Since 2011 Maria Svart has been the national director of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the largest political structure to the left of the Democratic Party in the United States. “We're an organisation, not a party,” she points out.
The DSA supports candidates in elections but it is also known for its links with trade unions, its activism in support of universal healthcare insurance and illegal immigrants, and against private prisons and the repression of migrants. Its activists are heavily committed on the ground in local campaigns, for example against the 'gentrification' of certain districts.
The DSA is a “big tent” organisation which brings together social democrats, anarchists, communists, activists and it includes activists who are heavily involved in election work – and others who reject it. The organisation, which has increased the number of its members tenfold since the election of Donald Trump, is close to Senator Bernie Sanders whom they are backing in the Democratic primaries for the 2020 presidential election.
Mediapart met Maria Svart at the DSA's headquarters in New York – which happen to be on Wall Street, the home of the American stock exchange. “It is ironic, it’s really just because it’s affordable, there’s a lot of office space here, but we do like to joke about it,” she says. But she says that at the time of the Occupy Wall Street in 2011 it was useful to be on hand “to be able to have people come and meet in our office”. Indeed, the centre of the protest, Zuccotti Park, is nearby.
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Mediapart: Three years ago the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) had 6,000 members. How many do you have today?
Enlargement : Illustration 1
Maria Svart: We grew from maybe 6,000 people participating members to 55,000 today. And we had 25 or 30 chapters but they were not very active, as well as some campus chapters; now we have I think close to 75 campus chapters and 150 community chapters, and about 50 other groups that are in an early stage on the way to forming a chapter. So we grew very significantly. And the chapters have all became more active, in addition to having more of them obviously. [Our membership] is small in the grand scheme of things in the United States, but for a socialist organisation it’s unprecedented in recent decades.
Mediapart: Why has the DSA grown so much?
M.S.: There’s systematic organising where you do campaigns and you ask people to join and you teach everybody to be organisers, and then you have more reactive,spontaneous organic growth. In the last three years a lot of our growth has been that second category.
We’re not the only organisation that grew dramatically when Trump was elected. The story I like to tell is that on an election night you can see on our database, which is connected to the internet, the join page of DSA exploded as soon as Trump announced that he had won. We and many other organisations had a massive influx of people.
There were other times when we had an influx - around the women’s march, the airport protests [editor's note, against President Trump's Muslim travel ban], when [Congresswoman] Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez was elected ...
At this moment when democratic socialism was viable, and more than viable, it was actually like an alternative that people were thirsting for.
Mediapart: People coming from different political backgrounds have joined you. Some people who are very to the Left, some former 'liberal' Democrats who have considered their party to have failed, and some very young members. Why did these people choose to commit themselves to the DSA?
M.S.: This concept that there was even an alternative was new to a lot of people, but it was in the air because of the Democratic primary. Also, we’ve had 40 years of austerity and neoliberalism and that’s why Bernie [Sanders] resonated with so many people. When Clinton lost to Trump, there are people that will say that Clinton had the election stolen, that Clinton won the popular vote, that was voter suppression, it’s all true. Yet they also completely bungled the election and they absolutely did not inspire the democratic base at all.
We can’t depend on the Democratic Party, and we were providing an alternative to neoliberal Democrats. And so many people were already frustrated with the Democratic Party, but they hadn’t done anything about it, and then when Trump was elected they realised that they had to become active. So a huge reason that people came to DSA is that we were different, and we were a radical departure from neoliberals, as an organisation, and we’re not part of a non-profit industrial complex, so to speak, we are funded by our members which means we don't have very much money but we are independent of major neoliberal donors.
It’s a chaos that can create new things, and new ideas, and new ways of organising.
Mediapart: The best-known of your members is Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, who is very well-known now in the United States and beyond. The New York section of the DSA in fact backed her during her primary against the incumbent Democrat, a senior figure in Queens, Joe Crowley. What has she brought to American politics?
M.S.: I think that she is absolutely a bridge between the Left and the rest of the progressive movement first of all, because she speaks, she understands the Left, she talks about how she is sort of an organic intellectual. She didn’t start by reading Marx, she started by experiencing what life was like as a working class Latina, and then she realised what’s what in the world. In some ways she’s like a young Bernie Sanders in the sense that she can speak the language that most people understand, and frame our ideas in a way that resonate with a lot of people.
One of the things that’s really interesting, that I think relates to the way she ran her campaign, is that she ran it by building a base, a really grassroots base and inspiring people to fight and organise in their community, and that’s the model that we have also used in DSA, and we try to replicate all over the country.
She focused on organising voters who have been forgotten, and that’s part of our strategy, and really building a grassroots working class multiracial base, and using a narrative that’s very radical and bold but accessible, that’s another part of our strategy.
We’ve got to get Bernie in the White House, but even then capital will come after him, probably come after us. So it’s like we continually have to build our base and build our power and that’s what we do at the local level as well. And [AOC] is very good at articulating that concept to people, which is why ultimately she chose to endorse him.
Mediapart: So were you surprised to see AOC support Sanders for the Democratic primary?
M.S.: No, she is a movement candidate, she knows that she won by organising a grassroots base, she understands power, she was an outsider, she went to Washington....she absolutely knows what she’s up against, she knows what Sanders is up against.
And she knows that [Elizabeth] Warren’s [editor's note, another Democratic primary candidate] theory of power does not depend on a grassroots. Warren thinks that [it's] about having a good policy, and that’s not the way the world works.
The way the world works is based on power, it doesn’t even matter what the policies are frankly ... you can even have good policies, but if capital doesn’t like it … it’s going to go nowhere. And Sanders obviously understands that, and I think AOC in Washington could absolutely see that.
'The real enemy is neoliberalism'
Mediapart: The DSA chose to support Bernie Sanders for the Democratic primary. What seems to you the most ambitious of his proposed policies?
M.S.: I think the concept of worker ownership at a mass scale is the biggest, the most exciting ... because it’s talking about the working class as a class. Obviously we’re also in the midst of maybe not quite a strike wave, but like a massive increase in worker uprisings in the US, so him being able to talk about the right to strike and all these things is also great.
Mediapart: In the past Bernie Sanders was in favour of nationalising the banks and a section of industry. That's no longer his position even if wants the state control of electricity production where it is possible.
M.S.: We are a big tent organisation and ultimately a number of our chapters here have campaigns to nationalise energy production, for example. If you look at these catastrophic wildfires in California, you can see why [editor's note, where some of the most deadly blazes have been caused by the deterioration in the electricity transmission infrastructure of private supplier PG&E], but it’s not the only place where we have these kinds of campaigns - here in New York we have another campaign…
Some of our chapters do work to try to nationalise the banks or create public banks, and we want Medicare for all, but we would love to have fully socialised medicines. Anything that meets a human need we don’t think should be sold on the market.
Enlargement : Illustration 2
Mediapart: On the night of Trump's victory another notable phenomenon was the victory of several candidates supported by the DSA. Where does the organisation stand in electoral terms?
M.S.: We have about 100 elected officials and about 50 candidates. Before I became national director - I was involved in DSA before then - I remember at one point we gave a donation to a candidate and they returned the cheque because they didn’t want to be associated with us. Now we have 100 members in office, and half that many people running for office right now. So it’s been a massive explosion, it’s very exciting. I grew up in an era when the evangelical right in the United States were organising at the grassroots, running people for school board and so on. And in some ways we are adopting a similar model where we’re supporting people everywhere to start local run for office, get experience, and run for a higher level office. We have to focus in Congress, obviously, but then we have a lot of people on state [legislatures] and a lot of people on city councils, and then various other random positions.
Mediapart: How have these elected representatives performed?
M.S.: In Denver, Colorado our city council member Candi CdeBaca, elected in June, helped get the city to cancel their contracts [editor's note, worth 10.6 million dollars] with two private prison companies. A lot of the time it has to do with straight economic justice, things that can be impacted at the local level like we have six members of the city council in Chicago, they’re doing really beautiful things, they just wrote an op-ed … pointing out that the teachers [editor's note, who staged an 11-day strike] are fighting for students, and that students can’t learn if they don’t have housing and food. We’re both passing policies but also lifting up this narrative to counter this really hegemonic neoliberal perspective, and focus on the policies.
Mediapart: Julia Salazar, who was elected to the Senate in New York in 2018, told us during her campaign that the political imagination in the United States is expanding.
M.S.: Most people in the United States are taught that … there is no alternative but to just take the way the world is.
I think talking about political possibility is very important because there’s both how we want the world to be, but also expanding people’s conception of how we get there. Because everybody knows that politics is broken, but most people don’t know there is a different way to make change.
So that’s so exciting about Bernie Sanders ... I talked about his labour policy and talking about supporting strikes, but also worker ownership, and nationalisation, those are policy proposals that can puncture this common sense that we’re taught about like what’s possible.
Some people doing the organising might have the radical lens but they’re not talking about it with other people, or maybe they’re talking about it without naming it as a system, and if you can’t name the system you can’t come up with an alternative.
We really see our role as explicitly seeing capitalism as the problem and democratic socialism as the solution.
One of the things that’s good about being big tent is that we don’t try to like tell everybody what to think, but we try to help people learn how to think and analyze what’s happening.
Mediapart: For example?
M.S.: Right now we have five national priorities, a green New Deal, and the Bernie Sanders campaign support, local electoral work which obviously is like a lot of things, Medicare for all, and labour solidarity.
We have an eco-socialist national identity, and we have been naming capitalism as the problem, and [have been stating that] we’re all going to die if we don't take back the planet …. I think because it’s so apocalyptic, our narrative resonates with a lot of people, and that’s an anti-capitalist narrative we’ve been able to bring into the environmental movement,.
Another part of our theory of change that we’ve taken into the environmental movement is that without the working class we’re not going to win. We’re bridging the two, and that doesn’t happen, in the United States and most places - the ruling class will pit us against each other.
We were telling our eco-socialists to invite striking United Auto workers to speak at the climate strike rallies, and we were telling our labour folks to show up at the climate strike rallies, and telling our eco-socialists to show up at UAW picket-lines when they were striking at [car-makers] GM.
So it's about being able to name the enemy, the actual enemy because neoliberalism is - like individualism - so strong as an ideology in the United States, that everybody comes up with individualstic solutions, or technocratic solutions to the climate crisis, and we keep bringing it back to power. Without power we can’t take on the fossil fuel industry. And the power comes from the ability to stop production, so it has to be a worker movement.
And young people are drawn to socialism for the same reason they’re drawn to the climate movement, because it’s like a self-preservation, self-defence reaction to the world.
'There is tremendous support for Sanders'
Mediapart: What's your definition of democratic socialism? In June 2019 Bernie Sanders gave his version: “The right to a decent job that pays a living wage, the right to quality health care, the right to a complete education, the right to affordable housing, the right to a clean environment and the right to a secure retirement.” What's yours?
M.S.: People should own what they produce, and anything that’s a human need should not depend on your ability to pay. That will obviously require a complete restructuring of our economic relationship, so we believe in completely transforming our society, and I would argue that AOC and Bernie are getting closer and closer to saying that too. What [Bernie] says publicly is different to what our ultimate goal is in DSA, but the concepts, and a lot of the ways he articulates it, that is more resonant to be honest. They say these things that are common sense … and they are seeing that that is extremely popular with people, so they are feeling emboldened themselves. I can’t go on mainstream television and say we need to abolish private property, or we need to seize the means of production, people find that incredibly off-putting. But when Bernie Sanders says, or when AOC says nobody should go hungry, or nobody should lack healthcare in the wealthiest country in the world, that’s a very similar concept.
Enlargement : Illustration 3
Mediapart: For more than a century the word “socialism” has been anathema in the United States and has been synonymous with “communism” or even “anti-Americanism”. That is how Donald Trump puts it. So after nearly a century are you going to break the pattern?
M.S.: We have a candidate who’s in office in Virginia named Lee Carter. His opponents sent out a mailer a week before the election with portraits of Stalin and Mao and his face, and he still won. Redbaiting has lost some of its power … people's conditions have deteriorated so much that they’re looking for an alternative.
Trump himself has been rumoured to say he’s not so sure that the socialism attack is going to work, although obviously they’re going full steam ahead, and that’s because Trump is a populist. Trump understands that people are out for blood, and it’s the neoliberal Democrats that are completely clueless about that.
On the other hand I would say that when Trump and the far right talk about socialism, what they are actually attacking is social solidarity of any kind, and … it’s like a code for what they are about, which is fascism.
If you look at the opinion polls in the United States for people of different ages, it’s baby boomers who are the ones that are afraid of socialism, and young people are absolutely not afraid of socialism, because they have seen that capitalism is just as horrific, if you actually stop and look at what’s happening. So I think the promise of the American dream, so called, is completely empty for young people, so that the redbaiting will not work with them.
Mediapart: Yet many Democrats attack the plans of Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders as being too far to the Left. Hillary Clinton would like us to return to the pre-Trump era when politics was “boring”. The billionaire former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, is thinking about entering the Democratic primary race [editor's note, he has subsequently done so] as he considers that the candidates are drifting too far to the Left and that the process will not be able to pick someone who can beat Trump.
M.S.: The neoliberal Democrats are always going to use Trump as a foil, they only want to talk about Trump, they only ever want to talk about Trump and refuse to acknowledge their… I would even say more than complicity. They're helping create the conditions that made Trump able to rise.
Mediapart: Can Bernie Sanders win the primary?
M.S.: Yes, of course! The polls show Bernie doing well and they do not measure what’s actually happening at the base, and there is tremendous support.
Mediapart: Working n the United States, I am always surprised that there are no contacts between the American Left and the French Left. Do you have any contacts of your own?
M.S.: Not really. I think that’s the way it is for the Left everywhere, unfortunately. And I would even say that in the United States the Left is like that, I just think everyone gets too occupied … I mean all politics is local so that’s normal. But even the Right is like this. One of [Trump's former aide] Steve Bannon’s greatest successes, I think, is getting the right to cross borders and unite around common narratives, for example in Europe. We need a renewed internationalism if we’re going to stop the Right and save the planet. But it’s an uphill battle.
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- This interview was conducted in English .The French version can be found here.