Response to Comrade Kelsey’s Questions

Below are my answers to comrade Kelsey’s questions — posed on Facebook — to current candidates to leadership positions in the upcoming EBDSA elections.

What do you see as having caused the divisions in the chapter?

In brief:

• Either innocent inability to or outright unwillingness to examine power dynamics and critically assess democracy within own chapter.
• Understandable defensiveness.
• The subsequent personalization of political critique — a common enough reaction in humans but also a predictable one which a mature leadership braces against and takes steps to counteract.
• Preference for “efficiency” or procedure over democratic participation and discussion (resisting general meetings as ‘undemocratic’, using Robert’s Rules or rigid time limits as a means to shut down member discourse for example).
• Frustrated members who felt they were being treated antagonistically got together to talk about it (another fairly predictable human response), thereby creating a de facto opposition. Perceptions of critics as “opponents” helped create actual opposition. A self-inflicted wound of sorts.

We live in, have been educated and trained in, a world full of oppressions. Some we internalize and carry with us in our organizing work. We assume our authority to dismiss others, we withhold our respect for those who disagree. Our capitalist workplaces depend on these dynamics; our job titles give us the ability to simply ignore other human beings, their desires to learn and grow, their struggles, their backgrounds, their disabilities, their very humanity in a quest for profit. In a truly democratic organization there should be no place for that kind of summary dismissal. We all collectively have an obligation — as peers who are all volunteering to be here — to address conflict in a mature and open manner, with warmth and empathy. We must check our defensive reflexes (and recognize we will all fail at this and that’s ok as long as we use it to improve).

I have noticed a tendency to imply that those who would address our chapter’s internal structures and dynamics as some class of navel-gazing time-wasters.

There has been talk in a various written pieces recently of what is sometimes called “prefigurativism” and has been variously described by members of current leadership as the quest for “a city-on-a-hill model for an ideal socialist society,” or the desire “to build a perfect world in miniature” or the pursuit of “efforts to pre-figure some kind of ideal world.”

There is an interesting conversation to be had about pre-figurativism — I’m betting I’m not the only EBDSA member who has had to look that term up, as it had not previously been part of my political education (yay, something new learned!). That educational moment has largely been lost however, and the concept has been deployed as a stagnant accusation that largely fails to engage with its target (please note none of the above linked texts actually cites any comrade’s text, essay, FB post or otherwise includes a single citation to support the claims made to utopian indulgence). If people who want deeper democracy are prefigurativist, if amending bylaws is just a futile attempt to make EBDSA a utopian bubble (and that’s all I and others like me can actually be accused of), what’s to stop that same accusation from being leveraged against any DSA member who makes any attempt to improve our chapter?

No group is perfect, but that doesn’t mean we are absolved of responsibility to try to address difficulties and overcome them, hopefully learning along the way. We know very well the world is and will always be very imperfect, yet here we all are, together, in a gargantuan struggle to make it better for everyone. To deride any efforts at improvement as futile since perfection is impossible is to reject outright the very idea that we can learn. It is to reject the very impulse to do better, to be better, to make the world better, that brought every last one of us to the DSA to begin with.

How do you plan to contribute to healing these divisions?

In the third question below, I enumerate some of the specific structures I would support in order to create space for more healthy chapter interactions, and prevent festering conflict.

So I’ll use this space to make a more personal answer. I think it’s to my advantage that I’m coming to this organization — and potentially to a leadership position — from less of a hard-core “I’ve read everything Marx wrote” sort of background. Because I never really went through a radicalization process — it’s been more a slow but constant accretion — I get the feeling I also forwent some of the true believer v. true believer infighting that can plague the left. I read from a variety of sources, drew ideas from theory but even more so, from history, and also literature, as well as plain old working person’s experience. Because I didn’t have to overcome a conservative family or community, I never had to go into, or prepare for “fight mode.” As a result, i don’t really have the stomach for protracted fighting (this is not to say I don’t like a good, rousing argument, as long as we stay adults), and usually am good at finding ways to break through impasses, even in heated circumstances.

In a way I think I came into this group naive (I couldn’t understand why someone would hear me express appreciation for anarchist thought, conclude I’m an anarchist, and then approach me antagonistically). But it also means I think I came in with less baggage, and more of a willingness to learn, ask sincere questions, listen to the answers, google it some more later, risk feeling ignorant because omg I didn’t know who X figure from the October revolution was. If you want someone who will be able to quote Lenin at length on command, that is not me. We must respect the fundamentally human element of our struggle, and that difference and discussion is an essential part of our path now, and is part of what brought all of us to the left at some point. Hashing out political difference is also an essential part in empowering oppressed people in general, as it allows us all to evolve and become active participants in their own liberation. If you agree, I look forward to speaking to you about the future of our chapter.

Have you contributed to these divisions, and if so how have/will you make amends?

Yes. My reactions as some early events (the caucus language LC meeting for example, and some one-on-one interactions that took place under less-than-ideal circumstances) may have contributed to the escalating perception of my involvement in some “angry” opposition. I have been visibly frustrated at meetings and when the only thing that comes across is a person’s frustration, it can exacerbate the idea that someone is just a knee-jerk complainer (the perception that has been articulated repeatedly about critical comrades). The onus is on the critic to remain calm and not distract from their argument, and I have not always remained so.

I could have also been more proactive in reaching out and talking to people, but I’ll admit I often fell prey to my own anxieties about how those interactions would play out, and avoided them. I’ve made assumptions. I also think I could’ve more confidently and explicitly raised concerns earlier, before it appeared I was part of a “disgruntled faction.” It might have been more clear that my concerns came from a desire to effectively organize my comrades and not from a desire to gang up on current leadership.

There was also a point at which, facing some unpleasant interactions concerning M4A organizing, I decided to step back from being involved in that program. I decided to back off from people I thought had treated me unfairly and simply ceded my involvement in that arena. I quit and went elsewhere with my energies. I fear that could have been construed as demonstrating that I wasn’t really “serious” and didn’t want to “do the real work,” thus exacerbating the mischaracterizations of chapter critics. I wish I’d stuck it out.

How would you like to see structures built so that this culture cannot arise again?

1. Regular, democratically structured, general meetings.
We’ve just started down this path and I think that going forward our chapter discourse and civility will benefit greatly from these meetings (resisted fiercely, I would note, by the leadership with which B&R is aligned, despite touting such meetings in their campaign materials).

However, the existence of meetings alone is not enough.

I would push for:

Greater meeting frequency. This has been painted as anti-democratic but actually provides people, especially people with difficult work schedules or family obligations, more opportunities to at least be able to attend something, as opposed to missing out on fewer, higher stakes meetings. As someone with a difficult service industry schedule that precludes my presence in many DSA events, this suggestion comes from a place of personal experience. It should also be considered — for those that counter that such meetings are too difficult — that the more we have them, and the more people we involve in organizing them, the easier it will become for us as a community to put them on.

A brief open announcements period at the beginning of meetings where any comrade can openly address their peers. We can limit time, have a signup sheet with a limited number of slots, and establish guidelines for what’s appropriate (no one wants to be held hostage to prolonged rants). We must trust that our comrades have things to say worth hearing.

Incorporate elements into meetings that aren’t entirely focused on debate/decision making. These segments could be broadly educational, informative in nature, a space to explore without the pressure of a political agenda. We could invite speakers from within membership or the wider community — to address topics of interest to membership in general without being part of current, potentially tense, political debates. The more meetings there are, the easier this will be to incorporate alongside chapter “business.”

2. Democratically controlled means of chapter-wide communication. I would like to see open official channels of communication that allow for real discussion, that allow for more voices to be heard by membership at large, that allow for the promotion of both official and unofficial events and projects that may be of interest to East Bay socialists. I think OpenEBDSA has some great concrete ideas for fostering this type of communication and I wholeheartedly endorse their proposals.

3. A democratically elected Transformative Justice Commission. The suspension and expulsion of the last year showed that — no matter the reasons behind discipline — there will be a problem of perceived conflict of interest if those being disciplined are political opponents of the leadership doing the disciplining. Removing those responsibilities from elected leadership tasked with the day-to-day running of the group — and onto a group of elected members who will specialize in resolving these conflicts simply eliminates that perceived conflict of interest. The creation of a Code of Conduct — with the democratic input and ratification of membership — would also aid the healing process and put into practice the ideals of deep democracy — placing authority with the membership itself.

4. A robust and democratic political education program. Education should be organized by the members who wish to learn (always presupposing the political action of the chapter) and posited as an essential part of our praxis, not a supplementary activity. Such a program could go a long way towards formally exploring the heterogeneous political backgrounds of our members. Facilitators putting together any curriculum would be accountable to member/students who would be tasked with articulating which questions of theory, history, practice, or current events they would like to explore. Members would in that way be trusted with being active participants in their education and the education of their peers. Facilitators would be tasked with providing resources, structuring class discussions, finding ways of engaging students beyond mere reading comprehension exercises. Lecturing should be held to a minimum, if it’s even found necessary at all.

5. The establishment of local branches. Local branch organizations would be like incubators to develop larger programs and a broader leadership group. I would especially like to see democratic membership participation in discussions of how those branches could be formed and integrated into chapter structures. The formation of a of Branches Committee with a mandate to create a timeline for such a process would be a good start.

For those running who have served on the SC already: how have you tried to heal these divisions already, and what hasn’t worked?
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