Groundwork

Groundwork is a caucus within Democratic Socialists of America.

Groundwork is a group of DSA members organizing to change DSA into what we all want but don’t have: a force strong enough to meaningfully influence politics on the scale of the next presidential election, potential general strike, and whatever other national ruptures may come.

The only way to do so is to become a genuine, mass political party. An organization in the millions, that anyone whose values align with ours can easily hear about, understand, support, join, and learn to organize in. The kind that can transform and run nations.^[1]

Socialist core

From Executive Summary: Liberation Road's 2022-2025 Main Political Report.

To address these challenges, Liberation Road set itself the task across the past three-year period of helping to build a stronger, more coherent socialist “core.” This has not meant consolidating all who self-identify as socialist, nor excluding aligned forces who use other labels. Rather, the task has been to help bring together those advanced forces who are rooted in mass organization, committed to left coordination, and strategically clear on the tasks at hand.

Efforts to cohere this core have made some significant advances in terms of strategic alignment, if not yet programmatic and organizational coherence. While no single organization has cohered our inside/outside trend, there is increased alignment among formations like Liberation Road, North Star Socialist Organization (NSSO), Convergence, Rising Majority, Grassroots Power Project, and the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA’s) Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) and Groundwork.

What’s needed now is not just shared vision, but shared practice, structure, and initiative to strengthen our movements’ ability to move from strategic defense to a coordinated counter-offensive. The question is whether we can forge a coherent, self-conscious “bloc” that doesn’t just resist New Confederate autocracy, but builds the power to defeat and unseat the New Confederacy and begin a process of structural transformation—both inside the terrain of the state and across civil society. The Third Reconstruction will not build itself. But it can be built—if we do the work to build it.^[2]