There is no democracy without participation

What is going on in the East Bay? If you attended our recent endorsements meeting, you might have heard reference to the anti-democratic forces threatening to subvert the control of the Local’s membership over our own organization. In the last portion of debate, several members took the time allotted for speaking against the endorsement of Gayle McLaughlin for lieutenant governor and used it instead to make broad statements about the need for EBDSA to deal with its “internal processes.” Indeed, if our internal processes were robust, these speakers would have been asked to keep their comments to the agendized issue. Instead, they attempted to pull the energies of the general membership into adjudicating what has so far been a mostly online battle about the rights of caucuses, and the supposedly “top-down” structure of East Bay DSA.

Of course, I understand why the chair chose to allow the speakers their time. Insisting we stick to the agenda would have only contributed to the narrative that EBDSA leadership is authoritarian and silences dissenting political voices. The leadership is thus charged for purportedly: 1) not having a sufficient number of general membership meetings 2) restricting the activities of EBDSA to initiatives voted on by the elected Local Council and General Membership, an egregious centralization of authority and 3) requiring caucuses doing work and producing written materials outside of the official structures to clearly distinguish the caucus from the official position of EBDSA. However, as a rank-and-file member myself I see the most pressing anti-democratic tendency represented in our chapter as those doing the denouncing. And I’m concerned about what looks like the increasing willingness of leadership to cater to these factions, perhaps out of pure exhaustion. For the sake of democracy in our Local, leadership needs to maintain its backbone.

Here’s why. At one point in the endorsement meeting we had to interrupt business in order to check that we still had a quorum, which is 10% of our 900 members. In EBDSA we have debated for months the usefulness of having more than about 4 annual general membership meetings (with many committee meetings, canvasses, and events in between), the largest of which have been attended by over 200 people. The poor attendance at the recent endorsement meeting appears to support the argument that too many general membership meetings is an undemocratic practice. Working people can’t regularly take several hours out of their week to participate in necessarily long mass meetings; the more such meetings we have, the narrower participation will be. One maxim I’ve learned in the labor movement and continually return to is: there can be no democracy without participation.

The factions proclaiming the need for more membership meetings argue it as self-evident that more meetings means more democracy. But in practice, more meetings with fewer members means ceding power to the groups that were unable to win elected representation on the Local Council in our last elections. They seek to mend that deficiency through demanding excessive processes that remove power from elected leaders and give greater control to the small group of rank-and-filers most able and willing to attend frequent, long meetings.

Our elected leadership, which our by-laws task with running the chapter between general membership meetings, have so far resisted these persistent minority critiques. But signs are they are starting to have an effect, as our Local Council recently passed a measure to hold bi-monthly membership meetings. Whatever approximation of the membership that chooses to attend these meetings will vote on proposals, rather than use that time to enact our program. For example, at our endorsement meetings, some members wondered during the Q&A period what an endorsement would look like in practice, and we were told that these new meetings are where membership would democratically decide how to carry out the endorsement mandate. It seemed as if this response was meant to head off protest from the caucuses that there was insufficient democracy in the endorsement process, by inserting additional “democracy” (in the form of additional meetings) after the vote, to discuss how we will go about acting on the endorsement (if one was made — and in fact both candidates were endorsed by quite a large margin). Leadership was apparently concerned that it would look anti-democratic to make a recommendation on how members should vote, and back that up with a plan of action.

Local leadership should not be afraid to do what it was elected to do: lead. Members who raised the concern that it wasn’t clear what it meant to vote to endorse are right. In the future, the External Organizing Committee should develop in consultation with the Local Council a plan of electoral action, and the Local Council should recommend that plan to the general membership for adoption.[1] Membership doesn’t have to approve the recommended endorsements, but not having a clear plan of action that leadership intends to implement if the endorsement passes in fact makes the endorsement less meaningful and the decision less democratic, since the members had less in front of them to vote on. In my old union, at similar endorsements meetings our Political Director (an elected member) would explain the strategic landscape and provide options for how much money members could choose to spend from the political fund and how much time she believed we should commit to each campaign. Members would provide feedback and vote based on her recommendations.

In EBDSA, instead of a single mass gathering where a program is decided on and delegated to leadership to implement (with member involvement, of course), the process is now dragged into at least three meetings: the informational meetings, the endorsement meeting, and now possibly a meeting to determine the ground plan where the endorsement could be killed in practice. If roughly the same 100 members attends each of these meetings, and they each last 3 hours, we’ve spent 900 organizational hours (not to mention the work of organizing the meeting) while engaging only ~11% of our membership in the “democratic” process. Punting important decisions to bi-monthly member meetings without a plan from leadership to frame debate only puts a burden on the rest of the membership to continually defend collective decisions from organized caucuses seeking to enact their own program without broad buy-in.

And what is their program? The issues I have seen raised by oppositional caucuses is a program to fix brake lights in poor areas and tenant organizing. I would like to briefly address the merits of these activities were we to support them as a local.

Fixing brake lights is a great community service project, but before supporting as EBDSA I want to understand how it advances socialist strategy. Inherent to the idea of strategy is that any organization has limited resources to achieve its goals, and our resources are more limited than most. Proponents claim that the project will bring socialists closer with working-class or poor communities of color. But how then is fixing brake lights more of a socialist strategy than charity work at any church in Oakland? If a caucus wants to engage in acts of charity on its own time, I have no qualm with that. But our organization should put its official organizing energy and talent to engaging in class struggle not for others but in concert with them, fully recognizing the political agency of those communities.

Poor and working-class people of color are perfectly capable of organizing in their self-interest, and don’t exist merely as objects to receive middle-class charity. If brake lights laws contributing to mass incarceration are a deeply felt issue in those communities, let’s talk to people about abolishing the law; and if there are other, more strategic issues that we could fight to change through organization, let’s talk about those. I believe it is through shared political struggle with communities of color that EBDSA will grow and diversify our ranks, bringing in new members as political equals, not through charity programs. If the brake lights program can be shown to be the first step in a larger political strategy, I might feel keener toward it.

The tenants organizing program gets much closer to real socialist strategy. For the last year I have supported developing a tenant organizing campaign as a way for our membership to engage in multi-racial class-based organizing; I myself live in a diverse apartment building with a dozen or more units.[2] With many members so positioned in relation to key East Bay landlords, we might be well situated to lead a campaign, or partner with organizations already engaged in tenant organizing work in the East Bay. But I believe the whole membership needs to be brought into that process through our democratic decision-making structures, and that the resulting campaign will be stronger because of it. In the meantime, why do caucuses that want to launch their own campaign see it is as such an impingement of their rights that they are required to identify their literature as their own, and not the official work of EBDSA? They certainly don’t represent me; not to my landlord, not to other tenants, or to the rest of the Bay Area left. I was never asked to vote on the leaders who devised their campaign strategy and developed their literature. There is no accountability structure for caucus work, and they have no right to parade as a campaign of EBDSA, using our small political capital while completely subverting our democratic procedures. It is a great irony that these groups would turn around and proclaim the leadership is “anti-democratic” when this illegitimate avenue toward power is closed to them.

Democracy is not like Oprah, where everybody gets a car. (You get a campaign! You get a campaign! Everybody gets their favorite campaign!) When a collective decision is made to prioritize one strategy over another, some people will not like that decision, and in an organization with a robust democratic culture the decision is respected anyway. This is a fundamental precept. For example, in a union, once a strike vote is taken and approved by a majority, you don’t cross a picket line even if you voted no. The only way working people have power is through collective action, which is only effective when democratic decisions are enforced. Being a part of a mass movement requires discipline: in this case, discipline to wait to inaugurate new campaigns as a general membership during the annual local Convention required by EBDSA by-laws.

Those trying to find a middle ground in sympathy with the aggrieved caucuses have appropriated the language of privilege to understand the relationship of the caucuses with leadership, by referring to the caucuses as marginalized minority groups who should have been consulted before the decision to require a disclaimer on their literature was made, as they are the “most affected” group. This fundamentally misunderstands what a caucus is, which is a political organization within an organization; there can be minority caucuses, and there can be majority caucuses.[3] Either way the caucus is not a marginalized identity group. They are self-organized political formations and should have the same rights as every other EBDSA member to know the agenda before a Local Council meeting.

Finally, there is an element to this controversy regarding Facebook and the perception of censorship, which led to our previously sole FB group moderator stepping down from the position. All I have to say is, Facebook is not a public square. This is a misconception that socialists ought to fight against, not mindlessly reproduce. For example, page administrators have the power to “hide” comments on Facebook while leaving them visible to an individual and their friends, an extremely insidious form of censorship. The problem in fact lies with people who believe their every Facebook post is as consequential as Martin Luther’s thesis’ pinned to the church door. As a whole, our organization must move away from excessive reliance on corporate online platforms and toward real-world solidarity building with each other. The kind of toxicity internet activism is able to produce between comrades has pushed an unknown number of potential members away from our organization, who see our online conduct, assume it is how we engage in person, and decide to skip our real-life events.

Protecting democracy is important; that’s why leadership needs to maintain its backbone and not be cowed into retreating from building a mass socialist organization of working people, which yes, requires accountable leadership to ensure popular mandates are obtained, and critically, are acted on. Working people want to be in an organization where they have agency in setting the agenda, but also one that puts their limited time to valuable use and gets results. What we need is a plan to reach out to our hundreds of disengaged members and move them on a program; what we do not need is more meetings to satisfy a small group of members who value process at the expense of broad involvement.

[1] To those unfamiliar with EBDSA’s structure, in our by-laws (approved at a very well-attended general membership meeting) our local is divided into two broad committees: the External Organizing and Internal Organizing Committees. Leadership from both committees comprise the Local Council (what we call our steering committee), in addition to the regular officer positions such as Co-Chairs, Vice-Chair, Secretary, Treasurer, and two at-large seats for a total of 13 elected Local Council members. The External Committee runs our political work campaigns such as Single-Payer and electoral campaigns, and the Internal Committee organizes the membership — for instance, to turn out to important meetings.

[2] For the record, so has East Bay’s Social Housing Caucus, which has not felt the need to launch its own independent campaign.

[3] In EBDSA’s by-laws, for a caucus to gain official recognition it must have at least 5 members. The only upside to gaining official recognition is that the group’s stated purpose will be added to EBDSA’s website.