A Brief Overview of Socialism Done Left's Substack
Shocker, it's terrible garbage
Socialism Done Left is an anti-trans racist, antisemite and deeply ignorant person.
I’m beginning this piece with this information because I feel that, without this context, SDL might just seem like dime-a-dozen internet leftist, caping for electoral politics and shouting radlib platitudes into the void. He certainly is, to be sure, but he’s much worse than that. His opportunist grifting quickly rises to the top of this particular sphere for its audacity, but also for the complete lack of self-awareness.
It was revealed in April of 2021 that SDL had been just an absolutely abhorrent racist in leaked Discord messages. What follows are examples of what I’m talking about. Content warning for racism, police brutality and antisemitism.
Lovely.
In response to this information being released, SDL did a stream by way of an apology. He raised money for charity and promised to do better. This amounted to donating $58.46 to Trans Lifeline.
No, that wasn’t a joke.
So as you can see, we’re not dealing with a serious person in any regard.
Now that the necessary context has been provided, let’s move onto the focus of this edition of The Catch, SDL’s substack.
My aim for The Catch is to help provide my readers with tools to cut through the news media’s capitalist frameworks. But SDL’s substack provides a valuable example of exactly why “alternative” networks should not necessarily be trusted either. Misinformation and incorrect framing can come from anywhere, and it’s important as consumers of news and analysis to be cognizant and aware of the tactics employed to further political aims. All journalists are informed by politics, whether they readily admit it or not.
With that being said, SDL’s brand of posting exemplifies just how misleading arguments can be, while also being insufferably smug. In addition, sometimes I just need to blow off steam and shoot at a barrel of fish. So if you’ll indulge me, we can move on.
DSA’s Membership Numbers
To begin, we’ll examine the piece that drew my attention. “DSA is the largest US socialist org in 109 years.” Curiously, the original banner photo that this article was posted with is now gone. So here it is, just in case you missed it.
First and foremost, SDL does not format well. I don’t take this as a character failing, but it makes these posts difficult to follow. So I’ll try my best.
The beginning of the post begins with this passage:
At around 90,000 members, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is currently the biggest socialist organization in the United States since 1914 -- that's 109 years ago.
No socialist org has had anything close to DSA's membership in the last half century. See for yourself:
SDL then links a graph charting the membership of various socialist parties in the USA since the year 1900. The source listed at the bottom left of the graph is a broken link.
SDL then claims the DSA is bigger than the Students for a Democratic Society at its peak (~35,000) and links to a pdf chronicling the group’s history.
The pdf is 495 pages long with no page number to indicate where the source was found. I checked the section labelled “Officers and Membership Statistics” (p. 471 out of 495) to see if this claim held up. Indeed, I found membership listed at 35,000 for April 1968 (p.472). This is the most concrete number referenced in the doc. Other, higher membership numbers are less trustworthy. For example, memberships in June 1968 range from a possible 40,000-100,000, November 1968 ranges from a possible 80,000-100,000, and June 1969 ranges from a possible 30,000-100,000. These numbers are not explained in the document itself. Even still, this should be mentioned in the article itself with a caveat that they are estimates, or not reliable, or something. It wasn’t.
SDL then writes that the Communist Party USA’s heyday reached ~60,000 members, linking to a University of Washington page that aims to map American Social movements. It explicitly says membership reached 66,000 in 1939. That’s not around 60,000. That’s 66,000. But not even that, because the page notes “Party membership surpassed 75,000 at the start of 1947 before starting its Cold War decline.”
Last time I checked, 75,000 was not around 60,000. It was 75,000.
SDL’s claim that the Socialist Party of America’s 1914 peak was around 75,000 leads to another broken link.
To quote SDL immediately after these numbers are stated “That’s a big fucking deal!” He then claims the DSA is the first modern socialist org with “truly mass membership.” I don’t understand how this tracks. True, with proper political organizing, you don’t need to have a majority of a country’s population as members to qualify as a mass party, that much is clear, but what are the terms? Because comparing DSA’s stated 90,000 is not exactly squaring up with any definition of “mass membership” I’m aware of.
Following this, SDL says that the DSA dominates the modern socialist movement.
Even if we arbitrarily assign 250 members to all the (~45, by my count) tiny socialist parties with no public membership details, DSA members would make up roughly 90% of the US socialist left
How did you count 45 tiny socialist parties? Do you have a list? Why 250? What is the purpose of these parties? Also: the DSA in the second chart is listed at 87,000 members? What? I thought it was 90,000? Am I missing something?
Besides this, are anarchists included in the US socialist left? Is that what these unnamed tiny socialist parties are? Last time I checked, anarchists aren’t interested in party politics. Where are their numbers in activist circles? None of this is addressed.
The reason for DSA’s 90,000 but also 87,000 membership, according to SDL, is due to two factors: Electoral Entryism and Internal Democracy.
Electoral Entryism is justified in that DSA runs candidates on Democratic Party ballots. He then claims “Congress has more socialists than any time in history” and links to another of his articles and let me just get through this one first please.
The Internal Democracy point refers to the Leninist practice of “democratic centralism” which SDL describes as preventing “open criticism of the org.” This is misleading. Yes, democratic centralism heavily discourages open opposition to the party line, but its purpose is to foment the ultimate criticism within the party so that the best line can be taken, then reflect unity outward. Does this always work out? No. There are criticisms to be made (as somebody who left an org that did not uphold this approach, I especially know this). But how exactly DSA’s internal criticism is greater than these other orgs is not explained, just stated.
In fact, how were the DSA’s membership numbers collected? I found a DSA memo that claimed “94,915” comrades in July of 2021, but I had to find that on my own. Was this the same source SDL used? He says that data before 2020 came from public statements (none of which are linked), but the “Early 2021” segment mentions it’s around 95,000. Good job on actually getting it right this time but maybe link to your source instead of a… Google Trends search for the phrase “democratic socialism.”
The rest of the article is… serviceable, for the most part (we’ll get to that). Suggestions to move beyond Trump, continue to win elections, as they have apparently done, and socialism is on its way, baby!
The Most Socialists Elected Ever
Let’s return to that tangent, where SDL claims that “US Congress has more socialists than any time in history.” The first half of the article, after the introduction, goes through the history of elected socialists in the US.
It’s here that I have to advise against simply linking to the Wikipedia page for something you mention in an article. It gets egregious. SDL mentions he created a Wikipedia article for “List of socialist members of the United States Congress.” But he also just links to the corresponding Wikipedia page for the following topics:
“Socialist Party of America”,”First Red Scare,” “Victor Berger,” “Meyer London,” “Socialist Party of America” three more different times (Split of the Left Wing Section, Left turn and split of the old guard, split with Trotskyists), “Popular front” “American Labor Party,” “Vito Marcantonio", “Fusionism,” “Fiorello La Guardia,” “Leo Isacson,” “Liberal Party of New York,” “Students for a Democratic Society", “Black Panther Party,” “COINTELPRO,” “New American Movement,” “Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee,” “Michael Harrington,” “Social Party of America, “Social Democrats, USA",” “Ron Dellums,” “Major Owens,” “John Conyers,” “David Bonior,” “Bernie Sanders,” “Danny Davis,” “Labor Party,” “Green Party,” “2000 Ralph Nader campaign,” “Occupy Movement,” “Bernie Sanders” (again), “Bernie Sanders 2016 Presidential Campaign,” “Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez,” “Rashida Tlaib,” “Ilhan Omar,” “Cori Bush,” “Jamaal Bowman,” “Summer Lee,” “Greg Casar,” “Steven Lukes,” and “Overton Window.”
To be blunt, if your readers wanted to spend an evening absent-mindedly browsing related Wikipedia entries for American democratic leftism, then they can just go fucking do that. What are you offering of substance?
What SDL offers is electoralism under the banner of the Democratic Party. That’s it. He says explicitly by evaluating the “socialist left’s long failure” of electoral socialists on third party ballots. This is done in service of the DSA’s tactic of sponsoring candidates that operate on Democratic Party ballots.
The successes of these socialists? SDL cites the Cori Bush, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Ayanna Pressley sit-in to protest the repeal of the eviction moritorium, which extended it! Huzzah! The Supreme Court ended it three weeks later. This is framed under “decision-making power.” Undeniably those three weeks gave time to people who needed it, but how exactly is entryist electoral politics going to stop the Supreme Court? No answer is provided.
The other two positives are choosing which issues are mainstreamed. SDL cites Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez’s platforms pushing Medicare For All, a $15 minimum wage, the Green New Deal and “a dozen other issues” as evidence of setting the agenda. I’ll wait patiently as you find examples of where these were set as an agenda item.
Then what happened.
For ideological power: “Electoral wins give socialists some power to determine what people believe.”
I don’t even know what to say to that.
Conclusion
SDL’s substack is a haphazard justification for electoral politics, and a finger-wagging scold for all those who do not engage successfully, or as their primary aim. Lip service is paid to organizing outside of elections, but that’s all that is said. In his second piece, he keenly notes that the Black Panther Party’s local electoral campaigns were “almost always unsuccessful” and targeted by COINTELPRO. This is not explored. Why was the BPP targeted by the government? Its leaders assassinated? Precisely because they posed an acute and militant threat to the American capitalist system. As SDL’s own reference to the eviction moratorium shows, DSA does not pose that threat.
Oh he also lifted the headline of his second piece straight from another article, written by a DSA member. He mentions this halfway through his piece.
Free advice for the DSA: get someone else to write these things for you. Even if he boosts engagement by liking his own posts.
Though there is not enough time to go over the entirety of SDL’s substack (or money, as I still do this newsletter for free), through these two examples we see a distinct lack of analysis on display. It appears that the sole thrust of SDL’s arguments for the DSA, and by extension a focus on electoralism, rely on numbers and clout. But what has the DSA achieved?
I have no doubt that there have been on-the-ground organizational successes by the DSA in some capacity, but any of those instances are absent from these pieces. The argument relies on pure electoralism and (badly played) numbers games. When most of the prominent socialists in Congress/Senate threw their weight behind back-to-work legislation for railroad workers right before disastrous train wrecks, this goes unmentioned. Accountability for these failures is nowhere to be seen. This is taken with a legitimate but minor victory in eviction moratoriums being crushed by the US judicial branch.
Can one honestly argue that electoralism under the Democratic Party is the path to socialism?
The racist, antisemitic, transphobic streamer has yet to convince me.
I don't know what I'm supposed to do with all this information.