Without A Habit of Introspection, There Will Always Be Square Wheels

A response, or more of a parallel view, to Jean Allen’s piece in Cosmonaut, titled “What’s At Stake in the Democratic Socialists of America?”

This is modified from a post I made on the DSA Forum. As such, this is a draft, of a sort. I may come back later. The tone is informal, please do not treat this as you would an essay. I have things to do, editing this is not one of them. If you can’t take this rough writing, you’re perhaps too stuck in academia.

The title, perhaps fittingly, is loosely from Without a Science of Navigation We Cannot Sail in Stormy Seas, a piece on SDS and especially how they felt things were going wrong, soon after the fated ’69 convention. Full disclosure, I was having a hard time coming up with ideas to title this.

[With regards to people and their views on socialism], I have found, that most of them are actually pretty cool with socialist ideas, and even the word ‘socialism’. But the problem is that, as they’re disorganized (even if in unions) by the culture of isolation that is cars and no consistent, predictable shifts, it is harder to build solidarity between people spontaneously. Your coworkers often aren’t off when you are, and, being in cars, you rarely if ever interact with people in the spaces between where you sleep, where you work, where you shop, where you eat, where you drink. Solidarity building is hard, right now, for individuals with no scaffolding in place, because we live in a society designed to keep people apart.

There’s a lot that needs to be done, but quite a bit of it is not actually that hard. The issue is that without deliberative structures for which to hear the thoughts and internal processes and ideas of new people, the org misses that, and the people get alienated.

I don’t have good solutions, not that I can articulate anyway. But that too is why we need a culture of deliberation instead of show debates led by tinpot chairmen at worst and without enough time allocated at best. Formal debate takes four times as long for a quarter of the information shared, and because debate is definitionally polarizing, it cannot bring about synthesis of ideas

Someone else brought up how we need to ‘build the party’, and brought up the basebuilding tendency. I think ‘partybuilding’ is the wrong way to look at this, and pulling the cart before the horse (and leaving the parking brake on). Its not building a party, its building the foundation of what can build something resembling a party, which is a different task. I know that sounds somewhat convoluted, but bear with me. Right now, DSA is fragmented largely because as said above, no one has space to talk, its just you vote for the project you most want done, and if you lose, tough luck, you’re doing it no matter your qualms. Or you can just not come, but then that makes future proposals even harder because you lose facetime. Genuine concerns are lost because only 3 ‘againsts’ can say it, if any at all.

When it comes to ‘do the working class know something’s wrong and want to fight back’, the question is not of what is wrong, but how to change it. The working class, the proletariat, the lumpen, all the various bits who are ground beneath the heel of Capital — that is, those who own the tools to manufacture goods to sell, selling goods we make for far more than we’re given for them — Know that they’re being screwed. They feel it in their bones, when they are paid 9$ an hour to cook 900$ worth of food. When they are paid 15$ an hour to build cars that sell for 150000$. When, adding insult to injury, they can’t pay for food, foodstamps are denied because they make JUST ENOUGH to eek by, but not enough to eat, they have to go to charity that often is demeaning and requires they jump through extra hoops. On and on. People know that they’re being harmed. They just don’t know how. They lack the words to describe their treatment, and because of that, often lack the ability to conceptualize it as a distinct thing from existence. In the chronic pain community, and the trans community, there is this moment where, once you realize a thing is there and distinct, you can fight it. But until then, it is just your normal. You assume it is part of your brain, or part of your life, or part of society, just the background radiation of existing. Until you’re given the words.

Being in a capitalist, parliamentary system, they have been convinced they have no power other than voting every two years. By giving concrete options past that, you can start building around that false consciousness. The difference between community organizing and ‘organizers’ in the socialist sense, is that community organizing involves a concrete goal and that goal is a sort of pivot, but stays the center of mass of the organization. But as socialists, we are not organizing individual communities, we are organizing, ideally speaking, the entirety of the class. Individual ‘identities’ as the shorthand often goes, often need to be protected at first, as it will take time for people to unlearn the bigotries capitalism has imbued them with. However, by being proactive, it turns out it does not take very long for people to unlearn things once they understand what the root cause of their problems is — that is, Capital itself, tricking the class to fight among themselves.

So here’s the thing. What creates the conditions that would make some sort of ‘party’ in the 1930s european sense of a ‘political organization that does lots of things and contains the flexibility to shift when needed’?

A continuous history, and momentum from that. The left of the past thirty, fourty, fifty years has been small fragments, unsupported, that spark, burn, and fizzle within a few years AT MOST, often more like a few months. Just in the 21st century there were the anti-war protests, the 2008 chicago teachers actions, the 2010ish wisconsin teachers movements, the uprisings around shootings of black children by police in the 2010s, occupy, the WV teachers strike. Each, except for a few months after the WV teachers strike and the various Black Lives Matter organizations, fizzled instead of bridging the spark across the gap to the next one. Nothing was carried, and in most cases, not even a postmortem of what went wrong/right, logistical techniques, etc. Just finding pages of chants from some is quite hard, and this is post-facebook!

To be clear, ‘vanguardism’ is not what I’m proposing, and, I’d go as far to say, neither did Lenin. My read is his idea that the ‘most advanced workers’ would go on to become the vanguard of the proletariat reads like it was not talking about some university students who read all of marx, but that, within the proto-party (I have no better word for it yet) the workers who stepped up, self-organized and educated, and took the leadership role even though they knew it’d suck, would be it. The proto-party is a structure that brings the workers (and those who do social reproductive work, that is, those who can’t work, those who don’t work due to taking care of kids etc, etc I will continue to use ‘the working class’ as easy to understand shorthand) together to share their struggles and nudge through facilitation (either through theory, action, or both) that the root cause of their struggles were in fact the same, not randomly placed. I have described it as a sort of lens, where things going all different directions are made to converge on one point. I think you will find that when you can phrase it in ways people can understand, most people ALREADY support these ideas. The problem is being able to get all of the people together in one place. When you’re worked to the last thread of your energy, even organizing beers can be hard, let alone everyone in your city who wants to help. Once people are in the same room, they tend to open up, spirits raised by others dealing with similar, and a space where its acknowledged.

In 2017, I came to DSA because it purported to be a big-tent (many different schools of thought allowed to exist within one organization) with a low barrier of entry, and in that I saw a sort of neutral territory — not ‘left unity’, as unity is worthless without action — but a place to share ideas and generate synthesis between the various schools of thought, to share ideas, both “out there” and rationally grounded, and generate synthesis, new ideas from the old. Nothing else on the left has worked before, its time to create new things. But we can’t do that when instead of doing what we said we’d do in August 2017, which was, to remind our non-DSA readers of our current constitution,

Solidarity requires cooperation, but not consensus. Deliberative processes are the only way we can come to close to whole chapter buy in on anything, and deliberative processes are also, conveniently, the best way to get new ideas from the old. It will take time to adjust, we will need new systems, and much discussion will likely have to happen outside of meetings. Fortunately, technology has changed a lot in 60 years. When I talk about “deliberative processes” I mean ways where we can bring all of the ideas on a thing to the floor, the worries, the hopes, and figure out why there are conflicts and how things can be made better for the organization as a whole. The goal is not consensus, which can be held up by people who want something completely different, but instead to have everyone at least have a “If we impliment this, it will not get in the way of things I must do”.

Right now, our structures are far from that. We have, both in our National Political Committee (the governing body of DSA between National Conventions) who purport to be a representative democracy, but in fact have no accountability to the membership (A membership which are codified as the highest body of the organization) and in microscale in various chapters such as East Bay and Philly, top-down leadership cliques that direct members as if they are fungible volunteers, instead of organizers with ideas of their own. On the other end, there are the more flexible chapters like SF and Boston, which, if I remember correctly, run on a working group model where they have a looser democratic mandate from the membership and people work flexibly within that.

Which brings us to story time.

In 2017, DSA sat at a unique moment. It still does, but the window is closing. A lot of people I’ve talked to told me they came to DSA because the big tent idea gave them hope after a fractured and broken left. But more importantly, it gave people the hope of a space that could bring together those pieces and, if not repair it as kintsugi, (something broken which is repaired with gold, so as to make the cracks an integral piece of the presentation) at least we could have a space where people from different places could come together. Whether they stayed in their old organization too, or joined DSA completely, mattered less than the intermingling of different styles. (I had no previous organization, this was my first ‘formal’ left org, though I had been doing a lot of queer and disabled activism which was unknowingly informed by socialism for over a decade. It was sort of just an innate sense.)

I think, and have thought since at least october, that DSA is the one organization, in the right place, at the right time, that can pull that off effectively. Not because it is special, no, because during the right time in history, it was not special. It was open to everyone. It was, largely, a social club for the previous members, having fewer than 25 members in most chapters. Which means it was whatever people made it to be. They didn’t know that, going in — at least, I didn’t. I had assumed it would be a place where I’d be told what to do, and then do it. But it turned out that many of us who joined had skills equal to those already here — that we were equals. What a change from the activist groups! What a change from the progressive volunteer organizations! What a change from the cadre groups! We were not condescended to, and we grew. Some people have called DSA a project incubator, but I don’t think thats correct. I am not even sure a “leader” incubator is correct. Its not an incubator, it is just a space where people trusted us enough to show we were at their level.

This slowly fell apart, as one tendency made their way into leadership positions, often being the only ones volunteering for leadership positions. Once secured, they worked to make the bylaws more ammenable to top-down structures, and guiding the membership with a firm hand. People who spoke out were “iced out”, details for events and actions would not be relayed, or given late, or you only could get them from friends. The clique put their people in committees, which ensured that they got face-time infront of the members, but anyone who wished to run against them would have a hard time, as during canvasses and meetings, only the people immediately near them would know. When the 2017 convention came, the same group won the most seats with the least total votes of the slates, from having given strategic voting guides out beforehand. They were prepaired, everyone else was new.

But that happened after.

In 2017, DSA died. It started in November 2016, when Trump won and members joined looking for something to do to fight. The org’s structures had a hard time handling not only the influx of new, young members, but new, young members to the left of most people in the organization at the time. Unelected staff still haven’t changed, which is not a bad thing (They are jobs, after all), but part of the inertia, as they often act as if the membership is not the highest body of the org, and instead defer to the national director or the NPC, causing everything to be sluggish back-and-forth. We rarely get to talk to each other outside of the bar. We rarely get to have any sort of deliberative discussions at meetings. We instead play debate club because our leadership structures are made of hardware store concrete we smoothed over the failing steel supports.

A leadership fix doesn’t come easy. It will likely require regional bodies, that then meet as a national one via delegates. But at least then there will be people in the chain who have been in every chapter, every locality, and can speak to the area. Again, a thing for deliberation and synthesis involving the various methods. The new from the old. It cannot be fixed with one person’s, one school of thought’s, ideas alone. You need many hands to loft a big tent.

The moment is something that I am not sure really has ever been seen on the left, at least that I’ve heard of. I don’t think we could name it at the beginning, I don’t think we can name it now, not yet. But I think some of us, maybe all of us if they try, can feel the outline of it and how it has shaped our actions these last few years, our wants compared to the dissonance with what was actually happening. I don’t know that its shape is fixed, even, of this thing that I can barely describe, this ideal for risk of sounding too ‘radical’. An org that exists not as a funnel for fungible volunteer labor, but a framework for facilitation of the members themselves. Most of the factions exist as an immune response to a threat to the organism. But, like an autoimmune disorder, the immune system is an overreaction, causing people to be paranoid of caucuses outside of the “pathogen”. The counterfactions overcompensate, push themselves. Redundant resolution proposals. Labor duplication. Distrust, even where none should be. Ghostly copies of the SDS, in miniature. El pueblo unido, jamás será vencido, but apart, we risk crumbling. Even if the toxic cadre is defeated, or disgraced, the ossification of factions required to fight them may be too rigid by then to have any semblance of what we saw.

55000 people does not make a party, nor should it. A party of the sort marx, of the sort lenin talks about, requires a representative cross-section of the entire class. And you can’t get that with 55000 people who keep alienating whoever doesn’t or can’t do the projects they offer.

But what you can do is start trying to build the organization you are in into something that is not only welcoming, but offering aid where it’s needed when its asked for. And to start reaching out to the places that have been building for decades with few resources. Just because you have the resources does not mean you can replace them, nor should you. You should reach out. You should build. Coalition work is often grueling as communication styles and vocabulary don’t match. Its worth it, often. You have the map. They know the territory, every nook and cranny of it.

I said, in 2017, DSA will be in a place where it can focus more on external projects once it becomes the name people give when you’re in some trouble that can bankrupt someone but is easy at organization scales.

“Hey, I’m, being evicted, I just got notice today” “go check with DSA, I know they have connections to tenant lawyers in the area and know the regulations”

“landlord kicked me out, I need to move my life’s posessions before the end of the day or they go to the dump” “check with DSA, some of them probably have time and a SUV or truck”

The examples being housing, because thats what’s on my mind.

You offer your labor to the orgs if they need peoplepower, not a promise of people, but the implicit agreement that if they need people you may have some to spare for any given event, but only if the people themselves are okay with it, other than an all hands on deck emergency where you drop what you’re doing and mobilize the chapter to try to draw the heat away or back them up.

You don’t become an organization of the working class by doing charity, or doing anything with the mindset of it being charity. You don’t become that by demanding things instead of asking what is needed. You don’t become that by treating your people like fungible volunteers, easily replaced with another if they lose interest.

You ask, they tell, you analyze, together you have the synthesis of your analysis + theirs, and that builds rapport, respect, along with ways forward. They may come back as members to do things. They’ll probably talk about what went on to their friends, who will to their friends. Some might just drift off, but not many. Analyze your projects, write after-action-reports, next time keep the good parts while removing the bad, and work in new things. You work with, build rapport with, and delegate to/from local orgs, as available labor fluctuates.

But eventually? that trust pays off, and maybe you’re now on strike planning meetings six months before the event, as an example. People come because they see you doing worthwhile things instead of being indistinguishable from the democrats. Look at the demographical cross-section of DSA-SF or Boston-DSA vs East Bay or Philly, and you’ll see some of this already in action. When we fight, we win, but only if our fights are chosen correctly. We need to punch above our weight, something a flexible structure can do, but top-down has too much inertia for if you have to ask the general meeting two months from now just to respond to an attack.

DSA is under attack, from the inside, and the sad part is none of it even had to happen. Spring would have had the socialist org they fantasize about if they just listened to the membership, but instead, they tried to bend it and now it’s near the breaking point.

So, the question is this: do we want to grasp that hope that some of us had for the org going in? We fanned the ember and protected it from the wind for two years now. Are we going to extinguish it, and dedicate ourselves to letting people lead us wherever they please?

Will we fight, or will we repeat the mistakes of the last few decades?

No president has saved us. As Kali Akuno said during a talk in Oakland, “Even if Malcom X was the president of the United States, he would still be the President of the United States.” A president has little power, and it it is only by the consent of the rest of the federal government that he can do anything. We saw this with the ACA obstructionism. We also know every President does horrible things. It seems odd that with only 55000 members, we are being pushed so hard towards him. But this is not a piece on the Sanders endorsement controversy.

Come join us at the bellows, because the ember has been neglected for far too long and I fear it has little fuel left unless we bring it tinder. Build for the common good. Build for a better world. But for marx’ sake, build.

The one thing I know we need to start doing? Is to actually take a long, hard look at the history of the US left, and acknowledge that things we tried over and over did not work, but did bleed a lot of the money and labor and organizers out of the left. Even when they won.

The left needs to build permanent structures with institutional knowledge, no matter how small. The saying goes “The left is not a church” and that is true, and for good reason. But one thing the church remembers and the left forgot is how to build community. Try asking the other organizations in your city, I guarantee you one of them is willing to talk.

The left lacks, more than anything else, a memory of history. Dialectical Materialism is worthless without being able to understand what went down in the past.

And, looping back to SDS? This all feels similar. Fitting that the DSA convention will be on the 50th anniversary of the fated 1969 convention. DSA is at a pivot in its history, a fork in the road. The answer is no longer ‘Reform, or revolution?’ but “working for the class, or wooing the class?” “solidarity, or image?” “help now, or maybe later?” What is our word worth, if we keep promising things and abandoning them when the next new media spectacle presents itself to us? It’s not fueling recruiting very much chasing those ambulances, or we’d be far higher than 55000. Staff won’t release the numbers of people who leave, but with the numbers they give as joiners, it should be quite higher.

The only way the org lives is if it engages people. That means many tactics, that means tactics that have buy-in from everyone, including new people, including people from different backgrounds from you. It means rephrasing things when they ask and being kind about it, within reason. It means our leadership, at the very least, must be held a to a standard above.

Because our purpose? That we wrote in the DSA constitution that 2017? The day DSA died and was reborn?

Is, at heart, building a better world. And you can’t build a better world if you’re replicating capitalist structures, capitalist exploitation, and capitalist formations of domination within your organization. You can’t treat your members worse than bosses do workers, and then TELL them what to do. They have to choose. By their own free will. As will the class.

We have to choose.

What the hell are we doing? We have 2 months.

This isn’t a call for unity. Unity is useless without action, so calls for unity aren’t worthwhile. I am not asking people to leave their tendencies. But I do think that we all need to start treating DSA as what it could be, what some of us still see, glinting on the edges of the shadows.

I am saying people must treat DSA as neutral territory, something that must be acknowledged by all groups to work. No more ratfucking by The Call/Springmentum, no more backstabbing through large media outlets you have connections to, no more leveraging social capital. For anyone. DSA is neutral territory, and its where we talk. We have twenty years until we can’t stop the fish dying from ocean acidification. There are families in concentration camps in the US. Yes, that is what they are. the US is at war in Syria, the US is itching for war with Venezuela, the US is acting aggressive towards China. We. Do. Not. Have. Time.

There is work to do, that we should have been doing two years ago. Do not blame the other factions, as they were only responding to the ego of the few, with the only thing they knew how to, building counter-formations.

But that doesn’t matter. Spring can’t do shit if you talk to your friends and comrades and caucuses. Their playbook asks you to lie to inoculate members, but for everyone else? The truth will set them free.

We’ve nothing to lose but our memberships, and, lets face it, those were already on thin ice. National never gave dues to individual chapters until recently. Organizing contacts are much tighter bonds than chapter membership. We’ve already been working harder than most professions, simply because of the urgency and timescale of our purpose while having few resources. They need us, we don’t need them. Time for them to act like it. Time to start doing what we and those who came before have always done: Fight the bosses.

I think there is a large chance for DSA National Convention to turn out to be the biggest event in the history of the current phase of the left. Whoever controls DSA, controls the title of largest socialist organization. I don’t think we need that title, but surrendering it to the friends of Jacobin gives Jacobin a virtual monopoly on anyone entering the left, and we’ve seen where they’ve lead us.

We’ve two months until the convention. The only way out is through, together.

DSA is not a church. DSA is not a party. DSA is not, even, a big tent. I understand I’ve been fighting for that this whole piece, but DSA is something larger. I do not know what it is, to be honest. I just know that its the same sort of feeling I got when I walked into my first Labor Temple.

We don’t need to make concessions to broaden the membership base — people know at their core that capitalism is broken. They just lack the words. Telling them instead to trust in the broken political system at al cost is condescending at best. Our current leadership says all their actions exist to build a movement. I think they succeeded, in their failing.

DSA is a ‘movement’, just not in the liberal sense. It has been, bubbling under the surface. It just needs buckle down and start acting like one.

There is work to do.

I know I’m supposed to end on a stronger Call to Action here. I’m unsure thats possible, most of my work has been to make DSA have robust deliberative spaces and not completely alienate entire swaths of the class. The ‘whats next’ cannot be shown to you by one person, or even a slice of people.

The ‘Whats Next’ must be decided collectively, through deliberation. The only argument against this is that it distracts from the pet projects of any given tendency, or, put bluntly: the implication that some people don’t matter, to socialists. That’s the path of co-option, and already hardly resembles socialism, let alone ‘the left’.