The Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) seeks to replace capitalist control of major economic institutions with democratic, public, and worker control—while pursuing immediate reforms that raise working-class power and living standards. Its current national program, “Workers Deserve More,” combines an economic-democracy agenda with sweeping changes to U.S. political institutions and foreign policy.program.dsausa+1
DSA calls for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, along with democratic control of workplaces and unions. It supports aggressive wealth and corporate taxes to fund public goods, infrastructure, and social programs.program.dsausa
Its major domestic commitments include:
Universal health care: health care with no individual charges, expanded public hospitals and clinics, free medical education, and protected reproductive and gender-affirming care.program.dsausa
Social housing: publicly owned housing construction, universal rent control, regulation of investment properties, and a guaranteed right to counsel for tenants.program.dsausa
Labor reforms: a living minimum wage, a 32-hour workweek with full pay and benefits, paid family leave, stronger rights to organize and strike, and a federal jobs guarantee.program.dsausa
Education and social provision: free public education from pre-K through college, student-debt cancellation, and expanded public resources for recreation, learning, and social life.program.dsausa
Climate policy: a Green New Deal centered on major investment in publicly owned clean energy and transit, a fossil-fuel phaseout, and worker leadership in the transition.program.dsausa
DSA’s program calls for strengthened anti-discrimination law, reparations, investment in historically neglected minority communities, recognition of tribal sovereignty and treaty obligations, and protection of bodily autonomy and queer liberation.program.dsausa
On policing and incarceration, it advocates demilitarizing police, ending qualified immunity, reducing police-union power, shifting funds into public services, treating addiction and mental illness as health issues, and ultimately abolishing police and prisons as currently constituted.program.dsausa
DSA supports abolishing ICE detention and deportations, broad legalization and amnesty for undocumented immigrants, a path to citizenship for permanent residents, and removal of visa caps and quotas.program.dsausa
Its foreign-policy platform is explicitly anti-interventionist: it proposes ending foreign wars and overseas bases, sharply cutting or “defunding” the Defense Department, and ending U.S. sanctions and embargoes on countries such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran. It also calls for ending U.S. military and economic aid to Israel, supports Palestinian self-determination and return, and urges prosecution of U.S. and Israeli officials responsible for crimes in Gaza.program.dsausa
DSA is not only proposing policy reforms within today’s system; its program also calls for structural constitutional change. It advocates public election financing, eliminating dark money and Citizens United, abolishing the Electoral College, expanding the House, proportional representation, ranked-choice voting, a multiparty system, and abolition of the Senate.program.dsausa
It further proposes replacing the presidency and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary selected by—and subordinate to—Congress; extending voting rights to permanent residents and people currently or formerly incarcerated; D.C. statehood; and self-determination for U.S. territories.program.dsausa
In brief, DSA is more than a Scandinavian-style welfare-state program: it wants universal public services and strong labor protections in the near term, but its stated end goal is a democratic-socialist economy in which key productive assets and political power are controlled by workers and the public rather than private capital.dsausa+1