As the 2023 DSA Convention approaches, let’s try to answer a strategic question. The question concerns a big picture issue, one that I think people tend to lose in the details of the various Resolutions on display.
So, let’s talk broad, national strategy. I have in mind DSA’s ‘decision’ – quotes because it’s perhaps more a starting point than a decision – to run priority campaigns around issues rather than people. DSA builds its recruitment model on attracting people to issues like Medicare for All rather than reaching out to members of target classes and building campaigns around their ideas. An org can do both, of course. But DSA probably doesn’t have the resources to do both well. And, at present, it only does the former.
I’ll argue in this post that DSA should run grassroots organizing campaigns built around classes first, rather than issues.
DSA National: Built on Elections and Issues
It’s not exactly a secret that the DSA’s primary strategy for growth has been to latch onto the 2016 and 2020 Bernie Sanders campaigns. And in terms of short term member growth, both campaigns paid off big time for DSA. The org grew first from 6,000 to 50,000 or so members. And then the second time around it grew from about 60,000 to over 90,000.
In short, DSA struck gold twice. And each time, it hoped to convince many of these members to stay in DSA, even after the (2x) failure of Bernie to win the Democratic nomination for President.
But what would DSA do between (and after) national electoral campaigns? To keep and grow members, it needed to engage and retain the people who joined the org during the Bernie campaigns. And to do so, it tried to spin off some of the key issues from the Bernie campaigns into issue based national priority campaigns. The basic plan was to build out the campaigns at the national level and then ‘plug in’ local people and groups into these priority campaigns.
DSA built its campaigns around Medicare for All, the Green New Deal, and Labor.
Issues vs. Classes
At this point I’d like to pause and think, again, about the broader landscape here. Building out Bernie flavored issue campaigns was, indeed, one option for DSA. And insofar as Sanders built an issue-based campaign and engaged lots of people around, especially, Medicare for All, this made a certain amount of sense.
At least, it made a certain amount of sense if DSA’s main goal was to retain members. So, I get why DSA did it.
But in DSA’s rhetoric, member retention isn’t really a goal in itself. Rather, DSA’s own proclaimed goal is to put together a ‘multiracial working class‘ coalition to attain and use power. It’s this class based coalition that will create the socialist future.
The Assumption Made Explicit
In short, DSA announced the intention to organize by class. But, in fact, it organizes by issues. And it often conflates issues with classes. In other words, it assumes that the kinds of people who are interested in Medicare for All and the Green New Deal are working-class people.
The problem is that the assumption is usually false. Instead, the stock list of DSA issues attracts activists, enthusiasts, and various members of activist subcultures. Sometimes they fit the ‘multiracial working class’ model. But just as often they don’t.
In response, DSA often simply slaps the label ‘working class’ onto whoever happens to join the org. Regardless of their actual class status. ‘Multiracial working class,’ then, has become for DSA less a target demographic than a label to apply to whoever happens to join DSA through its various electoral and issue-based campaigns.
DSA corralled a motley crew of activists and called them ‘working class.’
Medicare for All, Green New Deal, Labor
So, back to the issue campaigns. DSA built out national level working groups around these topics (among others). It holds bi-annual Convention, such as the 2021 Convention I attended. The Convention builds a consent agenda that spends most DSA discretionary funds on these issue campaigns. In theory, these resources could go to organizing classes rather than issues. But they don’t.
And so, DSA does attract lots of engagement in its campaigns on M4A, the GND, and Labor. But it builds engagement, again, among people already interested in these issues. Mainly activists, almost all young (often students). Mainly people who come from progressive, highly educated and/or wealthy circles. In short, DSA’s issue based campaigns build support among progressives. But it’s not all that great at attracting the ‘multiracial working class.’
Caveats
That said, I have to lay out a couple of caveats. First, this problem inflicts pretty much all orgs in the progressive and/or NGO realm. And most of them it inflicts far worse than DSA. Sunrise Movement, for instance, has all these problems to a much larger degree than DSA. DSA far better incorporates lower income people, especially lower income young people, into its model than Sunrise. But DSA does still suffer from these issues.
Second, Labor is, to some degree, an exception to what I’ve written above about issue campaigns. However, in practice, DSA’s Labor priority campaign focuses in large part on building out DSA’s network. Especially its network with left-leaning labor leaders. And so, it’s less focused on building the actual member base. But I do think Labor, among these three priority campaigns, holds the greatest potential to get beyond the trap of only attracting activist and/or progressive new members. Labor is sometimes a ray of hope.
The Role of Electoral Campaigns
So, as I wrote above, DSA used the Bernie campaigns of 2016 and 2020 as its primary tools for building members. As one might expect, local chapters – with the guidance of National – have tried to replicate this model in various ways. We’ve seen scattered local and federal campaigns throughout the country. We’ve even seen a much more developed and centralized model in NYC DSA.
The general approach in DSA – how various parts of the org translated the Bernie campaign model – has been what various DSA factions call ‘class struggle elections.’ The basic idea idea – conceiving of elected officials as organizers first, and politicians second – is sound, especially at the later stages of a socialist movement. But as a shortcut to class formation, which is how it’s used most of the time in the actual world, it’s very unlikely to work.
In short, the idea of using local electoral campaigns as a quick way to build members runs into the same issues of lack of sustainability that it runs into at the national level. Not a great surprise.
Rhetoric and Reality
Finally, before offering some ideas toward a solution, I’d like to summarize the current state of affairs in DSA. I’ll summarize what I see as a loose split between two kind of issue based focuses.
In short, some in DSA want to use the Bernie campaign and the DSA members of Congress as a tool to attract more members and get them ‘plugged in’ to campaigns that the org decides upon, democratically, at the national level. People like Bernie Sanders, AOC, and company attract new members. And then the org gets them sorted into Medicare for All, Green New Deal, and Labor campaigns. This camp includes the Socialist Majority, Green New Deal, and some parts (the smaller part, from what I can tell) of the Bread and Roses caucuses.
Others in DSA want to put more distance between DSA and the Democratic Party. They want to highlight instances where the Democrats – and even DSA members of Congress – have sold out working-class interests. They point to issues like BDS, where the Democrats (and Jamaal Bowman) violated DSA support for BDS. And they point to the rail strike, where Democrats and DSA (except Rashida Tlaib) voted against workers’ rights. This camp includes (the majority, I believe) of the Bread and Roses caucus, Reform and Revolution, Marxist Unity, and various other DSA factions.
The Assumption Again
However, despite this apparent dichotomy, the two sides actually share the same false assumption. They assume that electoral agitation at the federal level will build a sustainable member base in DSA. They simply disagree over how to do it.
But the assumption is a false one. We’re not going to build a sustainable member base through federal electoral agitation. At least, not at this stage in our movement. Federal elections can provide a short-term bounce in membership in special circumstances (e.g., Bernie 2016 and 2020). But it doesn’t usually do so. And even when it does so, sustainability comes from grassroots local action.
Or so I’ll argue.
A Solution
And this brings us to potential solutions. How should we settle the strategic question?
We need ideas for building a sustainable membership model. And those ideas flow, in my view, from a proper power analysis. If the multiracial working class is what wins power – and I believe it is – we need to build genuine working-class community membership in DSA. We need to recruit working-class people of all races to become DSA members and to build out and lead campaigns around issues they choose.
We don’t choose the issues for them at the outset.
This requires DSA to recruit people, not issues. And specifically working-class people, not “Medicare for All” or “Green New Deal.” To start with issues is to put the cart before the horse. Instead, DSA should recruit working-class people and then bring them together to form an issue agenda. They can build campaigns around the issues they care about, within a socialist framework.
What issues concern working-class people? What do they want to see in their workplaces and communities? Organize around that. And do so especially at the local level, where working-class people can organize labor unions, tenants unions, mutual aid societies, and so on.
My advice to DSA is to take much of the funding and infrastructure that goes into the Medicare for All and Green New Deal campaigns and transfer this to campaigns to organize the right people. We could hire field organizers who train DSA chapters on how to put people people together in their communities, do power analyses, and build campaigns from the ground up, rather than having campaigns run at the national level.
P.S. – “But what would it look like?”
I think the biggest reason people never have in mind the kind of solution I develop here is that they have difficulty imagining what such a system would look like. What would it mean to have priority campaigns around people rather than issues? Aren’t we a political org that seeks to do things on issues?
In one sense, it’s easy to answer these questions. Instead of having campaigns called “Medicare for All” or “Green New Deal,” we’d have campaigns called “Tenants” and “Workers.” The latter campaign – “Workers” – would probably be divided into more than one campaign (e.g., service-industry workers, office workers, cross-racial organizing, and so on).
But that doesn’t get to the heart of the question. People are concerned about what they’d be doing. But the fact of the matter is that these things are to be decided at the local level, not the national one. A good field organizer helps a DSA chapter put together tenants and/or workers to do a local power analysis and then take action. They can form tenants and labor unions, demonstrate against bosses and landlords, hold strikes, et al., as needed.
The role of the National org, in my view, is to support and highlight local and regional efforts.
National should send field organizers, help with strike support, draw public attention to local actions, and help local chapters come together to create organic, regional orgs. National shouldn’t set the priority issues from the top, whether or not the process they use is a “democratic” one. No centralized DSA issue-setting process that covers the entire org will ever be democratic enough to be properly responsive to local conditions.
