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By: Travis Wayne
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.
Build the branch to build the party.
“The party” has as many definitions as there are blades of grass. Each tendency and caucus tends to imbue “the party” with its own nuances, its own emphases. Substantial disagreements on the party form plague every single socialist movement, in every era, but the “party” itself doesn’t tend to particularly care about definitions – in fits and starts, in battle, the party splutters into existence as a self-organized vehicle the working class discovers on its own all over again. Its definition and its program are fluid products of the struggle in flux. In many but not all cities and towns across the United States, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) has emerged as the mass organization that acts increasingly most like the party. Our numbers swell with each victory we win and each defeat the working class suffers.
The party forms in our collective hands, but our hands are diverse. Allende’s children sit alongside Harnecker’s on steering committees and ecosocialists share unions with anarchists. We’ve gotten about half of what Seth Ackerman’s Blueprint for a New Party advocated for in building the party surrogate – a party-like structure with no ballot line. But caucuses have different visions for the party of the future. To some, the party surrogate is the indefinite road of DSA’s success. Others prefer a clean break and independent ballot line. Others hold up the vision of the mass party, brought down from Kautsky and the RSDLP and Partido Ortodoxo, in which socialist organization is built within. For example, in 2021, now-NPC member Cliff Connolly of the Marxist Unity Group wrote that the party must “win political hegemony in whatever independent organs of proletarian power that we help build, using every available means,” by building “the local chapters of the mass party work together on a common, democratically agreed-upon plan.” In 2024, meanwhile, Bread and Roses’ Elizabeth Brown described a vision of a socialist labor party as one where we act as the political center for a wider affiliation network of “class organizations” built through a dirty break from Democratic control once there is a base for the break. Reform and Revolution counters this strategy by calling for “A Socialist Party in Years, Not Decades.”
The 2025 DSA Convention, the highest-body of the largest socialist organization, chose instead to only endorse R07: Principles for Party-Building: “The fundamental purpose of a socialist party is to be a mass association of the working class formed for collective political action.” DSA is the party surrogate, for now, but what matters more than the ballot line is “our ability to take independent political action” with “local party organizations run by membership.”
In Boston today, I argue that these agreed-upon principles can be best honored through branch-building. Branch-building means organizing local party appendages closest to sites of struggle and connected to working class self-activity. That can include the industrial section, the labor or tenant union caucus, the neighborhood. Building branches closest to sites of struggle is how we ensure branches actually function as “local party organizations,” organically connected to the political arenas of everyday life where oppression is experienced and protagonism grown, while developing the layer of new members themselves to make those branches “run by membership.” Since many of Boston’s new members are entering into organization at the local layer, we can organize the party best by meeting them where they enter – the local. At the point of entry, new members can best be nurtured into core members by becoming protagonists: members, decision-makers, organizers in an organization of organizers.
Some have called the strategy of building the branch “decentralization.” Rather than detracting from building Boston DSA, branch-building lets us organize deeper into the lives and terrains of the working class. Branches connect people to the working class’s self-activity most closely because branches can prioritize lived experiences of oppression experienced in the workplace, the home, the community more effectively than chapter apparatuses tasked with dozens of other priorities for meetings, while also building the confidence of new members into leadership. Members can wield power, strategize, and campaign as a collective, learning collective lessons within one unit of the party itself. Branches can be incubators of member leadership for the party and also serve as healing grounds for party leaders to recuperate from burnout. The branch is a sign of vitality, not weakness. Instead of purposeless decentralization, as some allege, branch-building strengthens the sinew of the party itself.
Without these bridges to working class self-activity, there is no party at all.
From Neighborhood Groups to Branches
Call it a local, call it a branch – the party needs bridging organizations.
The local party appendage closest to sites of struggle acts as the conscious bridge between the party and the self-activity of the working class – the struggles below. Sometimes, the chapter can do this, especially if it serves a small area or when the political center of the chapter and the chapter itself are synonymous, as in small chapters or in locals with fifty or fewer active members. In those cases, chapters may be “branches.”
In Boston DSA, branches can only be organized as organic projects of the membership surges and self-organization of the membership. Since new members have started organizing neighborhoods, conscious efforts to build the party from those formations is branch-building. Since November 2024, new members have infused new energy into ten “neighborhood groups” (the bureaucratic classification that separates them from working groups) across the Greater Boston area, with active formations of members in Cambridge, Somerville, Allston-Brighton, Arlington, East Boston, Jamaica Plain, Malden, Medford, Merrimack Valley, South Shore, and North Shore. Each has different projects, different profiles, different silos. Since new members began participating in Boston DSA in neighborhoods, core and active members also began in greater numbers. Some caucuses, like Bread and Roses, have made organizing the neighborhood groups a key priority enough to run as a slate on their development during local convention. A chapter co-chair candidate has also campaigned on developing the same layer – illustrating cross-caucus, multitendency recognition.
“Branches” don’t need to exist on paper to exist in practice; we can organize by people, not by resolution. Neighborhood groups are informal and vary in level of activity, according to the bylaws, which means some neighborhood groups are branches and some aren’t. Neighborhood groups are not automatically branches of the party because neighborhood groups do not automatically connect members to working class self-activity.
A neighborhood group is a bureaucratic category that isn’t a working group; in Boston, a branch is a conscious political project to organize a functioning appendage of the party connected and intervening as an “independent political force” in sites of struggle. A neighborhood group can be passive; a branch must be active. Most obviously, a branch is more than a neighborhood group because it encompasses more neighborhoods – consciously building the party deeper and more local to everyday working and oppressed people’s lives.
In arguing for building the branch to build the party, I will use Somerville as a case study. I moved to Boston in August 2024, became active in Somerville DSA in November 2024, and have co-chaired since February 2025.
Somerville represents one path to branch-building, but not the only one.
The Branch as Local Party Organization
Like the party, the branch must be multitendency and shared by the movement.
Last winter, Somerville DSA had an active membership of fifteen members. Now, we have over seventy active members participating in party activity as recorded by listwork. At the beginning, administrative items were traded between core members saddled with significant chapter-level duties that ensured local work always took a backseat. An election led to a slide towards fascism. Then, new members began to show up – until active membership was largely newly-activated, including me and other members, who began to organize the branch.
First, we organized intentionally multitendency. While other working groups may have become caucus fiefdoms and subject to a winner-takes-all political culture that undermined solidarity, we sought to build Somerville to maximize the participation of as many members as possible across all tendencies. First, membership passed a resolution for formal neighborhood leadership to place administrative burden into the hands of elected leadership instead of branch membership. This immediately built ownership among a new core team over the key important cogs of the branch functions, including regular flyering, listwork, intentional agenda-setting, and a maximalist approach to turnout. Established also was the expectation that branch leaders were responsible for these items or to find someone to do these items – building up another layer of member leadership, beyond what may pass as an organizing committee – as a baseline and foundation of our leadership. Administrative clarity creates space for greater participation of members, which leads to both a more robust internal democracy, as well as more member leadership energizing that democracy. Party-building was understood from the beginning as the essential core responsibilities of member leaders.
In Somerville, we elected two co-chairs, one secretary, one moderator (tasked with liaising with the Harassment and Grievance Officers, as well as maintaining accessibility for all members), and one internal organizer (tasked with turnout and onboarding). This structure would then be adapted a few months later by the other largest branch in Boston DSA: Cambridge. Members of the Communist Caucus, Bread and Roses Caucus, and independent new members have all shared leadership in Somerville since our self-organization, working together to set agendas and improve meetings, developing new strategies to maximize turnout over monthly potlucks. We conducted one-on-ones with other new members to become priority campaign stewards, a framework adapted from Las Vegas DSA, where specific member leaders are responsible for bottomlining the branch’s priority campaigns. New members have become priority campaign stewards and also become active in other parts of the Boston DSA chapter by first developing into member leaders as priority campaign stewards. These include members from across the ideological spectrum, from the aforementioned caucuses to Boston DSA’s internal “Conifer” alliance to independent cultural organizers. In other words, already, the branch has served a role as the local party apparatus capable of building up new organizers to build both the broader party and class organizations in sites of struggle.
This constant focus on building up member leadership is in line with the framework of Antonio Gramsci when the founder of the Italian Communist Party referred to when he called for “a continual insertion of elements thrown up from the rank and file into the solid framework of the leadership apparatus which ensures continuity and the regular accumulation of experience.” Beyond the branch’s multitendency nature, branch-building can be party-building also through articulation. In the words of Salar Mohandesi, “the primary task of the party is not actually to create social forces, but rather to facilitate their coming together into a broader unity.” The working class self-organizes in a turbulent below, an underbelly of capitalism that eats at our will and seeks to disorganize us in racial and gendered and intersectional ways, so its formations are as “fluid, unstable, personal” as Mario Tronti described the class struggle itself. Rent goes up and markets crash. Some unions win recognition from the state and some don’t; some people organize in workplaces, some in buildings, some in community spaces. Union reform caucuses rise and fold. News stories change and people pivot. The democratic socialist party press has received some investment and Working Mass continues to grow its subscriber base, but the majority of members do not have a reliable finger on the pulse of the fractured and disorganized conjuncture: what Maria Poblet describes as “a combination of circumstances or events usually producing a crisis, long or short-term, relating most to the short- and medium-term interventions.”
Branches of the party are uniquely capable of strategizing across all terrains within one set turf, all of the circumstances or events that may produce a crisis in the local area where the branch organizes, but only through the conscious political organization of the branch.
In Somerville DSA, we first sought to strategize by power-mapping. We did that for two meetings. Now, we incorporate “updates from the working class” into the top of every branch meeting agenda. This is intentional. Last month, updates included reports from the strike of sanitation workers rocking the North Shore, concessions workers’ striking at Fenway Park for the first time in 113 years, contract fights by the local teachers union, and information from the eviction defense in Nubian Square by the Greater Boston Tenants Union. Members heard reports and asked questions. This month, we did the same. This month, in August 2025, members discussed the Hamilton Tenants Association rally against their landlord, Somerville 4 Palestine’s ballot initiative to divest the city, and a report from a conversation with a representative of Partido Socialismo e Liberdade (PSOL), a mass socialist and democratic party in Brazil. Not only does this structure of updates provide a beginning of a space for members to literally engage with updates from across working class self-activity in the area, Marx’s famous dress rehearsals for revolution, coming collectively to understand what’s happening and through that process to report to one another on these struggles – to study them, on each other’s behalf, for one another. We aim to ask members to give reports with a particular focus on strategically asking members who have not stepped up as leaders before, to facilitate that end. Through these asks, we build up more ownership over the branch – the party.
But reports are not enough. The point of talking about what’s happening is to intervene in what’s happening. We analyze updates from the working class in Somerville to participate in struggles in Somerville. And since the branch can prioritize time for discussions not only of working class self-activity but also its own collective projects, its own interventions, the branch can bridge the party to the working class and vice versa. In other words, Boston DSA branches can become vehicles themselves, but also vehicles for members to become organizers, which bridges new members directly to working class self-activity. The branch facilitates both ways.
The branch, as a unit of the party, seeks to constantly engage with the turbulent self-activity of the working class because it’s a necessary if insufficient ingredient to actually articulate local struggles into a broader unity – the historic role and power of the party. “Some of these social forces may be working independently towards alliances, but their coming together is not inevitable, and in most cases efforts to coalesce will end in failure,” Salar Mohandesi continues: “But through the party, then, acts as a kind of binding element, trying to find a way to bring together diverse social forces, and to help them stay together, despite the many tendencies pulling them apart.” As a binding element, it can ultimately become undone. Just because a party branch exists does not mean it continues to be a party branch.
But effective branch-building doesn’t stop at conjunctural analysis or direct connection in struggle as a means to develop members as organizers. We also need branch-building as a means of creating the local vehicle for “independent political action,” just as agreed upon in the Principles for Party-Building passed by the 2025 DSA Convention.
The Branch as Laboratory
Independent political action is developed in the laboratories of the working class.
The working class, in building its party, must try things to gain confidence. Our own collective capacity for risk is a direct result of trying things together. We cannot take on projects capable of changing material conditions, of intervening as an independent political force as the party must, without first learning what works and what doesn’t together – and earning trust through praxis. That does not happen automatically and it does not automatically pass down with lineage. Instead, trust must be relearned, relationship by relationship, year by year. And we can do this doubly effectively by creating the base layer parallel to the center, because the branch doesn’t just exist in neutral parallel to the center – it reinforces it.
In Somerville DSA, we adopted a one-for-one proposal as a unanimous membership of nearly fifty of the then-sixty three active members of the branch. Somerville would adopt one external priority campaign, one internal priority campaign. Campaigns would need to be renewed every six months by proposal and vote of membership. Choosing priorities forces membership to grow and, by making collective decisions, becomes a collective conscious of its own power. This collective-making process not only built consensus across conflict lines in Somerville; it also created ownership. Even when proposals failed, openly encouraging and building new members to make proposals increased their confidence in the short-term and participation in the branch in the long-term even in the first round following the passage of the resolution. Ownership over the branch increased. The democratic process of choosing a priority, of debating between proposals, let members feel and then claim ownership.
Membership proposed multiple proposals for both the external and internal priorities of the branch. Participation was at its highest during the meeting of the debate. Ultimately, members chose to prioritize electing a cadre democratic socialist and branch member Willie Burnley, Jr. as mayor of Somerville, while our internal priority campaign became a combination of two proposals that blended together organizing training, socials, and political education. Another proposed external priority campaign would have charted us to fundraise to forgive the medical debt of local residents. The debate between these proposed priority campaigns underscores the breadth of possibility available to a branch becoming a vehicle for independent political action in the external priority campaign. Other priority campaigns could include strike support, building a community-wide strike committee, an ICE watch operation, an eviction defense operation in partnership with a local tenants’ union, a local No Appetite for Apartheid initiative to build a base of apartheid-free stores, or a local ballot initiative for socialist policy. Through the one-for-one structure, the process of rigorous and open debate to choose only one priority per sphere produced two collective projects shared across tendencies in the Somerville branch.
Even more importantly, though, the one-for-one structure of renewal every six months ensured that the branch became a laboratory for working class experimentation. Proposals are created by members working together, which after meetings involving conjunctural analysis of the moment each month, inherently involve the process of collective strategizing on behalf of the branch even to make a proposal. Developing winnable collective campaigns within the capacity of a group is an inherently good skill to develop as a member of Boston DSA. Key also is the six month term. The campaign must be time-limited, not only to make it winnable, but to ensure that the collective can remain coherently organized. It’s easier to contribute to a project even when your favorite one fails when you can try again in the fall.
The product of collective choice is member leadership. The process of choosing priority campaigns can be cultivated by branch leaders, but engaging members as fully as possible in the process of the choice itself can turn new members further into organizers. When members feel like they themselves can shape the future of the branch’s activities, they are more likely to continue to contribute to the party. By organizing new members at the layer closest to sites of struggle and orienting the party branch around those sites of struggle, we can most effectively build those members into organizers in the workplace, the home, the community – participants in the struggle itself. Already, in Somerville, this is clear – not only do Somerville members regularly attend tenant union eviction defenses and participate in strike support, they also sign up for tenant organizing trainings, workplace organizer cohorts, and practices for systematic one-on-one structured organizing conversations.
This member leadership element of organizing the branch into a local vehicle for “independent political action” is key. The branch is our membership, no more or less. We are as powerful as our members, collectively. As a result, learning how to leverage the maximum power of our collective is key to becoming an independent political force. The process itself is transformative. While the primary product is member leadership, one byproduct of building the branch as the party is the seismic force of a tightly-organized party cell in the wider community. At its most formidable, the branch is a “mountain,” party cells that “[loom] large and formidable over their region… [where the] development of the party as a governing institution required that these “mountaintops” would subordinate themselves to the work of the party as a whole.” By avoiding mountaintopism, the branch builds the party and avoids decentralization by nurturing organizers into the collective force we are capable of together.
The creation of powerful “mountains” is the byproduct of branch-building, but the power of that force in the bourgeois political system cannot be understated. In Somerville, one comrade who participates in branch-building wondered whether an end result of our strategy would be a socialist version of Boston’s old Irish ward system. Martin Lomasney, once-boss of the West End, used to run the ward with iron power: “his organization was broken down so that he had a competent leader in every precinct. That leader had a dozen lieutenants… It was the job of each to see to it that every voter on his street went to the polls on election day and, what was more important, voted for the Lomasney candidates.”
It’s true that a byproduct of branch-building may be the lattices of a rank-and-file electoral movement that closely resembles the Lomasney presence – especially since our first external priority campaign, in Somerville, has been an electoral campaign. We have canvassers at doors or calling voters most days of the week, overseen by three priority campaign stewards, connected both to the Electoral Working Group and the campaign. But by connecting to the turbulent and oceanic power of the working class instead of the more limited political horizons of diasporic community organizing, the branch connects to even greater sources of power. And instead of top-down patronage systems dominated by patriarchal white men, the branches can be organic and dynamic outgrowths of empowered memberships developing new organizers from members returning to their workplaces and their buildings and their communities to fight.
The potential power of branch-building far surpasses the political power of the old machines that ruled Boston for more than half a century.
The Branch as Party
There are plenty of contours of the party question to debate. But every conception of the party is strengthened by a layer of party organization that bridges the central party to working class self-activity, training new organizers who can become not only effective members of the party, but effective protagonists of their own struggles. The branch can serve as the local party organization and the laboratory of the working class, a site of political experimentation closest to where exploitation is both experienced and can be politicized in collective action. And while in Boston, the branch is a conscious political project that can be organized from the neighborhood groups, the “branch” is not unique to Boston. Anywhere there is a unit of a few dozen members who can connect to the working class can form a bridge between the party and the turbulence below through following a branch-building strategy.
There are other aspects of branch-building as party-building that there isn’t time to explore here. One is how the branch is uniquely suited to house cultural organizing. Socials happen at the local level; this is why socials are a key part of Somerville DSA’s first internal priority campaign. More generally, in the process of organizing the party, NYC-DSA and Triangle DSA and DSA chapters in New Jersey, along with countless other chapters, all discovered the need for cultural organizing. There are running clubs and dating clubs in New York City; in the Triangle, members form hiking associations and crafting formations; in Boston DSA, members meet to play basketball under the team name “United We Dunk” regularly.
But realizing branch-building unlocks new terrains for political experimentation, a laboratory for members to try things together, also means embracing the branch as a site of political imagination. Building branches, if undertaken across the city of Greater Boston, has a destination. Imagine: every part of Boston, each with a branch of the party. From Somerville to Roxbury, from Jamaica Plain to Cambridge, from Allston-Brighton to the South Shore – each home to a machine of localized “independent political action” driven by members, which means internal democracies with robust and participatory worlds, training workers and tenants into organizers of the party and of mass organizations: the labor unions, the tenant unions, the assemblies and the neighborhood councils. That is a vision of socialist and mass struggle merged into one. The branches, tightly-organized, each may have their own flavor, their own identity, informed by the social forces they articulate. Some may work on electoral interventions, others on fighting gentrification. Over time, the branches may begin fundraising projects for party offices. Party offices could grow across the city, one for every district, one for every neighborhood. That is a vision of a party not dissimilar from the workers’ parties around the world, with corner offices embedded deep inside the neighborhoods of the urban landscape.
These are examples of different horizons. Each belongs to membership to explore – or not. The branch is a conscious project of party-building, which means it can only exist through members breathing life into its vision. But that’s no different from other parts of the party. DSA is nothing but its members, which is no different from the branch. And when we think of “Principles of Party-building,” we need to take seriously how we can best pursue that goal as a mass organization at the most hyper-local levels of disorganization.
It may not be the only road, nor the only one necessary to accomplish the goal of party-building, but it is certainly an important one: build the branch to build the party.
Travis Wayne is the deputy managing editor of Working Mass and co-chair of the Somerville branch of Boston DSA.
The post OPINION: 2025 DSA Convention – Build the Branch, Build the Party appeared first on Working Mass.
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