Drawing from recent experiences in the Cleveland Left, Alek Nielsen argues that the DSA must make a decisive break from a progressive ecosystem model of organizing in favor of mass partyism. 

At the Socialism Conference this September, Jacobin Magazine’s Daniel Denvir hosted a panel on Organizing and Socialist Strategy, where a particular set of questions caught the attention of some of my comrades and I in DSA:

We often hear that our movements are siloed ..to what extent are we seeing collaboration across movements and organizations? What would it look like to truly have a ‘movement of movements’, to have not only organizations with their own clear strategic agenda ..but a left that was held together ..by some sort of broader strategic, dare I say revolutionary agenda?

Historically it was the party form that played this role, to articulate all of these different struggles into a common project. In the absence of that sort of party-like organization, what do we need to fill the vacuum? Do we need one big organization, something like a party, or a party, to win, or should we be nurturing an ecosystem of organizations?

Denvir’s question hits on a tension inherent throughout the panel. In today’s “ecosystem,” groups can become more strategic in their own right, but any discussion of a general strategy is fanciful or vague because there is no single body capable of formulating and practically accomplishing a movement-wide strategy. Denvir’s train of thought is also linked to the significant gains made within his own organization, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), towards a “party-like” independent political organization, proponents¹ of which now hold a majority on our national leader body. It is good news that the very question of a party is before the movement again. Denver is right to pose it as an alternative to the ecosystem. The panelists’ replies reflected, in my view, general confusion on this point.

Panelist Alex Han of In These Times said it was clear there was no space for one big organization while admitting it is a goal we can work toward. He asserted that a party is itself an ecosystem, which isn’t entirely wrong. To fill the strategic vacuum, however, he calls for more “individual actors” who can learn “to act in concert, to do ..assessments and reassessments together,” rather than envisioning this as the role of a unifying organization. Rachel Gilmer, of the Florida Dream Defenders and Left Roots, calls for more “cadres organizations” playing that same role, swimming in the sea of movement organizations, learning our general lessons for us. In one way or another, our panelists are holding out hope that a strategy could arise from the influence of strategically minded individuals and groups, on otherwise autonomous organizational units.

The panelists rejected the idea that a single organization could, at least at any conceivable point in the future, “hold all the contradictions” in the movement. Indeed, no organization could plausibly lay claim to this in 2023. Nobody expects the Dream Defenders to dissolve into DSA. But in rejecting Denver’s either/or, calling for both a political party and an ecosystem of separate movement organizations, they blur the distinction between what we need and what we have now. One might escape with the impression that if we simply did more of what we are already doing, but better, we might one day get a socialist or worker’s party. This is not so. To accomplish a movement strategy, we need to go beyond artisanal activist formations. We need a common body that can direct the movement’s course.

Across America, our boutique movement organizations are drifting leftward. This is likely to continue indefinitely as the foundations for liberal reformism evaporate.²  In the absence of a revolutionary movement strategy, this left turn amounts only to a greater vagueness in our analysis and planning. It involves organizations of strictly limited means adopting more ambitious, which is to say less realizable, goals. Increasingly the tools of grant funding, legislative advocacy, pressure campaigns, and one-off reforms are applied to revolutionary ends. Only the hyper-committed can stay on this course for long, exacerbating the cliquishness of our social movement and its domination by paid professionals. To simply have the word party on the lips of these activists would be no advance whatever. The unholy alliance of board-driven, top-down, and decentralized, unstructured decision-making (among the nonprofits and the pseudoanarchists / individual activist-entrepreneurs respectively) can hardly be considered the nucleus of a future workers’ party. This alliance was first forged in explicit rejection of the party form. We do ourselves no favors forgetting this.

Priorities and Cleveland’s Progressive Ecosystem

Denver’s question brought my mind to the activist community in Cleveland. I hesitate to badmouth other activists in print. I count myself among the least informed in a DSA chapter which, by avoiding official politics in favor of “base building” for years, has grown generally ignorant of their chosen terrain. I have no hope or desire to convince local activists to abandon their work. I regret their present course, but ultimately it is not my business, and I ask for no say in it. It is necessary to speak on this principally for reasons of internal DSA politics: 

1. Many DSA chapters themselves function as ecosystems. To better “hold the contradictions” in their membership, chapters are segmented into committees for each issue area, project, or even identity group. Where power is based in decentralized fiefdoms with autonomous decision-making powers, DSA chapters gradually lose their ability to make general, organization-wide decisions. Choices about capacity and strategy are increasingly “emergent,” which is to say they are the net sum of choices made by a very small number of people in competing subgroups. 
2. Other chapters solve this problem with a top-down centralization emulating the professional nonprofits, greatly limiting DSA’s mass potential, even on the rare occasion when said top has acceptable politics.
3. Nearly all DSA chapters have to tail the movement ecosystem to some degree. Ohio’s DSA chapters, for instance, were in no position to advance an abortion ballot effort on our own, nor did we make the most important contribution to this fight. Nationwide, we frequently join in contests well beyond our own power. If paired with misunderstandings about the long-term prospect of the ecosystem, this will help prevent the consolidation of a democratic mass-party structure.

Strategic thinking means, in part, choosing not to do some things in order to do other things properly. Where does our limited capacity go? What are our shared priorities? These are difficult things to decide even within a single organization. This Fall, I had hoped the starkness of the abortion fight would bring about a semblance of prioritization, but this was never likely. Instead, Cleveland’s electoral activists had their energy spread across four different ballot initiative efforts, led by One Fair Wage, People’s Budget Cleveland, and Ohioans United for Reproductive Rights.³ The movement has come up with many rationalizations for its spread-out approach. Intersectionality is a natural one, these aren’t truly separate issues. For the worst-paid workers in Ohio, abortion may as well have already been illegal, so they say. Those of us who can afford it will still travel to exercise our abortion rights, come what may. Time is running out to address any of these issues. GOP power in the Statehouse is closing the window for ballot initiatives. Some speculate that having multiple progressive issues on the ballot will lead to increased turnout, and I hold out hope this is true. Much of this is just over my head. The problem is not with these arguments themselves, but that they are post-facto justifications for a decision none of us had any part in.

One Fair Wage (OFW), because of its ability to directly hire a large activist base, probably dwarfs the others. When they first began gathering signatures, it was not clear to us that this energy, being so urgently mobilized at the same time as the Abortion petition work, was for a 2024 ballot initiative. I am not sure when the decision to campaign for this was taken or why. I doubt the potential to compete with the abortion initiative was seriously considered; it is not anyone’s business but the Board’s. OFW and the related Restaurant Opportunities Center have a history of questionable decisions taken from the top down. They represent a relatively new phenomenon of labor-themed non-profits, about which there has been much excitement as a supplement to labor unions and their membership. We must eventually ask whether such a supplement is useful for those seeking a renewed and democratic labor movement, and speak and act accordingly. All else aside, these are the organizations we build through these campaigns. 

A huge proportion of the activist scene was pursuing a city-level charter amendment for a Participatory Budget (Issue 38). Over the summer, this fight to have ‘the community’ decide 2% of the city budget (roughly 14 million dollars) had been at the center of activist politics. It has greatly upset our City Council, apparently poisoning their relationship with the Homeless Coalition (NEOCH), from whose extended universe the initiative first emerged. People’s Budget Cleveland (PB Cle) bled one-time allies. Councilwoman Rebecca Mauer came out opposed, shocking the activist community.⁴ So had progressive Councilwoman Jenny Spencer, Mayor Justin Bibb, and the leadership of several labor unions.

Kris Harsh, councilman for Ward 13 argued that by placing power in the hands of residents with “the most social capital” and “free time to participate,” participatory budgeting is less democratic than representative government. There is more to this argument than most activists would admit. Nonprofits and activists would necessarily play a large role in the PB process. They are not elected to represent the community and are ultimately accountable to themselves and their funders regardless of how sincerely they seek community input.⁵ Still, Harsh is dodging the real issue and is utterly disingenuous. Council would rather funnel taxpayer money to cops and stadiums, priorities determined by their own distinct (and clearly worse!) set of self-selected “community” members (and of course, by capital). Nobody presently and faithfully represents ordinary Clevelanders, who largely take no part in politics. It is no wonder activists look to further empower left nonprofit coalitions. We can set aside the many flaws with community “input” and “participation,” because the PB Cle initiative did not promise representation even for the activist minority. Rather, the practical power of the council majority would prevail, at the ballot box or afterward.

Not long ago organizers hoped for the council to pass a PB resolution of their own volition, with the mayor’s support. After their proposal to the council failed, PB organizers simply sidestepped their key strategic problem: faithful implementation still requires movement-oriented candidates to capture more council seats. Had it passed, through the Steering Committee, called for in the amendment, the city council and mayor’s office would have ample opportunity for sabotage, each splitting half the appointments to the body. The amendment language also called for a Coordinator to chair the Committee, appointed from a “third party nonprofit,” and it made several similar references to “Community partners”, the nonprofits needed to construct ‘community’ input. There are many such partners to choose from, but NEOCH or a NEOCH adjacent group would seem a natural fit.

We can use the recent discussions seeking a revived Cleveland Tenants Organization (CTO) to predict how this would go. Council recently floated contributing a million dollars to tenant organizing work in Cleveland, sparking great excitement in the left-leaning nonprofit sphere. As the only nonprofit doing tenant organizing work in Cleveland⁶, every credible participant in the CTO discussions acknowledges NEOCH as the natural fit. Yet excluding anyone associated with NEOCH quickly proved to be Council’s priority. NEOCH’s support for PB Cle and their valiant efforts to stop the displacement at Euclid Beach manufactured home park have demonstrated that the Coalition is serious about spending public money to make trouble not just for out-of-state landlords, but for pseudo-public institutions like the Western Reserve Land Conservancy. The window in which NEOCH could expect such funding has closed. Although many talented people are still occupying themselves in these discussions, as of writing it appears that the money will sooner go to a toothless amateur outfit like Organize Ohio, or even to a landlord-friendly consultant, than anyone halfway poised to augment the power of tenants in Cleveland. Had Issue 38 prevailed, Council would be no less committed to excluding the movement nonprofits from the participatory budgeting process and shamelessly subverting it in every other way possible. We have the same problem in the Statehouse, which was likely to “post-empt” the initiative, had it passed, a recurring problem for municipal reformists. Without a base beyond the activist scene, PB Cle supporters cannot win a fight with the powers that be, regardless of the will of Cleveland’s voters.

In light of this and by its ‘participatory’ nature, after passage, the PB process would still require a great deal of time and energy. As in the CTO discussions, activists were likely to stay the course well after they hit a brick wall, diverting scarce energy from other initiatives. To make it clear the process represents a community, they would presumably involve ordinary Cleveland-ers in their very first political meetings. This would be no small task to bring people into such a wonky process, to convince them it is worth their time and in any real way under their control. Should it prove otherwise, the more clever of these participants would be lost to the movement forever. Even in the most idealistic scenarios, a 14 million-dollar investment cannot combat the fundamental issues in Cleveland neighborhoods. Were it several billion dollars it would still fall short, failing to challenge the ownership of the neighborhoods so invested in. One way or another, the effort would be frustrated and prove incommensurate to the scale of movement energy invested. Rather than reversing trends of political apathy in Cleveland, the process was doomed to reinforce them. 

Democracy in the Movement

Late last year, a coalition of reproductive justice nonprofits came together with an initiative to put abortion rights in the Ohio Constitution. Like these other initiatives, this was a decision made by relatively few people, primarily professionals, but in this case, they chose correctly. Unlike One Fair Wage, PB Cle, or Issue 2, had we lost the abortion fight, those activists who could afford it would consider leaving Ohio altogether. Each hour spent on these other campaigns was an hour not spent on the abortion campaign. Abortion made it to the ballot, and because Issue 1 passed the risks of this spread will be forgotten. Nonetheless, they were still risks. Regardless of the raw popularity of a wage hike, of sensible drug policy, and legal abortion, there is a dire need for activist capacity to ensure any of them. Our opponents are highly organized through their churches, and the GOP holds state power in state government.⁷ The will of the majority of Ohioans alone has, anyhow, never been decisive. The GOP will use the state government to sabotage abortion rights in Ohio. Because we understand this, DSA chapters resolved to prioritize independent socialist campaigns for abortion rights, capable of developing and recruiting new reproductive justice activists for the long term, in a fashion the nonprofits and the Democratic Party are not designed to do. At the national level DSA is learning from our campaign in Ohio, towards implementing our national reproductive rights campaign in 2024. 

All of Ohio’s DSA chapters joined the fight for abortion rights. Most decided to pursue other initiatives alongside it, while Cleveland DSA eventually opted to pause or scale down our other external work.⁸ Were I in these sister chapters, I would object to any spread-out approach. I could do so with little fear of being shouted down, and with a genuine chance that my objections would not only be heard but carry the day. If I felt strongly enough, I could speak with my comrades ahead of the vote, and come to a General Meeting with a team ready to push for strict prioritization. In such a democratic context, when one loses, one is still bought into the course decided upon. Where can comrades make the case for prioritization in the social movement? The ecosystem is so thoroughly decentralized that the idea itself is incoherent. 

If 2023’s movement campaigns had to gain the acceptance of a mass membership that considered it their business to interfere, holistic strategic questions could have been raised and addressed more thoroughly. More Zoom meetings alone solve nothing. Democracy is not possible absent the genuine possibility that a proposed project can be rejected. Many activists (inside and outside of DSA) will not countenance this. A great number would never seek this degree of control and discipline over “those doing the work.” Movement leaders make many sacrifices, but deference is no gift to them. We have hundreds of planners and campaigners nationwide who bear a very lonely and I should think very painful weight, shouldering responsibility for the movement’s perpetual strategic failure. We see little in the ecosystem resembling the genuine collective responsibility necessary to grow into a true mass movement. Any expansion of democracy must be paired with centralization. Attempts by leaders in these scattered organizations to be more internally democratic would only confuse the issue further. Groups becoming more democratic in their own right does not thereby bring overall movement strategy under democratic control.⁹ In the absence of any centralized democratic control, most activists stand powerless. As with individual consumers in a capitalist society, who have many options at the supermarket but cannot simply choose to have a robust transportation system, without any lever of collective decision-making, we can only “vote with our feet” as atomized movement-consumers. Alternatively, we can rationalize the movements’ “decisions” as organic expressions of the will of “the community,” of the ecosystem. 

Socialist leaders cannot afford this autonomy. The ‘ecosystem’ can get away with substituting professionalism for mass planning, and paid staff for recruitment, but only so long as their goals are purely reformist in character and do not seek a transfer of practical power. As leaders of an unprofessional, revolutionary organization, we need help not just with signature collection or phonebanking, but with planning and assessment of our work. We must reject the widespread instinct to claim easy victories and shield our base from difficulties. We need informed dissent and opposition. In a socialist party, no leader or project is above critique. Socialist leadership depends on the guidance of the collective and not the other way round. This guidance must take the form of actual people having actual, practical control (not mere input, participation, etc.) over our collective course, as part of a common organization. We can accept no substitute. 

I say all of this in a spirit of comradery with my fellow activists in Cleveland, who I feel are, in the long run, wasting valuable talents on fights that will not and cannot change the overall balance of power. I don’t intend this as a call-out. Plenty of our members themselves benefit from the paid canvassing in these campaigns and indeed have used these positions to carve out time for DSA work. DSA volunteers are present in all of these campaigns. I myself work in the nonprofit ecosystem, in a job I consider meaningful in its own way. I certainly don’t wish to side with the ghouls on City Council, who I can only hope will one day denounce DSA with half the energy they’ve directed at NEOCH and PB Cle. But the movement in Cleveland is still far too weak to pretend to be all things to all people. We need focus, and more still, we need a means to consolidate forces after defeat into a common structure, to achieve a net increase in movement planners, thinkers, and activists.

Revolutionary Strategy and the Party

As we wait for movement leaders to catch up on the party question, we are neglecting what should already be the key questions: what sort of internal party democracy is necessary to build it into a revolutionary instrument? Will this be a socialist party or merely a workers’ party with socialists in it? These queries will remain unfashionable and bizarre to progressive intellectuals, but as leaders in the actually existing socialist movement, they are already before us. If our common organization does not escape our social confines and conquer both a mass membership and a focused revolutionary strategy, we will likewise fail, having only wasted more workers’ time in the process. We will end up tailing the initiatives of nonprofits (if not the Democratic Party itself) regardless of our militant rhetoric. 

In one manner or another, the route to a revolutionary socialist party in the United States runs through DSA. Cleveland DSA is certainly in no place to lecture the local movement when it comes to concrete victories. Our contribution has been very modest. We have, in fact, not yet decided upon a local strategy, thus far pursuing campaigns in a centralized but ad hoc manner. Nationally, in DSA, there’s great confusion on precisely these questions, with “partyist” elements setting themselves against the (largely reform-oriented and top-down) pro-centralization tendencies. The members as a whole, in chapters and at our national conventions, refuse to decide between projects, deliberately rejecting the imperatives of collective strategic decision-making. DSA’s status as the best hope for socialism is not necessarily good news. Ten years back, our having any hope was enough. This won’t sustain us indefinitely. The prospect of a mass socialist party arising from the nonprofit industrial complex and the spontaneous street movement is simply worse. The notion that it could arise from the initiative of individual activist-entrepreneurs is not worth discussion. It is not that the individuals involved in this work have no place in a Party, but the ecosystem they work in is best understood as its opposite. DSA’s most developed chapters have established a democratic decision-making process and the beginnings of a mass membership, both crucial steps towards a movement that is under democratic rather than privatized control.

Those of you who believe we need more than reforms, that we need a revolution, must acknowledge the need for a revolutionary strategy. An ecosystem of autonomous private actors simply cannot have a strategy. Big-picture decisions will remain defacto and undemocratic, regardless of the intentions (regardless of the actions!) of movement players. I am calling on all of us to dare, at the very least, to imagine a socialist party that is actually capable of coordinating the social movement. Without such a party, we cannot have a collective, shared strategy. Without it, we cannot reevaluate this strategy in light of failures or setbacks. We cannot coordinate individual initiatives towards a common purpose. The party-form was largely rejected in the 1960s, after Stalinist sectlets and reformist bureaucrats thoroughly discredited it. We have tried to replace it with privatized and decentralized “community organizing” for the better part of a century. Without a vehicle for collective reflection, however, activists can and will continue on this course indefinitely. Despite 40 years of easy victories claimed, the social movement remains stagnant. Avenues for even modest social reform are closing. We are at an impasse. To transcend it, we need something that is at once new and old: a democratic socialist political party.

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1. “Partyism” is a complex phenomenon in DSA. For most self-identified “partyists” in DSA, whether we continue to contest Democratic primaries, or immediately create a separate ballot line, is beside the point. No (presently) significant nationwide faction supports the latter course, and “partyists” are eager to distinguish themselves from the “clean break” factions past and present. The “partyist” factions focus instead on building an independent democratic organization that subjects our elected officials to the guidance and discipline of membership and adopts a revolutionary program and strategy.

   Complicating matters further, the main factions which are not called partyist, do still support building DSA’s independent organizational capacity, but with less strict standards of political independence from progressive Democrats, and with a pervasive agnosticism on questions of revolutionary strategy. Ohio’s chapters, across the spectrum of DSA politics, organized their own canvassing operations wherever possible. The idea of merely joining the nonprofit or Democrat-led canvassing was a nonstarter. DSA’s national electoral operators consistently encouraged this. DSA’s “social democrats” and non-organizational-anarchists, once key opponents of independent work and organization, are today extremely marginal. In this way, key aspects of our left shift in 2017 have been consolidated.

2. After a brief period of accommodation in 2017-2021, the Democratic Party has grown incredibly hostile to its left wing. Nationally this has been obscured by the desire of DSA congresspeople to compromise with the party, and by the ongoing desire of many mainstream Democrats to revive their 20th century trade unionism. In Ohio, where establishment Democrats never abandoned trade unionism, we know this politics is strictly limited in its aims and in its prospects inside the Democratic party and the constitutional system. Increasingly DSA’s would-be Democrat representatives face a choice. The Democrats offer less every year as they lose ground to the GOP electorally, and have lost the Supreme Court.
3. I don’t discuss Marijuana legalization (Issue 2) here. As a popular and simple initiative, it seems likely it increased turnout in a straightforward, statewide fashion. It does not seem to have absorbed much activist capacity.
4. Councilwoman Mauer was a critical part of 2019’s Cleveland Lead Advocates for Safe Housing, a semi-successful NEOCH/DSA coalition effort around lead paint remediation that constituted Cleveland DSA’s first “priority campaign”. She went on to beat an entrenched incumbent for the Ward 12 seat (Slavic Village). A nonmember, she remains socially connected to our chapter and politically speaking comes closer to us than any other present councilperson in Cleveland, even releasing an acceptable statement on the genocide in Gaza.
5. There’s a great deal of writing on how and why non-profits construct the notion of community representation, the articles from Ramsin Canon in Midwest Socialist are probably the best place to start.
6. The American tenant movement outside Northeast Ohio is largely led by the “Autonomous Tenant Union Network” which has chapters in several major cities. This “autonomous” coalition is united in rejection of outside funding, instead relying on member dues and founding themselves on firm democratic control. Eventually, we should expect the funded efforts of groups like NEOCH to come into conflict with autonomous organizing, if the tenant movement develops far enough in Cleveland.
7. With the recent and mounting enthusiasm for ballot initiatives (inside and outside of DSA), the extent to which their implementation still depends on electing a sufficient number of Democrats to state government needs to be investigated closely, including in the case of Issue 1.
8. We have authorized some “nonpriority” work, with UAW strike support, Starbucks pickets, a one-off solidarity action with the Forbes Union, and more. But DSA Cleveland only pursues a maximum of 2 priorities at a time and is strict about limiting nonpriority work. Most Ohio chapters have attempted priority based centralization since Olivia M first described our common problems in 2020, but apparently with mixed success, and often in a manner Cleveland DSA would reject.
9. The democracy-in-one-committee approach, one alternative to centralized decision making power in DSA, similarly sidesteps the problems outlined here.