Jean Allen discusses the factional infighting in the DSA and it what it says about the organization at large.
On Friday February 8 the steering committee and the organizational structure committee of Philly DSA unveiled their proposed bylaws for the chapter. These bylaws, if passed, would lead to a radical restructuring of the chapter and a leadership elected every 2 years with a limited ability for recall; this would effectively be the only decision-making body in the organization. Members would be able to advise the leadership during the bimonthly meetings, but would not be able to create new campaigns on their own initiative and have to work through the existing committees, which they would need to ask to join. Later this spring that structure was approved at a controversial general meeting.
This has formed a part of the latest chapter of national DSA drama, which moves fast and often feels easy to shake off if you aren’t in one of the ‘problem chapters’ which generate so much of the organization’s discourse. In fact, as I write this, the events in Philadelphia have made Spring’s image so toxic that the caucus split on March 17. This event has put DSA politics, which for the last year has largely been merely one of opposition to Spring (née Momentum), into a state of flux.
The Organizational Dispute
The most obvious document to look at for Spring’s organizational vision is their article “For a Democratic and Effective DSA,” particularly the segment “Legitimate Representation is Direct Democracy’s Cool Cousin”:
“General meetings should be held only as frequently as necessary, as they require a good deal of preparation and energy that should be spent primarily on external organizing. Depending on the chapter, the appropriate frequency will vary from once a month to quarterly.
An agenda should be set by the chapter’s elected leadership ahead of time. … It should be up to the steering committee to use its judgment in determining which agenda items should be prioritized at general meetings, but members can and should be able to request that items be placed on the agenda — and should be able to amend the agenda at the start of the meeting by majority vote if necessary.”
This comes bookended by a large amount of concern regarding how radical democracy creates unaccountable rule by those most “in the know.” It is an odd form of doublethink to propose that, in the name of democracy, all decisions be made within heavily regulated general meetings which are only held as frequently as necessary, with necessity, of course, being decided by the leadership. This new ‘managed’ organization is a break from the usual working-group-centric model, where people have some degree of autonomy and can freely associate with projects they find interesting. While this model allows for far more individual agency, there’s some validity to the argument that it is less formally democratic because the decision of individual members to work isn’t ‘exposed’ to formal accountability. But one can make a chapter’s priorities ‘democratic’ without this form of supervision, which is, in fact, the limitation of member agency within the smallest and most managed possible spaces. Furthermore, creating unnecessary levels of bureaucracy is not necessarily supportive of an effective organization, especially given how swiftly things can move and how necessary member buy-in is for new projects. This form, which was argued for in The Call and has become reality in Philadelphia, can easily be seen as anti-democratic while justified as its opposite.
To go further than this, this top-down organizational form has been argued for since the end of Occupy Wall Street and its connected movements. Throughout Europe, left populism came as a reaction to the kind of horizontalist structures that existed during the movements of the squares, offshoots of the Occupy movement. Left populism’s thinkers and politicians argued that to become an effective movement they would have to shed the localized and horizontalist activism of the past and move towards a new kind of organizing which would focus on envisioning the future and controlling the discourse. Doing this would require breaking with some of the sacred ideological cows of the Left, but more importantly, it required a break with the organized left as it previously existed. Over this decade, from Greece to Spain to France and Italy, this new movement manifested itself in new parties which broke from the old, both in terms of the literal old guard of European social democracy-turned-liberalism, but also of the older activist groups which culminated in the movements of the squares.
Since at least 2013, Jacobin magazine has lauded this new populism. They ran articles by the leaders of Syriza, Podemos, and France Insoumise. They spoke to the theory that underpinned those parties, and they excitedly spoke of the revolution that seemed right around the corner the moment that these parties would win.
Except they didn’t. Granted, Syriza had to deal with the whole EU when it began opposing austerity, but this should have been predicted. Across the rest of Europe, the left is losing steam. Podemos went from a trajectory towards one of the two largest parties towards a precipitous decline. France Insoumise was not able to break out of the far left, Corbyn’s Labour has been stuck just below a victory, and across Europe, the willingness to sacrifice the left’s sacred cows seems more like an excuse to give up internationalism and support for migrants to little or no advantage.
Beyond the strategic mistakes the European left has made in its acceptance of nationalism and carceral borders, a large part of its lost momentum has to do with the way the left has narrowed over the course of the last decade. Throughout Europe, the growth of left-populist parties has occurred on the backs of other movements, and in each case these parties have demobilized their predecessors, from the winding down of the councils in Spain to the increasing disconnect between Greek street movements and the Syriza government. This sublimation is concerning, because it means that the failure of the parties to win in elections isn’t just one setback in a wider struggle; it’s a failure in the struggle as a whole.
These are not just abstract problems happening somewhere else. They are not mistakes which will be self-corrected if left alone. It is the product of a totalizing logic which opposes itself to the rest of the organized left. If the main goal of the left is to offer discursive interventions towards altering the common sense, and to use these counter-hegemonic discourses to win state power, then other formations, using different means towards similar ends but perhaps not speaking the same language or using the same words as the think tank socialists, are not allies to be embraced but enemies which can throw the whole movement ‘off message.’ For instance, attempts to push the language of Medicare For All in directions which are more inclusive of disabled people have been perceived by some as poisoning the well, pushing M4A into a direction which (although more anticapitalist) would be less palatable to the voting public. As such, these disability advocates have been straightforwardly treated as enemies to the cause, rather than people who are working from their own experiences who have the capacity to push the conversation on Medicare For All into a broader direction which questions the logic of capitalism.
It was understandable that through the long reaction of the late 20th and early 21st centuries and with the overall silence of the Left that US leftists would look internationally for inspiration. As the Pink Tide steadily ebbed, it was natural that Leftists would look to Europe for examples of a comparatively successful Left. Yet in repeating the strategies of European leftism in the last decade without a glance at the dangers inherent in those strategies, the Left, and Spring in particular, leads us down a dangerous path.
The Structural Problems
The issue is that on a deep level Spring caucus is right: there is a fundamental flaw in DSA’s structure which came from our massive expansion, overloading an organizational structure built to sustain small chapters that mostly exist as a social space for groups of less than ten activists rather than mass organizations. Building around cities rather than specific projects, workplaces, or neighborhoods, meant that when thousands of members joined, the organization de facto drifted towards the form that’s been used to organize large numbers of activists for the last four decades: the activist network.
The activist network is typically a group of some hundred people connected by an ideological belief in social justice in a specific city arranged into different projects or subcommittees, and aimed at advocacy or activism about a particular issue (note: when I say ‘advocacy’ I mean a broad term involving directly pushing for a specific law or bill; when I say ‘activism’ I mean protests, rallies, and events which might have vaguer relationships with specific policies), often through giving support to a recently created struggle. Because these groups were basically created to make the most of a situation where one has more resources than manpower, these groups would do their best to mediate and use popular movements outside of them to pressure for more radical or more feasible reforms from the state, depending on the group. They would engage in activities which would either require small moments of hyper-organized action such as a protest or a march, or activities which would require a small amount of manpower over a larger period to time, like writing letters to the editor, training the leaders of emerging movements, lobbying politicians, or doing work to spread knowledge of an event or action.
These activities need to be done, and groups of this sort fill an important niche in the Left. But this fundamentally managerial and mediatory role with regards to their unorganized constituents ends up creating problematic behaviors which worsen the more that activism predominates as the only activity on the Left. This managerial role can’t be held by everyone, and thus puts a limit on the degree to which struggles can expand and increasingly do so in a way that is self-replicating over time. These groups exist essentially to be support networks for the spontaneous risings of groups poorer and more oppressed than them, and in support to funnel their efforts towards the channels this group has access to, and this is the beginning and end of their activities and self-justification, often requiring the creation of movements that have no presence at all outside the activist subculture in order to justify themselves.
This structural tendency is worsened by the demographics of such groups, which tend to be alienated college graduates who connect to each other as a subculture of individuals interested in similar histories and ideas rather than as people working towards their material interests within the same workplace, building, or neighborhood. Because of this subcultural aspect (and in a way similar to a snake eating its own tail), when these groups organize around material interests that they share with their constituents, it is often as college students or within college campuses, and often these material interests are still sublimated under a desire to expand one’s activism by expanding one’s subculture through ideological agitation, rather than using said ideology to provide us with our goals and practices.
The DSA suffers from much of these problems on both the structural and demographic level as essentially being a progressive advocacy group which differentiates itself by being composed of self-identified socialists. While this is an unquestionable advance in the politics of the progressive advocacy groups composed of nothing much at all, this still provides the DSA with the problem of not having an easy path towards sustainable membership growth. As of right now, the main reason people have joined the DSA is because they find themselves interested in socialism, either because of events that happen primarily in a few major metropolitan areas or because they’ve been gradually finding themselves more attached to the policy goals of DSA-aligned politicians. Since they are not coming to their DSA locals because of things those DSA locals did, finding a place for these new members becomes problematic because in many cases it might not be immediately clear how their interests can be implemented, and in many other cases (interest in policy rather than practices), it simply isn’t immediately possible to put these into practice except through the mediation of electoral politics. And so many of the people who come to our events once or twice or maybe even spend their money to join us end up being a part of a large and utterly inactive periphery, thus replicating the structural problems the activist network has. Those who remain to become the core are often already linked to existing activist networks, which replicates the demographic problem.
The only reason the DSA hasn’t already fully developed in this direction is because of the occasional actions of members which point in other directions, such as mutual aid events, neighborhood activism, or forms of reproductive unionism. These actions should be lauded, but they are increasingly coming up against the limits of the DSA’s structural and demographic problems, which is that your average chapter outside of a few major areas is far too geographically dispersed to not adopt the kinds of methods seen in activist networks. Actual mutual aid done in a consistent way requires labor and resources which dispersed networks have a hard time providing, and neighborhood activism can’t really be done when hardly any members are concentrated in one neighborhood. So long as new members mostly come from things the chapter is not directly involved in doing but rather in interest with the subculture the chapter is a part of, this tendency will worsen until it is truly self-reinforcing; there is a good chance that this is already the case. We can already see one of the symptoms of this in a collective, if the largely unspoken, assumption that the working class is an outside entity that we need to organize. But whether the trend is permanent or not, the fact is that the DSA has historically been a progressive advocacy group which calls itself socialist, and despite a fragmentation caused by the massive addition of new members, it is on track to become that again.
This is the problem that the Spring caucus sought to solve through formalization. Rather than being an advocacy network on the verge of exhausting itself, the idea is to shear off those elements which are causing burnout, accept a smaller active membership, and become an advocacy group. This perspective does not just come from an ideological perspective originating in Europe, but is also a response to a real problem the DSA is going through right now, and we ignore this at our peril.
Counter Practices
But what follows seems to be the mainstream response from those who would oppose the Spring caucus. Perhaps it has to do with fears of being called entryists, perhaps it has to do with the fragmentation of the Marxist and Anarchist lefts over the last few decades which few seem interested in mending, but the ‘DSA left’ overwhelmingly does not seem to have the same feelings about ownership of the organization, nor does it seem anywhere as willing to engage in political struggles with Spring. Instead we’ve seen, e.g. from the Socialist Majority caucus, an argument of ‘live and let live,’ and a connected argument of avoiding the problems that exist at the national level by investing all power to local chapters. We see the argument that the DSA can continue to be both an organization based around fighting specific campaigns for policy goals, while also being a base building organization which does deeper canvassing, perhaps in support of internal development or in support of these advocacy campaigns, while remaining an internally coherent organization which won’t suffer from burnout.
This ignores the fundamental problem that the political splits in DSA are about, and how this problem exists in every chapter in the organization: Why, outside of a vague political sentiment or a belief in an organization that we could be, would anyone become an active member in our organization? If we do some advocacy work, some activist work, and some base building work, then what we are committing to is being an organization which does the same work a variety of other, better funded, and more experienced organizations do in a less extensive and focused way. Even in small cities it’s not especially difficult to get involved in an activist organization with a large number of self-identified socialists.
What is needed here isn’t just continuing the practical fragmentation DSA is going through. This won’t be effective for two different reasons: one, for the reasons I have described, but even ignoring that, even taking this ‘live and let live’ attitude on its own terms as an attempt to wrest control over our organization from a dangerous faction, this platform doesn’t work. The difference between an organization which works towards discrete policy goals and one which works to elect specific politicians is not much of a difference at all, and it’s still working by the same logic Socialist Majority nominally opposes, where the DSA acts as a mediator for movements assumed to be outside of it, rather than incubating those movements ourselves.
What is needed is more than live and let live, what we need is, to quote Srnicek, a counter-hegemonic argument, and to go further, a counter-hegemonic practice that can create an organization which moves past the limits of advocacy-activism. I mentioned counter-practices in passing in What to do as a Leftist Intellectual, but now is well past time to explain the concept.
A counter-hegemonic practice is not just doing one thing as opposed to something else; it is a practice which can recontextualize all other practices around itself and build a new organizational hegemony around the goals of said practice. As an example, many advocacy groups, including the Medicare For All campaign, have potlucks to draw people to their meetings, but those potlucks are not the center of their practices. They are done in the name of a particular goal which doesn’t necessarily end in a revolutionary potluck destroying capitalism and building a potluck society. In Spring’s conception of the DSA, the main practice is taking state power through election campaigns and by creating a space for socialism in the midst of the governmental-policy complex. Socialist Majority counterposes that with a call for pluralism, but a pluralism without a focus will just kick the can down the road and continue the DSA’s position as a group which tries to do both the work of an Our Revolution advocacy group and the work of an activist group without having the funding or the time to do either. What we need is a strategy which retains the DSA’s existence as a group which brings a variety of strategies and tendencies together, which can also combat both the mono-politics posed by Spring caucus and the degrading trends which every chapter faces.
Base-building
Over the course of the last three years, an alternative has presented itself and been popularized in many corners of the Left. The base building tendency (also called the dual power tendency) has gained traction due to the incisive critiques that proponents such as Sophia Burns, Tim Horras, and the Marxist Center as a whole have put forth regarding the practices of activism and advocacy. The idea of base building as just the extension of things that many successful organizers and organizations do anyways has caught on as an alternative to what many see as chasing our tail.
But this is the problem, not with the strategy itself but with the popularized version of it. How can base building be both a systemic alternative to activism and something which organizations do all the time? The popularized idea of base building, which combines focusing on specific campaigns while developing a base through mutual aid, is indeed just community organizing under another name. This idea of base building as an easy thing has been combined with an idea of mutual aid as being inherently anti-electoral and having its own good politics associated with it to form the bedrock of a certain segment of the DSA left, including the defunct Refoundation caucus.
The flaw with this idea is that structures and organizing forms do not have a content of their own, and supporting them in the abstract just leads to, at best, winning in the abstract. Mutual aid is not inherently anti-electoral and indeed does not have an inherent politics of its own: it has been pursued (in varied forms) by churches, charity groups, and liberal NGOs towards different ends. It is not a magic weapon which will imbue our movement with inherent goodness when used; it is just a technique like any other. Organizations are defined not just by the techniques they use, but by the relationship of these techniques to their broader goals. If members of the DSA call for mutual aid to pull in working-class constituencies and retain them in our organization without merging this technical call with a broader critique and counter-strategy, what we often see as the response is one of mutual aid events or an increasing number of social events which don’t fundamentally change the organization but rather serve as add-ons to existing strategies.
Without a long term goal, an intent to ‘organize the unorganized’ as Tim Horras says, these strategies can (and often have been) integrated into typical activism or typical advocacy. Without a broader project these strategies will turn to dust in the wind, or to be captured either by cranks who want a high horse to affiliate themselves with, or be incorporated into the exact kinds of projects base building was set up to avoid.
If base building is to be a systemic alternative to electoralism or activism, it needs to be more than a hollow technique we project ourselves onto. It needs to include medium and longer-term goals and needs to be feasibly scalable such that any chapter can begin this kind of work. This question of medium and long term goals brings up a question which members of Marxist Center have been asking since before their Unity Conventions: base building for what?
This question brings us into a new territory and finally an answer. The problem has been that the American landscape is littered with the ruins of dead radicalisms that have calcified into institutions by and for capitalism. This has happened not just ideologically but structurally, as groups of demobilized and alienated activists became dependent on funding. Breaking from these formations doesn’t just require being apart from them, but building new institutions by and for the working class that are structured and fight struggles in different ways. As Marx noted, without an independent political party the working class is forced to channel itself through bourgeois parties which it does not and can never truly control. This is true in the American context politically, but it is now also true at all other levels of engagement. The press is by and large the property of a handful of billionaires who decide on the press’s content, the major unions have been business unions since at least the 1950s, mutual aid has primarily existed through churches if not through an edifice of charitable organizations funded by billionaires in a way that wouldn’t be unfamiliar to Victorians, and academies are only ‘radical’ in the frenzied minds of movement conservatives. Finally, at the political level, leaving aside my criticisms of advocacy and activist groups, American cities have been single-party states for so long that they have reverted to the machine politics of old. This structure cannot be defeated with mere ideas or arguments or with some clever trick, and thinking that the magic word of socialism will defend us from cooptation will doom us to the same fate as our predecessors.
So base building would be the preliminary aspect of a strategy aimed at creating institutions of and for the working class which form an alternative to those institutions which currently exist in our cities. In the long term, if we build these independent institutions, we will have built the component parts of a party which, as the culmination of our work, will finally allow socialists and the working class to work within the political sphere in a truly independent way. This is all well and good in the abstract, but how can this be applied to the DSA’s current situation? What campaigns can this strategy be used towards?
In Marxist Center chapters the answer has been reproductive unionism. As opposed to typical unionism that organizes as the point of production (the workplace), reproductive unionism organizes at the multitude of points at which the working class reproduces itself. This includes but is not limited to tenants unions and organizing around utilities consumption. These pathways are far less cluttered with older organizations and building a tenants union or fighting utilities companies can create these organizations while continuing DSA’s plurality. Multiple different practices will be needed to succeed in these goals, from canvassing to journalistic work to agitation to advocacy work to union-style organizing. Each of these practices and struggles can also create possibilities for building lasting institutions while building our capacity to fight for reforms in a sustainable way.
Since such a strategy does not require that one political line be publicly held in order to build support for a program or candidate, this would avoid the limited and autocratic structures Spring suggests, and with a specific goal and a focus on both unorganized people and on areas where other activist groups aren’t working, we’ll avoid the redundant strategies put forward by the Socialist Majority.
Conclusion
The beauty of the Democratic Socialists of America since its rise has been its place as a staging ground for the transformation of theoretical tendencies into practices, its location as a multi-tendency organization, and its sheer size, dwarfing anything else which calls itself the US organized left. Combined, they have created an organization which has allowed the complete recasting of the Left’s fragmentation into practical terms. This has created a new and volatile politics which, due to its state of emergence, leads to often seemingly contradictory positions being held within one organization or one person. But this is for the best. The differences of the previous eras are not completely irrelevant, but they have been narrowed down by decades of Leftist failure that by now they can be largely summed up to doing the same things, holding different signs at the same corners, and hawking different books with the same content. For all its faults, the DSA has acted as a laboratory of the Left, with the conflicting strategies allowing us to know how they work. Important projects like Build, which focus on creating practical knowledge gleaned from a sharp analysis of projects chapters have undertaken, could not have existed in the United States a few years ago, and indeed does not exist in countries which have gone through similar situations as the United States has but have not developed the diverse kind of left which allows for actual strategic thinking. The DSA, Marxist Center, and Symbiosis are all of massive importance in figuring out what our politics mean in a period when our powerlessness is no longer an excuse for impotence.
At the same time, the DSA is hamstrung by inherited tactics and a structure which made sense at a time when we were an organization of a few thousand rather than a few tens of thousands. The lack of regional organizations, a clear inside/outside distinction, or even clear roles within the organization have created their own pathologies. Without mediating regional structures or clear roles it is impossible to enforce any condition or rule, since all you can do at best is rely on interpersonal relationships with the leadership of various chapters to enforce any given rule. Looking at the same structure from the bottom up leads to even worse problems, with support from the national largely being dependent on, again, interpersonal relationships with those who have personally committed to campaigns. Without an inside/outside distinction members are never able to really trust each other, as the continual leaking of information shows, and members can never truly break from agitating or propagandizing to analysis. The forum has not served this function because at this point the organizational pathology has truly set in, and without trust we again see interpersonal cliques emerge as the only sustainable organizing subgroup. This is an objectively regressive trend that will limit our ability to move past our transitory phase into a sustainable mass organization. With that said, it should be clear that what is at stake if we remain on this path is not a mere transformation of slogans, but the squandering of the chance we have at transcending the differences of the past.
To answer a criticism I imagine this article will bring, this problem cannot be solved with a split. For one, the problems I have described are systemic to the DSA, and without a massive restructuring, any new group is not going to avoid them. For another, DSA’s internal politics are not even conducive to a split right now, with most of the new caucuses either being politically ephemeral or barely extant at the chapter level. Because of these factors, the main danger for our organization is not a split along ideological lines but an increasing burnout we can’t even put a finger on and backsliding into the forms of the last decade as we transform back into a rhizome of overworked cliques.
There is still, regardless, hope. Perhaps it’s a hope borne out of a lack of alternatives, or perhaps it’s a hope borne from just how much things have changed in the last three years. The Left in America has spent nearly fifty years in such a state of isolation that merely referring to yourself as what you are, a radical, a revolutionary, a socialist, was enough to make you impossibly beyond the pale. In such a state we developed a belief that came from this isolation, that socialism, revolution, etc., were magic words which represented our isolation, that giving up those words would make our beliefs easily transmittable and, on the other side, that the use of such words would guarantee an organization a license to good politics and protect us from cooptation.
Things have changed massively in only a few years, yet many of us still cling to these beliefs, that with a mere word we can arrange ourselves on the right side of the story, that with mere words affixed to old and tired practices we can somehow elevate them. History has not borne out either of these beliefs. Now, with tens of thousands working in the organized Left openly as socialists and millions more who identify with the term, it is clear that merely saying the word is not enough. The task for socialists now is to discover what socialism practically means in our age, to create an organization which is socialist in action and not merely in name. To do so will require harder analysis than we have done, massive recalibrations of our organization, and a great deal of work. I’m not going to pretend that it will be easy. But if we wanted an easy path, we would not have become socialists.
I’d like to thank my comrades in Rochester DSA, in Red Bloom, and in the New York State Organizing committee, without whom I wouldn’t have developed these thoughts.
