The Communist Origins of the DSA: And what its history tells us about Communist infiltration

The Communist Origins of the DSA:

And what its history tells us about Communist infiltration.

At its 2025 convention, the Democratic Socialists of America removed a clause allowing for the expulsion of members “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization”. This echoed a foundational moment in the history of the SDS, one of the DSA’s predecessors, when it removed its anti-Communist clause at its 1965 national convention.

Communists, including the Maoists of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP), soon poured into the SDS. By the 1969 convention, the Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) managed to oust the PLP, not because it was Communist, but because it was so Communist that it was technically anti-Communist as the “PLP attacked Ho Chi Minh, the NLF, the revolutionary government of Cuba -all leaders of the people’s struggles for freedom against U.S. imperialism.”

Four years after tossing aside the exclusion clause, the SDS had been reduced to infighting between different Communist factions over which of them were the bigger Communists. The PLP lost the fight and the domestic terrorist organization known as the ‘Weather Underground’ emerged triumphantly in charge of the SDS and began planting bombs to overthrow America.

The 1969 convention would also prove instrumental in the emergence of the Democratic Socialists of America which had its roots in this chaotic era. Elements of the SDS, some associated with Communists, worked to build alternative organizations including one that would come to be called the The New American Movement (NAM). The NAM was interlaced with The New Communist Movement, took part in New Communist Movement events, featured Communist leaders and included a Marxist-Leninist Caucus inside its organization.

NAM’s official magazine, ‘Moving On’, guardedly stated only that “the New American Movement combines a Marxist analysis with careful attention to the current realities of American politics,” but NAM’s political text, ‘Basic Marxism: What It Is & How to Use It’ included writings from not only Karl Marx, but Lenin and Gramsci, signaling the group’s revolutionary Communist bent.

“NAM was an eclectic group of New Communist Movement activists and seasoned Marxists,” a current article by the editor of a Young Democratic Socialists of America (YDSA) publication claimed, and asserted that the founding of the DSA “was a merger of the social democratic Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee and the New American Movement, a product of the New Communist Movement.”

In 1984, Michael Harrington, a key DSA figure, assured the New York Times that “in the democratic socialist milieu, there’s even a small but significant group of former Communist leaders. They’ve broken with their past, yet I’m sure they still feel a little uncomfortable with my visceral anti-Communism.” Key Communist DSA figures however were not on board.

Dorothy Ray Healey, a former chair of the Southern California chapter of the Communist Party, who turned on it after Khrushchev’s speech, joined the NAM and then the DSA and became a national vice chair of the DSA, however furiously disagreed, saying, “You know I was pretty angry at an article … where Harrington makes some remark that the people in DSA who’d been communists had “broken with their past.” I haven’t broken with my past – that’s ridiculous.”

The line of succession between the NAM and the DSA was so secure that the DSA was recently able to collect on a $5 million bequest that had been left for the NAM. After the merger between the anti-Communist DSOC and the Communist linked NAM, the NAM slowly digested the DSA and now the DSA has begun to slowly take over the Democratic Party.

Restrictions on Communists, like the one that the SDS had jettisoned in 1965 and that the DSA tellingly tossed aside an even 60 years later, were about the ‘entryism’ of disciplined cadres of radicals like the PLP into more moderate organizations in order to take them over. By the time that the DSA dropped its version of the Communist exclusion clause in 2025, the point had long since been moot with Marxist and Communist caucuses, like the Marxist Unity Group and Red Star controlling a majority of its National Political Committee leadership.

The ban on members “under the discipline of any self-defined democratic-centralist organization”, a Leninist term for centralized top-down organizations, had long been a dead letter and largely aimed at the type of Trotskyist groups prone to collective takeovers. --->READ MORE HERE

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