Principles Before Personalities: My experience on the 2017–2019 NPC

Leadership is uncomfortable. I have been uncomfortable for the past two years. I also feel like remaining silent continues to render me morally complicit to what has transpired. I will be criticized for not speaking sooner. I will be criticized for what I have to say and what I don’t say. And I am sure some of that criticism will be deserved, which is one reason why I chose not to run for the NPC again.

Praxis is the name of the slate I was invited to join in July of 2017. Ravi Ahmad called me and asked if I would be interested in running on a slate that also included RL Stephens and Zac Echola, all three of whom I had met recently at the DSA leadership training during the People’s Summit. At the time she called I was an alternate delegate not even sure if I would attend convention. I wasn’t leftist politically savvy. I wasn’t into theory. I was into Bernie, which is how I found my way to DSA in the first place! I was into the idea of volunteering “a few hours a week” at the national level in an organization, that was less than 20,000 members at the time, that I had found to be a home for my political and social beliefs after having just moved to Tennessee from Florida. I didn’t know my slate mates well but I was quite enamored with them at the leadership training and after thinking about it and talking to my own chapter mentor, Travis, I decided I would like to serve DSA in this way. I was not the first member living in the South to be asked to join their slate but I was the first one to say yes.

Praxis was born out of a resistance to what was then the Momentum slate and now in its current form is referred to as Bread and Roses. The birth of Praxis was positive because it challenged the perceived sectarian behaviors of Momentum/Bread and Roses. Behaviors like stacking committees and working groups based on factional loyalty, pushing back against accountability mechanisms that you don’t control, and relying on bureaucratic maneuvers to push an agenda.

The power dynamics of how Bread and Roses/Momentum came to be would be a whole other meandering mess of me trying to analyze my own undereducated take. I am still learning about the rank and file strategy, Trotskyism, Leninism, and everything in between. Until July of 2017 I had spent the prior 18 years raising my three sons, working as a teacher for students who are Deaf and Hard of Hearing, and thinking I was doing real work by baking cookies for John Kerry volunteers!

I relate so whole-heartedly to the piece written by outgoing NPC member Delé. The following paragraph in particular spoke to me:

“Many people join organizations like DSA for personal reasons more so than for political reasons. This happens unconsciously. Our souls are broken by this system. We are lonely, depressed, beaten down, isolated, alienated. So, DSA and other organizations provide space where like-minded people can seek validation and a sense of belonging. I’m not faulting anyone for this at all! It’s completely understandable and a predictable product of our current political, economic, and social conditions.”

And this brings me to Build, the non-caucus/caucus. It is my opinion that Build has become a kind of parallel organization within DSA, a shadow organization. I want to be careful not to overly generalize because I know plenty of good faith folx associated with Build as a project and I find the zine and especially the artwork to be awesome! It is my opinion that Build was born to seriously undermine the national organization and as a way, again, to organize against Bread and Roses. I realize that most folx in Build are not acting to deliberately undermine comrades. However, my perspective after having served on the NPC the past two years is that Zac and Ravi cultivated Build as a way to do exactly that. It is my opinion that they the people in their core deliberately sow discord through half truths and manipulation, and weaponize dissatisfaction. Why are people doing this to an org they claim to believe in? Why run again for NPC?

I think it is worth sharing all of this so that folx understand why I oppose re-electing any of the incumbents running for the current NPC. It is because we as a collective body of leadership have failed the membership. We have lacked collective moral authority. We have allowed factional sectarian infighting to inhibit meaningful work. Leadership change is necessary for the health of the organization.

I cannot speak for the internal workings of Bread and Roses/Momentum. I do not have first hand experience of how they operate. I do know that after the NPC election their slate did not continue to grow relationships as a collective like Zac, Ravi, RL and I did. And this is why writing this so challenging for me on a very deep and personal level. I have loved all three of them. I have sided with them in times when it went against my gut. I have sided with them in times when it went against my politics. And it took me quite some time to find a stronger conviction for myself. I conveyed to them my disappointment in what I saw as a toxic and manipulative culture being displayed in their slack channels and on the team calls in the beginnings of Build. I saw a constant deceptive and active undermining of the national organization and I believe that this was part of laying the groundwork for building personal support for running for the NPC again.

It is understandable for people to feel frustrated after experiencing the shortcomings of an organization growing at an unmanageable rate, that was understaffed, and perhaps lacking the backbone to handle the sectarian behaviors. I can understand the dissent from comrades who feel there must be a better way to build the organization. But it is worth looking at how we are building.

I have seen and participated in patterns of enabling behavior with Zac and Ravi. I have described my past year to those closest to me as learning how to try and set boundaries in what feels like an insidious and manipulative relationship. One where gaslighting is the norm, where validating bad behavior and needing to be validated by others justifies abusive behavior towards comrades so one does not lose relevance, and where folx attach themselves to others in order to avoid accountability inside a core that is toxic.

Build declares their project is not a caucus because they have no unified ideology or that they are cross tendency. It is my opinion that many people who associate themselves with Build came into the fold the way that I was brought into Praxis, without realizing the truth. I found Ravi very charming. I was captivated initially by her charm, but the patterns of behavior that I have come to understand from the past two years can only be described as manipulative and that charm as superficial.

Concrete examples are difficult to provide in the sense that on their own they probably don’t seem like much to most people. However, the collective, cumulative patterns of behavior that I perceived look like the following; exaggerating relationships with respected people to promote your own standing, making promises one can’t keep or implying things are not true, raising things in meetings to give a certain impression that is not true, spreading rumors, telling one person one thing and the other something else to make us distrust each other. They have a way of making you feel like they are your true family and the rest of the organization and even staff cannot be trusted.

I ran for NPC out of a love for DSA and for wanting to be a part of building a movement…The same movement where I was originally introduced to DSA through my work on the local Bernie campaign and serving as a delegate to the DNC, the movement where I saw amazing people working together under a “big tent”, the movement where I saw wholesomeness and comradely debate play out in my home chapter and in other DSA circles in order to build a unified front against the oppression of capitalism. We are trying to fundamentally change the world and how it operates to build a society that works for the many instead of just the few. Disagreements are okay, and even expected, in a healthy big-tent organization. However, it is not healthy or productive to work against each other in bad faith within DSA, especially when we need all that we can muster to oppose the capitalist class.