What does the leadership of a mass organization look like?
This is a question that should be at the forefront of all political discussions within DSA. The DSA political platform, approved by the 2021 convention, contains several demands for democratic reforms: the abolition of anti-democratic institutions, democratic self-governance, and a guarantee of the right to vote. These are common sense political reforms which echo the platforms of numerous political parties. However, when we look at DSA’s own political structure, we find an organization that does not itself conform to these demands. Our federated structure attenuates the national body from the local, leaving most members without a direct relation to the larger body.
I have proposed a resolution for the 2023 DSA National Convention, which will be held this summer, that calls for the direct election of NPC members by the membership. I strongly urge all DSA members to support the measure. There is, of course, an argument to support direct election of NPC members based on pure democratic principle, but the concrete realities of DSA demonstrate its immediate need.
At a basic level, the structure of DSA is straightforward. The base of DSA is its members, who are organized into geographically delineated chapters. Members who have no local chapter are considered at-large. The general work of the members of DSA, i.e. the work of DSA itself, is largely instituted by local chapters in an independent manner, with little or not practical oversight from any national body. The nominal “highest decision-making body”1 of DSA is its Convention, which meets, at a minimum, biennially. The Convention is composed of delegates, who are elected by chapters. At-large members hold delegate elections nationally. The Convention then elects the National Political Committee (NPC), which is the “highest decision-making body of the organization between meetings of the Convention.”2 The NPC employs the National Director(s). The NPC, with the national staff, generally manages the affairs of DSA between Conventions.
While this may appear to be a straightforward political structure, its practical consequences must be considered. Members of DSA should consider that there are stark regional divides between our interests. It is not my intention to break down completely the regional divides that drive fundamental differences in the working class of say, Alabama, and that of California. But there are a couple of demonstrable truths between the rural-urban divide that relate directly to DSA’s internal structure.
Urban areas, being more densely populated, have larger DSA chapters. While this may appear to be tautological, it also reflects peoples’ amenability to socialism generally. Rural people, by and large, tend to cling to Cold War-era conceptions of socialism, and few are actively trying to organize in those areas. It is much easier to do that kind of work in larger cities, for both social and legal reasons.3
Accordingly, within DSA, the big city “megachapters” like New York City have an outsized impact on our national politics. Eight of eighteen total members of the current National Political Committee are from the greater NYC metropolitan area, with another five coming from other super-metropolises. The most “rural” member hails from Eugene, Oregon, which has a population of over 175,000.
In practice, DSA is a highly federated structure. National and local bodies operate more-or-less independently, without any kind of reciprocal accountability to each other. The vast majority of members are passive, paper members, who may or may not pay dues. About ten percent of the membership can be considered to be active members; while this number is not hard and fast across chapters, it is a reasonably consistent phenomenon. The active members then elect approximately ten percent of their own ranks to serve on the body of delegates, who in turn select sixteen of the eighteen NPC members. Each level of engagement is attenuated from the larger body which produces it: active members from the membership at large, delegates from the active members, NPC from the delegates.
These two facts, geographic interests and federated structure, collide in the Convention and the NPC. While metropolitan megachapters are well-represented at the national level, the reality is that most local chapters are largely uninvolved with the national organization. Essentially, DSA has a dual existence. Nationally, it is a roughly unitary body, by and through the biennial convention, the NPC, and national committees. Locally, it is largely composed of atomized communities with little or no communication with national or with each other.
The political directions of these bodies often diverge. Currently, most members of the NPC represent different factional interests within DSA, which are largely aligned with the factional interests of metropolitan megachapters. NPC turnover has been relatively high, and the process for replacing former NPC members who resign is self-selection by the NPC itself, rather than an election by the members or the delegates. But there is a second source of organizational direction for the organization, and that is from the staff, who are nominally subservient to the NPC. In practice, however, the Executive Director, an allegedly non-political, administrative role, wields an enormous amount of sway over the NPC, particularly in proposing budgets and advising NPC members of what is possible. At the chapter level, leadership’s ability to give political direction varies. But even where some chapters have reasonably coherent political messaging, such political direction does not necessarily translate over into the national body.
The 2021-2023 NPC embodies these issues. First, the NPC has experienced high turnover, with 25% of elected NPC members resigning prior to the expiration of their terms.They were replaced by appointment with candidates who are either directly or ideologically related to ideological groupings of NPC members.
NPC communication with the broader organization has been limited at best. Minutes of NPC meetings are difficult to track down on the discussion board. The most consistent sources of information regarding NPC actions have been Jen Bolen’s tweets and forum posts.4 It is troubling indeed if the only way we find out the actions of a subsidiary body is at the discretion of one of its members. The NPC conducted a “debate” between NPC members on the future of DSA on January 26 of this year, but did so seemingly without member input whatsoever.
The NPC’s inaction speaks even louder than its silence. This NPC has done nothing with many resolutions passed by the Convention in 2021, like the renewed Medicare for All priority or Childcare for All measure. Spanish translations of the website, Constitution, and Bylaws — passed on the 2021 Convention’s consent agenda — have not been posted.
Perhaps most glaring is the NPC’s failure to respond to political crises within the organization that stem from the actions of DSA’s endorsed federal elections on at least three occasions: the votes of DSA-endorsed representatives on September 23, 2021 which allowed the funding of Iron Dome, an Israeli missile-based air defense system, the further actions of Rep. Jamaal Bowman in contravention of DSA’s democratically adopted positions on BDS and Palestine, and the railway strikebreaking vote of almost all DSA-endorsed representatives on December 1, 2022. The NPC has responded not with action, but with platitudes.5
DSA political education events frequently discuss the necessity of “mass action” to improve the conditions of the multiracial working class. An oft-cited example of this is Peter Camejo’s 1972 speech, “Liberalism, ultraleftism, or mass action.” To Camejo, mass action is the strategy of “getting people into motion, into action” — that is, allowing the working class to express its own opposition to ruling-class political policy. Camejo argues that this is done by organizing people around their own clearly articulated issues.
In The Two Souls of Socialism, Hal Draper offers a similar outlook, in the idea of “Socialism-from-Below.” Socialism-from-Below is a commitment to the self-emancipation of working people, driven not by party apparatchiks, but by the working people themselves. Draper derives this idea from the “first principle” of Karl Marx: “The emancipation of the working classes must be conquered by the working classes themselves.”6 In analyzing Socialism-from-Below in contrast to its analogue, Socialism-from-Above, Draper links, causally, the exclusion of the great mass of working people to the power of the elite:
From the point of view of intellectuals who have a choice of roles to play in the social struggle, the perspective of Socialism-from-Below has historically had little appeal. Even within the framework of the socialist movement it has had few consistent exponents and not many inconsistent ones. Outside the socialist movement, naturally, the standard line is that such ideas are visionary, impractical, unrealistic, “utopian”; idealistic perhaps but quixotic. The mass of people are congenitally stupid, corrupt, apathetic and generally hopeless; and progressive change must come from Superior People rather like (as it happens) the intellectual expressing these sentiments. This is translated theoretically into an Iron Law of Oligarchy or a tinny law of elitism, in one way or another involving a crude theory of inevitability – the inevitability of change-from-above-only.
There is, of course, ideological disagreement amongst socialists and DSA members about how we can achieve political power for ourselves. But there has been at least symbolic support for Socialism-from-Below; such as in 2020, when DSA published its solidarity statement with Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD), a rank and file movement within UAW.7 DSA as a national organization already regularly advocates for more rank-and-file democracy within the labor movement, so it would be hypocritical for us to oppose internal organizational democratization. We should follow the lead of the UAWD campaign and model ourselves as a socialist organization invested in rank-and-file democracy just like the organizations we support.
The first step DSA can take toward standing with its members is to adopt a form more suited to a member-led mass organization. This means giving all members the ability to decide political questions at all levels, especially at the highest level. By rooting our political leadership in the democratic mandate of the rank-and-file, we will build a stronger organization that is more responsive to our members’ needs. If we hope to build any kind of mass movement beyond DSA, we need to become, structurally, an organization where all members have a say.
In contrast, delegate elections attenuate the membership from the political process and encourage a form of Socialism-from-Above. NPC candidates campaign for votes not from members or chapters, but their chosen delegates, and this gives our organized internal factions an arena in which they can horse-trade votes to ensure the largest number of seats at the table.
We have an excellent case study in the internal elections of United Auto Workers. For years, UAW international elections were won by “administration caucus” candidates whose policies were not in line with the rank-and-file union members, resulting in money being funneled from working members to union officials’ lavish lifestyles. Rank-and-file groups like Unite All Workers for Democracy (UAWD) led the members in ratifying “one member, one vote” (OMOV) for leadership elections in 2020. DSA openly supported UAWD’s efforts, releasing a statement of solidarity. In 2021, UAW members voted overwhelmingly for democracy in their union. Leadership elections were held in early 2023. While the election remains contested, it appears as though the rank-and-file slate UAW Members United have won their election, with Shawn Fain very likely to be the next UAW International President.8
While the impetus to democratize UAW by transforming it into a OMOV organization was a reaction to corruption, rank-and-file organizers skillfully seized on the internal crisis to push for a common sense reform that empowered the union’s members. Whether DSA’s current situation constitutes a “crisis,” adopting OMOV elections for leadership elections, beginning with the NPC, should be viewed as a logical extension of DSA’s support for the UAWD campaign and any similar union democratization campaign ongoing or in the future. The importance of rank-and-file organizing does not end at the union hall door: as we seek to empower union members across the country, we should likewise seek to empower our own members.
It is important to keep in mind that this is not the only organizational issue that stands between DSA and the building of a mass movement of the working class, and direct NPC elections are not a silver bullet for organizational dysfunction. But giving members a meaningful, democratic voice in how we choose our leaders is an important step forward for DSA. We have an opportunity to fight bureaucratization in the organization and more resemble a mass movement. Accordingly, we should adopt “one member, one vote” direct elections at the 2023 DSA National Convention.
Richard Williams
- DSA Const. Art. V, Sec. 1.
- DSA Const. Art. VIII, Sec. 1.
- In particular, organizing agricultural workers in the US has proven perhaps more difficult than any other industrial sector, with major successes coming from largely cultural or ethnically-aligned worker movements (e.g. Coalition of Immolakee Workers).
- I note this without regard to the substantive content or accuracy of those posts.
- See, e.g. DSA Stands with the Palestinian People: National Political Committee Condemns Iron Dome Vote, On the Question of Expelling Congressman Bowman, Stand with Railworkers, Build Workers Power
- This is the first declaration of the General Rules of the International Workingmen’s Association (First International). https://www.marxists.org/history/international/iwma/documents/1864/rules.htm
- https://www.dsausa.org/statements/dsa-statement-of-solidarity-with-unite-all-workers-for-democracy-uawd/
- https://www.freep.com/story/money/cars/2023/03/05/uaw-runoff-election-ballot-challenges/69969440007/