearly stating to the American public that institutions like the Senate and Electoral College must be abolished — but we must not subordinate the concrete organization of the working class to ideological battles at the level of the state and media. 

DSA has been polarized around many questions since its rebirth in 2017, and many caucuses have attempted to frame these polarizations to their own advantage. These have included debates about “electoral” vs. “non-electoral” struggle, as well as attempts to brand divides within the organization as falling along a  “DSA Left” vs. “DSA Right” divide (or the alternative suggested by the so-called “DSA Right” as actually being about “mass politics” vs. “sectarianism”). MUG and other caucasus are currently trying to polarize DSA along still-undefined “partyist” vs. “non-partyist” lines. 

Another fundamental question is whether DSA should be primarily oriented around a “class consciousness” or “class composition” approach.  While this might appear to be a philosophical question, it has real implications for strategy and tactics — including whether the class struggle is, in the final instance, a contest of power or a contest of ideas. “Between equal rights,” Marx once wrote of the conflicting claims of workers and capital to direct society in their own respective interests, “force decides.” 

For the more traditional electoralists in DSA, the “consciousness” mistake largely stems from a belief that socialism can be legislated by existing state institutions through appealing to voters and winning elections. This variant of the consciousness mistake is worthy of its own critique, but the line of argument here is directed more to groups that, like MUG, believe in the need to fundamentally transform society but act as if that will primarily be accomplished through ideological, electoral, and legislative struggle rather than through the recomposition of the class.

Our ability to walk off the job or withhold our rent remain two of the most effective weapons available to the working class. To avoid building castles in the air, all of our work on all terrain — electoral, tenant, labor, legislative, movement, street, etc. — must always return to this basic question: Are we building the collective capacity of our class to exert economic coercion against our exploiters and oppressors? The class-composition approach orients us toward this foundational question.² 

The “Economic” as Political

To understand why the construction of the coercive economic power of our class must be the primary task of socialists today, we need to dispel a common misconception — that the “economic” and “political” spheres are separate realms of power.  

Many socialists reify (perceive the results of human social relations as inherent attributes), the idea that the economic and political are separate. While capitalists are reliant on states and governments to ensure the smooth reproduction of capitalism, they work hard to give the appearance that they want “economic” questions to be separate from “political” ones. This is the ideological core of their arguments against state recognition of the legitimacy of labor unions, the regulation of wages, the provision of generous welfare benefits, etc. The free hand of the market should guide all of these things, and the “economy” should be run via the aggregation of decisions of individual capitalists, not via the “political” arena of the state. 

So, the temptation to distinguish between economic and political questions isn’t just a result of individual error or confusion. It’s a distinction that capitalism and capitalists actively reproduce, and thus feels real to working-class people in struggle. 

We must undertake organizing projects that unify and compose the class through action, bringing people together across socioeconomic differences: race, job title, gender, nationality, etc. 

At the same time, such organizing projects must rearticulate the “economic” as “political” — through putting forward demands that have to do with how the working class is organized socially or economically by the ruling class and that can only be won through conflict with capital (or a given representative of capital).

Labor and tenant unions and other durable class-independent organizations like DSA give us the organizational musculature necessary to bring these tasks together — articulating and winning class-struggle demands, taking action beyond the span of any individual cycle of struggle, and building ongoing solidarity across differences that otherwise divide the class. Our aim is to build a society where the appearance of separate “economic” and “political” spheres of power disappears. But without organized coercive economic power, DSA is a car without an engine.

The blurriness between the economic and political is especially apparent when we consider terrains like public-sector unionism and organizing by the unemployed, as Melinda Cooper has pointed out.³ For example, some workers involved in the United Auto Workers strikes at the University of California from 2019 to 2024 point to the public articulation of a cost-of-living adjustment (or COLA) wage demand tied to increases in rent as exactly the kind of “political” articulation of a classic “economic” demand that, if won, would have helped recompose the class and disorganize capital by tying asset appreciation to increased wages. This 2022 strike, as well as the 2019 UC Santa Cruz wildcat, laid the organizational foundation which made the UAW’s strike for Palestine in 2024 possible. Previous and formally “economic” demands (which were actually always political) gave way to formally “political” demands like those made during the strike for Palestine. In this case, and in many others, it’s clear that class-struggle politics can emerge just as much, if not more, through the fight for demands than through the content of the demands themselves. 

There is no stronger evidence that struggles over wages (including the social wage) are of paramount political importance to the ruling class than the fact that they remade the US economy in the 1970s and ‘80s to suppress wages and get Americans bought in to capitalism through asset appreciation (mostly via home ownership, and to some extent via stocks).⁴⁵ Tying workers’ prosperity to home prices, rather than to victories won on the picket line, makes it easier for capital to forge a cross-class alliance of property ownersand adds a material motivation to anti-crime hysteria. Reorienting the source of prosperity from struggle and solidarity to the inflation of asset value has had huge implications for the social and political composition of the class, effectively reorienting workers toward an individual rather than collective approach to securing dignity for themselves and their loved ones. 

It’s unquestionable that the problem “isn’t just disorganization” (as our MUG comrades put it), and that the working class will need to articulate general demands and directly oppose capitalism beyond the scope of any given industry or employer.⁶ But it’s also unquestionable that any bold class-wide demands are on a road to nowhere with the current level of proletarian disorganization. 

Composition vs. Consciousness, and Proletarian Disorganization

Independent, class struggle, durable working-class organizations are central to any road to socialism. Let’s define each of these terms:

• Independent – run by and for the working class, broadly defined as people dependent on either wages from an employer or the social wage (such as a pension or government benefits) in order to survive. 
• Class struggle – explicitly aimed at fighting the capitalist class, and naming and articulating who and what they are struggling against (capitalists and capitalism). The proletarian organizations we seek to build have to contest power and put forward demands – these organizations can have reading groups and provide charity, but that can’t be their purpose. 
• Durable – situated on the terrain of everyday life – sites of struggle that produce and reproduce opportunities for proletarians to build power, fight the capitalist class, and develop themselves as protagonists within those struggles. Two clear examples of this are organizations built on tenant and labor struggles.⁷ But other working class organizations that are democratically run and allow for rank-and-file initiative (so as not to become brittle and stale and so they can train new generations of leadership) can also be durable, including DSA.  

The main current limitation of DSA, in these terms, is that we cannot independently threaten the economic survival of this country’s ruling class. This limitation is downstream of the overall lack of organization of the class and the associated lack of experience waging coordinated struggles aimed at economic coercion of the capitalists. We need to develop and recruit a large layer of skilled organizers within DSA who carry out work in other proletarian organizations, such as tenant and labor unions. We can not address this core problem by recruiting more people to DSA or getting more people to vote for our candidates. This lack of organization will not be solved via calls to abolish the Senate, or through direct persuasion of workers to follow the DSA line on questions of state policy. Again, there is nothing inherently wrong with such calls or persuasion if carried out effectively — what is at hand is a question of emphasis and priority rather than sequence. 

Put another way, the primary emphasis must be on the composition of the class rather than the consciousness of the class. At this moment, we must be more concerned with what actions our class can take than we are with what our class thinks. 

We must examine the patterns and changes in how capital attempts to organize the working class in order to identify opportunities to compose and recompose the working class against capital. 

Many comrades in DSA adopt a different approach, considering the level of working-class organization to primarily be a result of consciousness (or lack thereof). It’s the job of enlightened socialists to educate workers about their “real interests” — whether through getting them to talk about our program or getting them to vote for our candidate. The right demands articulated correctly will bring the class-conscious layers of the proletariat into the ranks of “the Party” to follow our correct ideas and leadership. This is an ultimately idealistic approach, which argues that ideas and slogans are what primarily drive history toward socialism.

A class-composition approach draws from a different set of ideas about how the proletariat may win socialism for itself. Class composition can be divided into three different categories. Technical composition refers to how the working class is organized by capital in order to meet the needs of capitalist production. Social composition refers to “the specific material organisation of workers into a class society through the social relations of consumption and reproduction” – i.e. how workers are organized (and organize themselves) in a class society outside the workplace (in terms of gender, race, nationality, culture, sexuality, family, etc.). Political composition refers to the self-organization of the working class “into a force for class struggle” such as labor and tenant unions, workers’ political parties, etc. 

We must remake the technical and social composition of the working class in our own interests, for our own ends, against those of capital. It is not an uptick in class consciousness that will allow us to do that, but the building of working-class political composition. Capital has disorganized us — both on a concrete, organizational level through head-on attacks on working class culture and institutions, and on a more fundamental level by producing and reproducing a segmented and decomposed working class divided against itself in a myriad of profound ways (by race, gender, citizenship, education, sexuality, and so on). The political composition of the proletariat will allow us to disorganize and ultimately abolish capital. 

Attempts to recompose the class must go beyond urging workers to organize into existing unions and leaving it at that. One could argue that unions that fail to undertake meaningful class struggle fail to politically compose the working class at all. The aim is to reconstitute a set of habits of rank-and-file-led class struggle that have been largely lost in the US, not merely to increase union density. 

Struggles at points of working-class economic leverage — those that aim to bring about this sort of class composition — are highly political. In fact, they’re more political than many of the electoral races that voters conceive of as politics, because they bring workers into organized conflict with their class enemies. 

Proletarian disorganization is itself a form of capitalist organization. That is, in our present moment, the working class is organized (technically and socially) — but almost exclusively by capital, rather than through its own independent organizations built around class struggle (politically). Capital has launched an all-out global assault on the political composition of the proletariat in the last half-century. The technical and social composition of the proletariat has simultaneously been reorganized by capital in ways that have further undermined our political composition. 

Thinking about the process of working class composition allows us to strategize dynamically rather than copying and pasting old dogmas into political moments where the technical, social, or political composition of the working class are significantly different.⁸ Analysis flowing from the compositions of the class allows us to develop tactics and strategies informed by our moment, rather than measuring ourselves by our fidelity to a model from Russia in 1902.⁹

Efforts to recompose the class do oftenentail going up directly against the state, both as DSA proper and as DSA members situated as tenant and workplace organizers within other proletarian organizations. But those adopting a class-consciousness approach in DSA have, thus far, typically ended up emphasizing correct ideas and slogans over struggle and organization. 

Conclusion

The political composition of our class must take place via a variety of durable, class-struggle-oriented, democratic, independent organizations wielding collective coercive economic power against the capitalist class, if it is to take place at all. Tendencies in DSA that emphasize the role of the party and the program over the construction of collective coercive economic power have it exactly backwards. 

This is not to deny the role of demands. But the kinds of demands that will bring working-class people into struggle will not just be those articulated centrally by a party apparatus through internal debate (a program). Demands by workers and tenants directly on bosses and landlords — both for dignity and to reclaim value from their exploiters — will in many cases be just as, if not more, political than direct demands on the state. Both kinds of demands (and cases where they overlap, such as public-sector workplace struggles) can give socialists an opportunity to organize inside and outside of tenant and labor unions and build the kind of proletarian organizations that can end capitalism. DSA urgently needs to develop well-rounded organizers who can switch between these different levels of struggle and articulate the relationships between them, rather than activists trained to spread party gospel.

In the face of proletarian disorganization, our emphasis must be on building durable and independent proletarian organizations to build the coercive economic power of our class. Comrades in DSA must prioritize this hard mass work of politically composing our class above all else. 

If the communist hypothesis is that “this world is not necessary” and communism is “the real movement to abolish the present state of things,” then our interventions must always return to the forms of organization that best increase our ability to win this ultimate abolition. 

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1.  Tasks and Perspectives — Marxist Unity Group (Task #24) ↩︎
2.  Ellen Meiksins Wood, The Separation of the Economic and the Political in Capitalism, NLR I/127, May–June 1981 b ↩︎
3.  This argument is detailed in Cooper’s two recent interviews on The Dig. Counterrevolution w/ Melinda Cooper and  From Fiscal Austerity to Monetary Abundance w/ Melinda Cooper  ↩︎
4. By the social wage we mean pensions, government provided benefits, etc. ↩︎
5.  Cooper’s Dig interviews, again ↩︎
6.  Unite the Class! — Marxist Unity Group ↩︎
7. To be clear, DSA also offers advantages that labor unions, in particular, lack, such as the ability to put more militant demands on the state on terrains of racial solidarity, anti-imperialism, and social reproduction than most official unions are willing to put forward at this time. ↩︎
8. Salar Mohandesi- 2013- “Class Consciousness Or Class Composition” ↩︎
9. For his part, Lenin once argued that the “the very gist, the living soul, of Marxism” is “a concrete analysis of a concrete situation”. Many contemporary Leninists fail to apprehend this. ↩︎