Building* Power†
Most of the debates in DSA surrounding how to handle Jamaal Bowman's vote for Iron Dome funding and his disavowal of BDS centered on what I thought were more symptoms than root causes: if he should be censured or expelled from DSA, if we should refrain from federal races until we have the ability to discipline candidates at that level, or if BDS support should be a hard litmus test on candidate questionnaires. I don't think there was enough focus on the why of how we ended up in this situation. Why are we in a position where we're unable to hold an endorsed official to the organizational line on BDS?
First, let's take a look at how DSA electoral campaigns take shape. Win or lose, the campaigns run off of a small group of core activists (relative to chapter or municipality size) putting in maximum effort through canvassing. This has been pretty successful so far compared to the Green Party model of electoralism, but I don't think it's sustainable. Joel Brooks in Jersey City was able to get within four points of an incumbent city councilmember in 2021, giving arguably the most powerful political machine in the country a run for its money, but that was done with volunteers coming in from the NYC and Philadelphia DSA chapters. As the amount of races DSA candidates run in continues to expand, people won't be able to keep up that level of effort and focus.
An evergreen refrain on the left that picked up in frequency once again around the time of the debates around Bowman and BDS is that we need to build power, usually without any accompanying definition of what power is or how it may be built. Electoral successes get filed under "building power", and when elected officials deviate from an organizational line, the lesson taken seems to be that we need to build more "power" by electing like-minded officials so that the hegemonic political line on the issue gets broken; that they'll have more freedom to vote "the way they really feel" if they're surrounded by fellow travelers. Ultimately, I think this boils down to "elect better Democrats" and still gives too much to individual discretion rather than having organizational discipline be the guiding light.
To me, power means that we wouldn't necessarily have had to elect Bowman in the first place — real power would mean that we could force Eliot Engel to vote however we wanted on foreign policy or any other issue, and that we wouldn't have to put in maximum effort because our numbers would be so overwhelming. If our goal is to organize the working class as a class against the bourgeoisie, that means thinking about where the working class' power comes from: our ability to withhold our labor. Union density has obviously plummeted in the US over the decades, and that political vacuum has been filled by "candidate-centric" campaigns, where working class organizations like the remaining labor unions exist to serve candidates rather than us making candidates enacting our will. We need to turn that around by making sure workplace organizing training is available to every socialist. There are almost 100k DSA members, which is a massive pool of people that should seek to organize every non-union workplace in the country. If we're not working towards that, we are fucking up.
Like with so many issues, the working class being organized is a necessary precondition for any sort of movement on BDS. Enough politicians eventually came around to oppose apartheid in South Africa, but that was not before organized labor exerted its power and showed its solidarity with the anti-apartheid movement. Solidarity among the international working class made the end of apartheid in South Africa possible, and I expect the same to be the case with Israel.