I've never been against the idea of a "workers' party" but I have not seen anything that specifies (a) what that looks like or means given our current political economy, and (b) how one "builds" anything that resembles a mass, or even pre-mass, organization.

One tendency I see often is the swapping of service workers for industrial labor, e.g. nurses for factory workers. So, then all one must do is to organize these workers into unions, and then fuse their unions into an party. But the two modes of work are fundamentally different.

It seems obvious to me, at least, that a political party that is predicated on a mass base of social reproductive labor, for example healthcare and education, will have all sorts of idiosyncrasies that are distinctive and depart from the imagined ideal of a Party.

In other words, the prerequisites for the party are unclear to me. While the vision for a party is often centered on union members, unionization today is at an all time low, and even those who are unionized as typically state employees with no private sector leverage.

If the Great Party Discussion keeps happening in the DSA, I hope it at least begins to take seriously our situation...