We need a hammer
The revision of our chapter bylaws in the East Bay is a great opportunity to think about the structure of our chapter. As the bylaws revision guide puts it:
“Our bylaws’ most important function is to establish the democratic structures through which we make decisions, carry out collective goals, and elect accountable leaders.”
The structure that our bylaws build should be judged by how well it serves the goals of our organization. The proposed bylaws revision best serves that goal as is, without any further amendments.
A house or a hammer?
Let’s back up a second, though. Before answering questions about structure, we should describe what DSA is, as an organization.
In high school civics classrooms, we learn about the importance of checks and balances, the separation of powers, and other regulations on the rule of the majority. Without debating how well those ideals have played out in practice in the US context, these are the kinds of frames you need to put up when your task is to build a democratic structure for a group of people who don’t really have the choice of whether or not they’re part of the group. This is as much the situation in a nation as it is on a shop floor.
But DSA is a very different context. In an all-volunteer organization, everyone has opted to be here. We all consent to be involved, and we are perfectly able to revoke that consent (leave the organization or withdraw our participation) at any time. Even elected leaders enjoy this fundamental privilege. Another way to look at it, though, is that we are all here for a reason. Or as the preamble of our current bylaws and the proposed revision says:
“Our goal is to break the power of the ruling class and end the domination of capitalism over our lives and that of every life form on planet earth.”
The question we need to ask ourselves, then, is this: to accomplish this goal, do we need a structure in which we can house our community in the way we would house society at large, or a tool we can wield to smash capitalism? If we are serious about confronting capitalism, we need a hammer: an organizational structure that’s nimble enough to out-maneuver capital, and strong enough to deliver blow after blow until we’ve smashed the entire system of capitalist exploitation.
Outmaneuvering capital
If we pose a serious threat to capitalism — and we should — they’ll try to use any technicality to shut us down. Our priority has to be to not make it easy for them.
Currently, our chapter is organized as a non-profit 501(c)(4). That means that our bylaws are not just a document that we all agree to use to handle our own affairs, but that in the case of conflict, the state has every right to intervene and hold us accountable to them.
This is one reason why we have to avoid being prescriptive in our bylaws. We especially can’t create liabilities that will trap us into being held accountable to the state for provisions we can’t reasonably fulfill.
The proposed amendment on proxy voting and remote access is one example. It mandates proxy voting and remote viewing and participation in general meetings without outlining how voting rights can be transferred. It may, in fact, not be possible to ensure 100% remote access and participation to all members for reasons outside of our control. But if we pass the amendment, we can be held legally responsible for it.
But this is not the only reason to have a flexible set of bylaws.
There’s no way to know what challenges we’ll face down the road, and what our composition will be in the future. For example, we might continue to grow steadily, or some external event might drive a massive influx in membership like the 2016 election did, or we could experience a serious contraction in size. We need bylaws that are robust enough that they’re just as effective, regardless of any possible future composition of our membership or any other way our membership body might change. We’ve revised the bylaws of our chapter twice in the past 12 months because of the growth in the chapter.
We don’t know if within a year we’ll be in a position to transition to a branch structure as the amendments regarding branches propose.
But we do need to experiment. We will need to create new structures in our organization to accommodate both our evolution and the world evolving around us. We have to try things out, see what works in our context, and abandon practices when they stop working. If our organization is going to be agile and maneuverable, the chapter Steering Committee and the general membership needs the freedom to adapt. We can’t sketch out the flexible structures we’ll need by carving them in stone.
And we can’t do that by delineating these structures with specific mandates in our bylaws. We should only create offices that we absolutely need, like chairs, secretary, and treasurer, and avoid creating offices like “Internal Organizer” and “External Organizer” in the current bylaws or the “Communications Secretary” proposed in an amendment. The same applies to structures like committees and branches within the bylaws themselves.
Instead of creating a very prescriptive “Internal Organizing Committee” and “External Organizing Committee” as the current bylaws do, the bylaws revisions only say:
“Committees shall carry out specific functions or advance the political or organizational goals of the Chapter as defined by the convention priorities or the Steering Committee.”
That leaves plenty of room to experiment and tinker.
This principle applies as well to how we handle disciplinary questions. Empowering officers or a committee of elected members with specific disciplinary functions, as proposed in the Leadership for All bylaws draft, doesn’t just prescribe new structures and responsibilities that we would be held accountable to by the state — without even giving us the chance to even try them out — but creates a rigid, hyper-political climate for disciplinary questions that will only serve to undermine our goals. Creating a separate political space with the sole mandate of making disciplinary decisions doesn’t ensure impartiality. It taints every decision with an odor of political in-fighting and factional retribution.
And when capital or the far-right seek to disrupt our activities, we need our leaders to be able to limit the damage to our chapter and kick them out without having to defer to specifically-empowered officers or committees.
A strong, steady hand
We need an organization capable of leveling strategic blows against capitalism. By endorsing the Medicare for All campaign, for example, we have taken aim at the private health insurance industry. But we can strike capital in more than one place at once, if we strike with a strong and steady hand.
We have two main tasks, then: taking aim strategically at the most vulnerable areas of capitalism, and building our capacity to make effective interventions.
We can intuit where capital is vulnerable by those demands arising from increasingly acute needs — healthcare, housing, and education come to mind. These and others are areas of deepening contradiction within our society. As a deliberative general membership body, figuring out democratically where to take aim by setting annual priorities, and then developing campaigns to achieve them, is our most critical task. If we can’t set clear and coherent priorities we can’t determine what tasks are before us.
We need to spend most of our time debating political priorities and campaigns and working our asses off organizing to achieve them. That’s why it doesn’t make sense to abandon the rules of order we’ve all spent the past year learning while at the same time lowering the bar from 2/3 to a simple majority to change the bylaws, as proposed in the amendment regarding rules.
The lengthy amendment on branch formation likewise guarantees another round of contentious debates about structure in another year, proposing to supersede the bylaws we are debating and adding new quasi-bicameral structure (Section 1 of the amendment creates a “Local Committee” and Section 2 subsumes the Steering Committee under its auspices) as well as rules about recall, and prescribing the creation of a branches committee.
We best express our values democratically, not in the organizational guidelines in the bylaws. For example, we know that healthcare is a human right, but we express this viewpoint democratically. The same goes for qualities we value in our leaders. We deeply value diversity in our leadership, but such qualities of leadership are properly expressed democratically, through elections of those leaders, not in the bylaws, as the second proposed amendment suggests. Enshrining this priority in the bylaws incentivizes the mobilization of identity against political opponents. If at some point, quotas are barely met, an elected leader’s opponents may be tempted to call their identity into question because they oppose them politically. I don’t believe any of us intend to create a political incentive for such personally-wounding attacks.
As far as building capacity, we need to make sure that we are developing our political consciousness in light of the priorities and campaigns we take on, and also developing a diverse set of political skills as consistently across our organization as possible. There should obviously be specialization of skills, but to build a muscular mass movement for socialism, we’ll need to have as many of our thousand local chapter members as possible become competent organizers, ready to activate and mobilize the wider working class.
We need a structure that, as a membership, helps us strike at capital with a strong, steady hand, unified in our resolve and in our skills.
We need a hammer
We have big decisions coming up this weekend regarding our bylaws that offer the exciting opportunity to design the basic infrastructure of our chapter. The decision about the kind of organization that we should design should be guided by principles, but made specific to the context of the kind of organization we are and what our immediate tasks are.
Do we need a structure in which to house a city-on-a-hill model for an ideal socialist society? Or do we need a powerful and dynamic tool for building a mass movement? Starting from the principle that our goal is to strike at capital with enough force to knock loose its foundations, the kind of organization we should build with our bylaws should be one that is adaptable to the context in which we are working, that can outmaneuver capitalism when it inevitably strikes back, and is capable of taking decisive aim at capitalism’s vulnerable spots and swing it hard.
The revised bylaws proposed by the bylaws committee are the tool we need. Now let’s grab hold of it and get hammering!
