Seize the Means of Community

Something strange is happening in the way the Democratic Socialists of America are being described. A Republican president calls the group Communist. Anxious Democratic officials call it a spoiler — a faction dragging the party toward an electoral cliff. And the political press, reaching for something more neutral, tends to describe a demographic wave: young, largely white newcomers sweeping through changing neighborhoods and displacing established Black and Latino leaders.

These are people who agree on almost nothing. Yet each has reached for the same kind of description. And the sameness is more revealing than any of the descriptions, because it points to something the three of them share underneath their disagreements — a picture of what politics is.

In that picture, politics is a contest among groups that already exist. Blocs, factions, ideologies, constituencies: each is assumed to arrive with its interests already formed, and the game is the negotiation among them for control of offices. Voters come pre-sorted. Leaders speak for the sorted. Elections settle, for a while, who speaks for whom. It is a serviceable picture, and most of our political vocabulary is built from it.

The trouble is that DSA is doing something the picture has no slot for. So each observer, needing to file it somewhere, files it under the nearest category the picture already keeps. For the president, the slot marked foreign enemy ideology is closest, so: Communist. For the party establishment, the slot marked faction miscalculating its coalition is closest, so: spoiler. For the press, the slot marked one bloc displacing another is closest, so: demographic tsunami. Three different labels, one operation — take the unfamiliar thing and assimilate it to a familiar one, so you never quite have to notice that what is unfamiliar about it is not its content but its form.

Here is the form they are missing. DSA's candidates do not generally appear as talented individuals with good positions, marketed to a waiting electorate. They come out of an organization — with members, chapters, dues, internal arguments, political education, and a program the members vote on. Thousands of people knock on doors not because they were hired to but because they have entered something. And the people they talk to are not only being asked for a vote; some of them are being drawn, door by door, into the same activity. What is new is not a bloc with a sharper message. It is the attempt to organize people into a political force that did not exist before the organizing — to make a constituency through participation rather than to locate one that was already there.

That is the distinction worth carrying, because once you have it you can answer most of what is being thrown at the movement without answering on the frame's terms. A bloc is a standing thing you can count. A movement is an activity people are doing. The observers keep mistaking the second for the first — and every specific charge is a version of that one mistake.

Take the question, asked earnestly by reporters, of whether a well-paid tech worker can really be working class. Inside the bloc picture the question is about sorting: which income category does this person belong to, and does DSA's answer stretch the category past honesty? But the movement is not sorting people by income. It is asking whether someone who depends on an institution he does not control — who can be laid off, outsourced, automated out of a career he thought was secure — shares a situation with the home-care worker who is far poorer and far more exposed. The salary is real and the difference in exposure is real, and neither settles the question, because the question was never about the bracket. It was about whether people in different positions can be organized to act together. The honest answer declines the sorting and describes the activity.

Or take the sharpest version, the one that deserves the most care: that some of these victories came in neighborhoods reshaped by displacement, where the movement may be winning fair elections among the people who remain precisely because poorer, longer-tenured residents could no longer afford to stay. That worry should not be waved off. The Black and Latino political institutions now being challenged were not handed down by a generous system; they were won, through lawsuits and organizing and decades of work, by communities the system was built to exclude. Those institutions carry the accumulated legitimacy of real struggle.

But an institution cannot stay representative merely because it once emerged from representation. Its authority has to be renewed by the living activity that first produced it — by continuing to organize, involve, and answer to the people it claims. Representation, you might say, is what participation leaves behind, and it stays democratic only as long as fresh participation keeps renewing it. So the test of a socialist victory in a changing neighborhood is not the winner's race, and not the election result, and not the demographic chart the coverage leads with. It is whether the movement is organizing the public-housing tenant, the immigrant, the family facing eviction — whether longtime residents help set its program or are merely counted among its intended beneficiaries. Winning the district does not answer that. Only what gets built afterward does. And that is a question about activity, which the bloc picture cannot even pose, because it is busy reading the demographic chart.

None of this means the observers are lying, and it is important not to treat them as if they were. The frame is a genuine blindness, not a pose. The president's label is a weapon, but it does the same work a sincere reporter's does: it reaches for the nearest known category because the frame supplies no other. People standing inside the bloc picture are not being stupid when they cannot see the form. They are standing where the form cannot be seen from. The useful response is not to score against them but to describe what they are missing plainly enough that a reader can step outside the frame and look.

And stepping outside it cuts both ways, which is the part a movement's own supporters should keep. If what is new about DSA is an activity rather than a category, then the activity has to actually continue, or the new thing collapses back into an old one. A campaign can become a machine for winning and nothing more. An organization can harden into another faction that treats defeated rivals as territory to be seized. New leaders can drift as far from the organized public as the ones they replaced. The distinction that lets you answer the movement's critics is the same distinction the movement is answerable to. It is not a trophy. It is a standard, and it has not yet been met — it has only been made visible.

So when you next hear that DSA is Communist, or a spoiler, or a demographic wave washing over someone else's neighborhood, you now have something to notice before you answer. Each of those descriptions has already made the same move: it has mistaken a living activity for a standing thing. You do not have to argue on its terms. You can decline the translation, and describe what is actually happening — people trying, and not yet finished, to become an organized force that governs the conditions of its own life. Whether they succeed is an open question. But you cannot even ask it from inside the picture that keeps calling a verb a noun.

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