On Two-Line Struggle And Its Benefits to DSA (aka: What Mao Can Do For You!)

Arguing is a good thing if we do it right. As Communist organizers, it is our job to collect all types of experiences of struggle, sum them up and determine the path forward based on our analysis of our practice. When we disagree with someone, or an organization, it is not just about being right or proving them wrong. It is an opportunity to dig deeper, to clarify ideas, and to test whether our understanding really matches the situation. In the process, we are forced to examine our own assumptions, correct mistakes, and refine our strategy.

From a strictly revolutionary perspective, this matters a lot. People in the movement come from different experiences and see problems differently. If we just avoid disagreements or shut down debate, we end up with weak ideas that cannot guide action. But if we argue openly and critically, always with the goal of finding the truth (from facts and practice) and serving the people, our line becomes sharper and our work becomes more effective.

The key is that arguments are not personal battles. They are tools to strengthen collective understanding. When done properly, they help expose revisionist ideas, uncover hidden errors, and push everyone toward a clearer strategy. In this sense, disagreement is not a problem to avoid, but a practice to embrace, as long as we always focus on learning, improving, and staying grounded in the masses.

Maoists call this good faith engagement the practice of two line struggle.

Short version: arguing isn’t failure; it’s a method and opportunity for growth. If we do it with discipline, humility, and mass orientation, internal struggle sharpens our line, exposes errors, and makes our practice better for the people. If we avoid it or do it badly, we end up either a political cult or a useless blob. Two-line struggle gives us a way between those poles.

What is Two Line Struggle? (a working definition)

Two-line struggle is a disciplined political practice of open, principled disagreement inside the movement with the explicit aim of clarifying ideas, correcting mistakes, and strengthening the line that guides our mass work. It’s not performative shouting matches or personality fights. It’s organized debate with a method where competing positions are honestly argued, evidence is examined, mistakes are criticized, and the final decision is synthesized into a clearer direction for collective action.

Key ingredients: good faith, evidence, mass orientation, and the goal of forging a sharper, unified line that serves working people.

Why this matters for DSA

People in our movement come from real, diverse experiences. We come from renter organizers, union rank-and-file, mutual aid organizing, the student intifada, and organic left intellectuals. In Liberation, some of us literally come from the streets. That diversity is a strength, but it creates real differences in analysis and strategy. If we let disagreements fester, or avoid them out of fear, our ideas become weak, vague, and unusable in struggle. On the other hand, if we turn inward and forbid criticism, we risk becoming a political cult, cut off from the masses and harming our comrades.

Two-line struggle is a useful practice that keeps us sharp, tactical, and accountable to the people we claim to serve and to each other as comrades. It is like a crucible that strengthens our bonds and makes us reach deeper levels of unity in actions and core values.

The Two Consequences of Being Afraid of Struggle:

1. Political cult: insulated, rigid, and obsessed with purity tests. It polices loyalty, crushes debate, and slowly detaches us from the real needs of working people. Eventually it becomes a sect that trades political relevance for internal control.
2. Weak and diffuse movement: avoids hard political questions, never tests its ideas, and produces fuzzy, useless programs and weak tactics. It can’t pierce the boss’s armor or win the masses because it doesn’t have a sharp, tested line.

Two-line struggle is a tested and proven method that helps us avoid both traps and become a stronger, more united DSA.

How to practice two-line struggle without turning meetings into cage matches

• Apply the mass line: Start with the people: gather what the masses are saying, what problems they report, what experiments organizers are trying on the ground. Summarize the main findings: what worked, what didn’t, who won or lost, what assumptions failed. Bring these findings into the room as the starting point for debate. Not abstract ideology, rooted in nothing, but actual, real life examples. Why: the mass line keeps debate rooted in material reality rather than abstract dogma.

• Debate findings, not personalities: Require any critique to be about actions, tactics, evidence, and results, not about motives or character. Time-box interventions to keep the discussion focused and productive. Use a facilitator who enforces rules: no interruptions, stick to the point, call out bad-faith moves. Facilitators must actively check their own biases and tendencies so they do not unconsciously favor certain positions or personalities. Why: keeping it structural protects comrades, prevents escalations into personal attacks, and gives every participant a voice.

• Frame ideas in class terms and apply the dialectical method (Dialectical Materialism): Split every discussion, position, or tactic into its proletarian and bourgeois elements. Ask: which elements serve the collective interest, and which serve individualist agendas? Use DM to synthesize: identify contradictions, keep what advances mass-oriented revolutionary goals, transform or discard bourgeois influence, and combine the strengths of opposing positions into a clearer line. Layman’s terms: break ideas into two: proletarian vs bourgeois, then build a new idea that keeps what helps the people and scraps what doesn’t. Why: class clarity prevents reformist drift and makes synthesis actually proletarian.

• Use data and experiments (scientific method in plain terms): Treat organizational questions like experiments: state your hypothesis (what we think will work), define the test (what we will try), set measurable outcomes, and a timeline. If the experiment fails, update your position honestly and explain why. Keep simple public records: what we tried, when, how many people participated, and what the results were. Review these collectively. Layman’s terms: make a guess, try it, see if it works, change your mind if it doesn’t. Why: evidence-driven practice forces accountability and prevents debates from being only rhetorical.

• Call out faulty ideas and bad-faith arguments, but do it with rules: Define bad faith: personal attacks, refusal to provide evidence, repeated diversionary tactics, or attempts to undermine agreed democratic outcomes. When bad faith is detected: the facilitator warns, then escalates to mediation or temporary moderation of speaking time. For repeat offenders, chapters should use agreed disciplinary procedures. Protect good-faith dissent while stopping sabotage. Why: defending good-faith debate requires clear rules and predictable enforcement so argument remains productive.

• Synthesize and implement: After debate, synthesize a collective line that explains: the decision, the reasoning, the fallback plan, and the metrics that will show success. Publish the synthesis to members and to affected communities in plain language. Implement democratically while keeping the decision time-limited and revisable based on results. Why: debate without decisions is useless; decisions without debate are brittle.

Concrete structures we can adopt

• Pre-meeting briefs: short written summaries circulated before big debates with the evidence and proposed options. All viewpoints should be expected to provide their positions before the debate. This practice forces comrades to prepare, grounds arguments in evidence rather than emotion, and ensures that people without strong speaking skills still get their ideas into the discussion. It also saves meeting time by front-loading the information, making debate sharper, more focused, and less dominated by whoever can improvise best on the spot. Gives opposition a fair chance to research rebuttals. 
• Devil’s advocate rotation: for key proposals, assign and rotate a person to argue the opposite view in good faith so weaknesses are exposed before the vote.
• Time-boxed experiments: every major tactic is tried on a 4–12 week timeline with clear metrics and a scheduled review.
• Facilitator code of conduct: neutral facilitators enforce rules, call out personal attacks, and ensure marginalized voices are heard. 
• After-action reports: short public writeups of what happened, why it worked or failed, and lessons learned.

These structures make argument a predictable, constructive process instead of random conflict.

Good faith engagement checklist

• I argue ideas, not people.
• I bring evidence or organize to get it. I accept experiment results and change my position if they fail convincingly.
• I’m open to synthesis and compromise when it strengthens mass work.
• I avoid coercive language, guilt-tripping, or purity tests to win an argument.

If a comrade can’t follow these, the chapter should intervene with mediation and education. We should seek to reform comrades and deal with our differences gently but sternly. 

Red flags & what to do

Red Flags (not the good kind!)

• Repeated personal attacks or public shaming.
• Refusal to disclose simple metrics and methodology after an experiment is run.
• Constantly demanding “more study” to block decisions without offering alternatives.
• Using procedural tricks to overturn democratic decisions.

Responses

• Use mediation and restorative practices for interpersonal issues.
• Insist on transparency for tactical experiments (data or we revert to a democratic default).
• Have clear bylaws about how to handle repeated sabotage or factionalism.

How this works at different levels

As revolutionaries: practice the method personally to be the kind of cadre who learns from mistakes, documents them, and brings that intelligence to collective work.

As a chapter: adopt the practical structures above. Make two-line struggle part of meeting culture: pre-reads, a facilitator, time-boxed debates, and after-action reporting.

As a national formation: build clear norms for inter-chapter disputes, require evidence-based pilot programs before national rollout, and create transparent appeals and mediation channels so disputes don’t become purges.

A note on power, democracy, and synthesis

Two-line struggle is not an anti-democratic shortcut. After debate, we must still apply democracy: votes, mandates, and mass consultation where appropriate. But democracy should be intelligent and based on tested evidence and synthesized political lines that actually work in the field.

When a democratic decision is made, implement it with accountability: set measurable goals, check progress, and reopen debate when experiments show failure. That is how democracy learns and stays effective.

Closing: From Theory to Living Practice

If we want a DSA capable of not just existing, but of moving millions, then we must embrace the practices that sharpen us. Two-line struggle is not a gimmick, not a technocratic tool, and not a debating society’s sport. It is a deliberate method forged by revolutionaries to keep our politics alive, dynamic, and rooted in the people.

It asks of us two virtues we already hold in abundance: the humility to admit when we are wrong, and the courage to test our ideas in the open, shoulder to shoulder with our comrades. When we discipline ourselves in this way, we become more than individuals with opinions. We become organizers with clarity, teachers and students at once, capable of serving the people with strategy as well as spirit.

Start small. In your chapter, in your committee, take one concrete question and subject it to the method. Run a time-boxed experiment. Record the outcome honestly. Write an after-action. Share the lessons widely. Then pass the practice along to another branch, another region. Let it spread like good fire through the movement.

Two-line struggle transforms division into unity, confusion into clarity, and stagnation into motion. That is the path of a strong, democratic, self-correcting movement, one that can pierce the armor of capital and carry forward the hopes of the people.Appendix:

Comrades, when two-line struggle crops up, do not rush to stitch opposing views together. The first duty is to take each position apart on its own terms. Map its internal contradictions and ask plainly which class it pulls toward and to what degree. Every position contains tensions; identifying those tensions is how we see its strengths, its limits, and where it can be pushed toward working-class power.

Think in degrees rather than binaries. Few arguments are purely proletarian or purely bourgeois. Measuring how much a tactic or line advances working-class interests keeps us honest and stops us from settling for compromises that leave power in the wrong hands. Break each position into its pieces, test each piece against material conditions and the needs of the base, and always be ready to point out where a position contains a pull toward capital even when it also offers gains for workers.

Only after that rigorous internal analysis should we compare positions. With their contradictions exposed, the relationship between lines becomes clear. That is when principled unity, tactical synthesis, or sharp rejection are legitimate options. Use the mass line of listening to the rank and file to ground this work. Unity without class clarity is just a truce that preserves the status quo.

This method is practical for anyone doing organizing work, and it is exactly the kind of analysis DSA members should practice. It also helps any multi-tendency organization build accountable unity that actually moves people toward power rather than papering over political differences.

Comrade Isa is a member of DSA-SF and a supporter of Liberation.