For a Mass Socialist Party, Without Shortcuts

This first installment in our dueling series on the debate over the efficacy of student unions argues against student unionism. 

We are organizing amidst a long counterrevolution against the popular upheavals of 2020. The massive expansion of the police state and dismantling of Sandersism under the Biden administration have paved the way for the aggressive return of Trump and a new radically right-wing ruling-class political consensus. 

While the dissolution of the political assumptions of the 2010s under the rapid advance of this counterrevolution has left DSA in a period of stalled confusion from which we are only now beginning to emerge, YDSA has shown vitality by taking a leading role in the movement for a free Palestine and the explosion of student-worker unionism.

This leaves YDSA with a dual task as we stare down the second half of the 2020s. First, we must find meaningful ways to organize masses of students and workers in real opposition to the new ruling-class consensus; second, we must lead DSA as a whole in a new strategic direction to realize the political alternative the working class needs if we are to bring down the system that brought us to this point once and for all.

One answer to this call has come in the form of student unionism. Over the last year, a faction of YDSA has campaigned to orient our organization towards building “student unions,” nonsocialist membership-based organizations of students. Articulated in Carlos Callejo’s 2024 convention resolution along with Ali Noorzad’s and David Purucker’s recent articles in The Activist, the case for student-unionism seems to be the following: to win our demands we need to organize students on as large a scale as possible; organizing students effectively means formalizing the movement democracy that eludes activist coalitions by replacing them with mass membership organizations; and because of YDSA’s high barrier to entry, we need an intermediary organization to engage nonsocialist students.

Some of the premises of this argument have merit, but student unions are not the way forward. They aren’t class-based organizations, they offer no new solution to the problem of movement democracy, and they risk liquidating YDSA and its organizers into a broader nonsocialist reform movement. While chapters should be free to experiment, it is an error for YDSA to prioritize organizing student unions in our national strategy. Instead, chapters should lead class-struggle campaigns as YDSA, prioritizing the difficult work of organizing tens of thousands directly into the youth wing of our emerging mass socialist party in the coming years.

Class Power and Socialist Strategy

Socialists seek to organize the working class for three related reasons: it represents the overwhelming majority of the world, society needs its labor to function, and it has no stake in a status quo dominated by the power of property. That makes it the only class capable of fighting the battle for democracy to the end and overturning every injustice imposed on us by the ruling class along the way. Through collective struggle, we create the conditions for workers to think and act as members of this revolutionary class and not merely as individuals with a collection of needs to address. This is what motivates socialists to build class organizations like labor unions. 

Student unions could arguably perform a similar function by fostering “student consciousness,” helping to build a mandate for disruptive campus actions like student strikes. But we should remember the lessons of last spring’s Student Intifada and its failure to sustain itself after the end of the spring semester by expanding from campuses to the surrounding communities. The socialist movement cannot afford to reproduce the isolation of students from the wider working class by organizing students exclusively as students. It is imperative that we organize the working-class majority of students in ways that transcend their position on campus and move them to act as members of their class.

Student unions cannot fill this role because they do not organize their members based on their class, but based on their non-class-specific status as students, i.e., as consumers of a university’s educational services. As socialists, we do not prioritize organizing consumers’ unions in wider society because we believe the path to a better world lies through realizing and then using our unique power as workers. The same should apply on our campuses.

Coalitions, Democracy, and the Mass Party

The student union debate is inseparable from the larger question of how we relate to nonsocialist forces whose interests overlap with our goals as socialists. In YDSA, we have grappled with this question over the last two years as our chapters have navigated coalition work with other organizations committed to Palestinian liberation.

Proponents of student unionism have identified two of the key problems YDSA encounters in coalitions with other organizations: the lack of movement democracy and the related tendency to prioritize mobilizing a thin layer of activists over the larger base of politically inactive students. These are problems YDSA needs to resolve, but student unions are a shortcut disguised as a real solution.

Student unionism brings nothing new to the movement democracy debate because it does not create a qualitatively different kind of organization. Instead, student unions (at best) simply create a larger organization that still must seek to mobilize external support for its membership’s internal democratic decisions. The San Francisco State University Student Union, for example, won divestment in 2024 with a membership of several hundred that activated somewhere north of one thousand students with walkouts and mass assemblies. These are impressive figures, but still tiny fractions of SFSU’s student population, nowhere near the density a labor union would need in a workplace to call a strike. This case study, arguably the best the student-unionist project in the U.S. has to offer so far, does not support the idea that working through student unions transforms the democratic legitimacy of our organizing.

Such a transformation might take place if a student union were able to achieve majority participation on its campus and become a reproducible popular institution, like a labor union that has won majority status and a collective bargaining agreement. But in the meantime, SFSU’s experience proves that we do not need this fundamentally different relationship with the student body to win our demands through mass action; we just need to politicize and recruit students from beyond the activist layer on a massive scale and can in fact do so as a “pre-majority” mass organization. 

By making student unions the primary vehicle for this work, and not YDSA itself, our chapters risk surrendering our socialist politics to issue-based populism and hollowing out our own recruitment and development pipelines. This is not theoretical—this NCC term, we have seen some chapters prioritizing student union work struggle to grow or even shrink as a result. 

The answer to the challenge of movement democracy lies in a mass socialist party, not in student unions. We already have an organization to serve as a democratic, membership-based, low-barrier-to-entry political home for working-class students. It’s called YDSA. Activating and recruiting students through class-struggle campaigns, convening mass assemblies in moments of struggle, creating an organized space to practice democracy within our undemocratic society while we fight to realize a program that will extend that democracy everywhere—these are all things that a student union could do, but a YDSA chapter, with enough patient work, can do better.

The idea that we need intermediary organizations like student unions because we cannot expect to organize masses of students and workers into YDSA itself—whether because the majority of the working class will never be socialists or because YDSA is meant to be a “cadre organization” of dedicated organizers—is a pessimistic view of the working class that leaves the majority of our base estranged from true democratic participation in the fight for our future. Organizing the working class to free itself means bringing people into the democratic process of political revolution, not just the fight for their immediate interests. Winning people over to democratic socialism through struggle and organizing them into YDSA must be our north star in everything we do.

To help transform DSA into an independent mass party capable of defeating Trumpism and winning the battle for democracy, we need to massively grow YDSA in the coming years on the basis of our own revolutionary program. No shortcuts exist.