In September of this year, I went to the ManiFiesta festival in Belgium, hosted by the Workers’ Party of Belgium (PTB-PVDA). This festival occurs every year in Ostend, Belgium, and attracts 10,000 to 15,000 people from across the world to celebrate working-class culture, listen to radical music, and discuss and debate political strategy. I spoke with trade unionists, Palestine solidarity activists, student activists, researchers, healthcare organizers, and elected officials about their party.
There are three key lessons that DSA could learn from the PTB-PVDA.
One: Positive Demands
Building power requires a focus on positive demands that matter to people, phrased in language that appeals to people. By emphasizing healthcare, cost of living, taxing the rich, and ending political corruption, the PTB-PVDA is able to build a large base of supporters among the working class.
This hasn’t always been the case, but was a result of a shift in how the party approached their political project at their 2008 Congress, known as the “Renewal Congress.” At this Congress, the PTB-PVDA committed themselves to being a principled socialist party, a party of the working class, and also to being a “flexible” party tactically.
The results have been undeniable. In the most recent 2024 national election, the PTB-PVDA received 763,000 votes, up from 566,000 in 2019, growing the number of elected members of Parliament from 12 to 15 (out of 150). In the most recent 2024 municipal election, the PTB-PVDA grew its elected representatives from 169 in 2018 to 258, becoming the second largest party in Antwerp, despite the abolition of compulsory voting in the Flanders region. A third of the PTB-PVDA’s elected representatives are workers, and one in six are under 30.
This continues an ongoing post-Renewal Congress trend visualized in the graphs below, using a combination of PTB-PVDA data from the 2021 Party Congress and data from the Ministry of the Interior, showing explosive growth in party membership alongside a growing number of elected officials at local, regional, and federal levels.
PTB-PVDA’s meteoric rise took place during their Renewal period, starting after 2008. This is reflected in their ability to elect members of parliament federally and regionally, as well as two members of the European Parliament (not shown above). It is also reflected in the growth of the party’s membership along with the number of local councillors elected and the number of grassroots groups (analogous to chapters).
While maintaining a clear-eyed and principled long term goal of socialism, flexibility in tactics enables the PTB-PVDA to organize around demands that are going to mobilize the broadest sections of the working class, instead of “submerging” people with “the complete program”, or requiring them to accept the entirety of our socialist vision for society to organize with us. As an example, the PTB-PVDA was able to take on the fight against a regressive tax on electricity usage and put forward a plan to force corporations to invest excess profits in renewable energy generation. While fights against tax increases are typically not seen as a “socialist” demand, the PTB-PVDA was able to frame this tax increase as an attack on working families, and identify the corporate energy barons and the politicians that were subservient to them as the enemy.
Before the last federal election, the PTB-PVDA performed a massive survey of over one hundred thousand people, partially using an app they developed. Analogous to a bargaining survey in a workplace organizing context, the survey was used to determine the issues that voters cared about the most, and was used to inform the election platform, alongside the party program and strategy.
This does not mean that the PTB-PVDA simply abandons principles to build a popular party, a trajectory clearly taken on by some other left parties in Europe. The PTB-PVDA has maintained a strong position on Palestine and imperialism around the world, and since the onset of the genocide has continued to be among the loudest voices in Europe calling for a ceasefire and an arms embargo. The approach that the PTB-PVDA takes to talking about the genocide, however, demonstrates a clear understanding of tactics – speaking in terms of not only international law, occupation, colonization and apartheid but also of the massive cost of funding war by taking public money away from social services.
The PTB-PVDA emphasizes the positive aspects of its platform: economic justice, increasing purchasing power, housing justice, and healthcare. The language and solutions are common sense. Rather than talking abstractly about “bodily autonomy,” the platform plank for feminism uses a simple “my body, my choice” framing that includes not only access to abortion, but also the removal of sales tax on menstrual goods, emphasizing a common thread of economic justice.
Two: Clear Political Target
Socialist politics and maintaining a clear political target in the corruption of the ruling class are the best antidote to the far-right.
Fighting the far-right is an important priority for us in the United States, with an incoming Trump administration and empowered far-right movement across the country. The growth of the far-right is a global phenomenon, and Belgium is far from immune. However, the growth of the far-right, which is primarily in the Dutch-speaking region of Flanders, has not stopped the growth of the PTB-PVDA. In an analysis of the last federal election, the PTB-PVDA was shown to be the only party aside from the conservative nationalist New Flemish Alliance (N-VA) party that won over a significant portion of voters that previously voted for the fascist Flemish Interest (VB) party. How can a left socialist party take votes away from the far-right while maintaining a clear political vision of working class politics?
My conversations with PTB-PVDA activists around this subject suggested that these voters can be won over by two closely connected components of the PTB-PVDA platform. First, economic proposals of reducing the cost of living and taxing the rich, and secondly, anti-establishment political proposals to reduce the salaries and perks of elected officials and attack corruption in government. By maintaining a clear political target in the ruling class, the PTB-PVDA does not fight the far-right by building coalitions with liberals who have no quarrel with capitalism or the corrupt ruling class.
Instead, the PTB-PVDA rejects the status quo by acknowledging that working people are suffering under the existing system, and puts forward a positive vision of how society should change. This places a clear target on the political elites that enable capitalism to destroy the lives of working-class people, thus providing an effective target for voters with legitimate concerns around corruption of the political elite.
The last election also demonstrated that the PTB-PVDA is by far the most popular party amongst first-time voters in Flanders, suggesting that these politics resonate with young voters who might otherwise be drawn to far-right politics. The PTB-PVDA’s success over Green and Social Democratic parties at winning over votes from the far-right in Flanders provides strong evidence for a class-based, political elite-focused approach to fighting the far-right.
The PTB-PVDA is also the only party in Belgium with representation in both the Flanders and Wallonian parliaments, hence the dual French (“PTB”) and Dutch (“PVDA”) party names . As a result of separatist movements in Flanders and extreme cultural and political fragmentation across Belgium, no other party has a unified presence across both parliaments. This is the result of the PTB-PVDA-PVDA putting forward a “common history of the working class of Belgium” that spans Flanders, Brussels, and Wallonia, while emphasizing the common enemy of the ruling class that benefits from divisions. The PTB-PVDA also connects opposition to separatism to a clear vision of fighting corruption and making a more efficient and centralized government, emphasizing the costs of fragmented government that are borne out by working people.
Three: Democratic Participation and Centralization
Centralization and a clearly stated program enables the PTB-PVDA to move quickly and in a coordinated manner, while building a mass party and maintaining a strong culture of democratic participation.
In 2008, as part of the Renewal congress, the PTB-PVDA went from being a purely “cadre” party — a small group of intensely engaged activists — to having a tiered structure. There are three tiers in the party: militants, base group members, and consultative members. Each of these tiers are engaged in the democratic process of the PTB-PVDA to different degrees. Consultative members are surveyed in person and through phone banking to assess their perceptions of party progress. “Base group” (analogous to chapters) members are actively involved in party work and can direct questions to the party leadership through base group leaders. This tier can also be elected as delegates to party congresses. Militants are intensely engaged activists and commit more time, money, and energy to party work, and are also organized in specific base groups, typically taking on one clear responsibility.
By having a tiered structure, the PTB-PVDA is able to build and develop activists who can devote themselves to building the party while growing a mass base among the working class. This allows the party to retain a clear commitment to ending capitalism in the long haul, while enabling tactical flexibility in the short term to win over masses of people.
A massive collaborative and democratic effort goes into party congresses. In 2021, 883 delegates from 400 base groups worked for a year to prepare 564 pages of commission reports, to which 1,118 amendments were added, creating a document of 1,368 pages, which served as the basis for debates. The analysis provided by congress reports is crucial for maintaining clarity for activists who are committing themselves to organizing for the party. While appealing to activists is often deemed an “inward-facing” approach, all socialist parties must appeal to activists in order to attract a layer of organizers that will drive work in the party forward. The tiered approach that the PTB-PVDA takes ensures that activists who are attracted to the long-term political program are themselves oriented towards winning over the broader working class with flexible tactics.
How is this relevant for DSA?
Like DSA, the PTB-PVDA faced challenges in connecting the party to a mass, working-class base in a fragmented country with a growing far-right. Through strategic changes in 2008, they were able to completely change course, and become the fourth largest party in Belgium, while retaining a strong commitment to achieving socialism. In debates in DSA, the goals of building a mass base and commitment to principles are often posed as being in conflict. The PTB-PVDA case study demonstrates that a commitment to a principled, long-term strategy allows for flexibility in short-term tactics, while maintaining the party’s trajectory.
In DSA, it is often difficult to convince our activist layer that a specific demand or specific language should be avoided to maximize our ability to organize our base. This is not simply because our activist layer doesn’t think “strategically,” but because the “strategy” itself is often not laid out in clear terms beyond winning an election or campaign. The PTB-PVDA’s approach ensures activists understand that tactical flexibility and disciplined messaging are part of a long-term, clearly stated strategy that they’re bought into because of democratic participation.
DSA also struggles to carry out stated objectives and campaigns once these objectives are agreed upon at convention. The PTB-PVDA case study outlines the necessity of centralization, in which the party is able to move as a whole unit to carry out what was agreed upon at the party congress. Using a metrics-driven approach, the PTB-PVDA is able to clearly evaluate the successes and failures of organizing campaigns and change course as a unit when necessary. The presence of organized, outward facing internal caucuses in DSA limits our ability to coordinate campaign strategy in this manner, and caucuses across the political spectrum organize independently of the democratic mandate of the convention.
When I was leaving Belgium, all of the PTB-PVDA activists I spoke to wished me good luck with “building the party.” Despite all of our challenges, DSA today is recognized around the world as a crucial component of the future for working-class politics in the heart of the empire. It’s our job to apply lessons from modern socialist success stories around the world to build DSA into a party of the working class.