[ DSA’s six-year growth spurt has fundamentally changed the
organization. To resolve the deep issues it faces, it needs to meet
the organizational challenges this change poses.]
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DSA DEBATES SHOW GROWING PAINS  
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Christine Riddiough
June 7, 2022
Convergence
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_ DSA’s six-year growth spurt has fundamentally changed the
organization. To resolve the deep issues it faces, it needs to meet
the organizational challenges this change poses. _

Delegates to DSA’s 2019 convention showed overwhelming support for
an eco-socialist Green New Deal campaign., Photo by Paloma Nafarrate.
// DSA Ecosocialists

 

Max Elbaum’s article
[[link removed]] on
the conflict in DSA was very insightful, and useful in highlighting
the key issues that the organization faces today. It also outlines
some of the issues standing in DSA’s way of solving those problems.
For me, it also suggested questions that those of us who mainly agree
with Max’s arguments need to address.

First, running through the article are a number of assumptions about
DSA as an organization that need to be scrutinized. In some ways Max
suggests that DSA is a cadre organization. While it does have cadre, I
would venture to say that 90% of the members do not fit in that
category. What does that mean? In one of the first paragraphs, Max
says, “A significant number of members raised the demand that DSA
should go beyond airing criticisms of Bowman’s actions,” but what
does this mean? A significant number of members in an organization of
90,000 to me would be at the very least 1,000, but the demand was
probably supported by under 200. Maybe that is a significant fraction
of the cadre, but even then, how much it represents the views of the
cadre let alone the membership is questionable.

We really don’t know what most of the membership thinks about most
issues. We can assume that the members see themselves as democratic
socialists and we can assume that they’re interested in politics and
in changing how politics works. Beyond that we might make some
educated guesses—they’re likely to be pro-Medicare for All (or
some variation on that), for stronger support for public education,
for better regulation of business. But we don’t know any more than
that. For example, a while ago I was talking with a member from the
West Coast who didn’t understand why DSA should support statehood
for the District of Columbia, and I wouldn’t be surprised if he was
not alone in his view. I also wouldn’t be surprised if many in the
membership don’t support BDS or even know what it stands for.

Reaching beyond the core

The huge upsurge in membership in the last six years hasn’t simply
meant that we now have more money, more visibility, or a crisis in
leadership: it also means we’ve seen a fundamental change in the
nature of the organization. How has this growth changed DSA? In the
three decades after DSA was founded, the organization’s membership
hovered around 5,000–10,000 members. The increase to 90,000 or
100,000 happened in about a five-year period starting in 2016.

That surge meant that staffing had to increase quickly, the budget for
the organization grew dramatically, and the number of new, young
activists increased more than 10 times. But the real impact was the
dramatic growth of “paper members”—members who support the basic
idea of democratic socialism, but who aren’t ready or able to be
active members. While DSA has developed some infrastructure to support
the activist members, there is much less connection with the thousands
of other members. DSA also has limited resources to support leadership
development among the new young leaders. These folks have been thrust
into national leadership positions with little political education or
strategic direction. This is not a criticism of the staff or
leadership, but rather a critical organizational question that we have
to grapple with in order to really address the organization’s needs.

Max also says in the first few paragraphs, “Bowman did not claim to
be representing DSA…But he is a high-profile figure and it was both
warranted and inevitable that his actions would attract substantial
criticism from other members.” Later he says, “These activists now
[felt that] DSA should only endorse socialists who promised to
prioritize accountability to DSA itself over accountability to the
broader progressive coalition that had to be forged for any campaign
to be successful.”

These comments leave out one very important group that Bowman is
ultimately accountable to: his constituents. Unless we acknowledge
that, we have an incomplete understanding of electoral politics and
the pulls on politicians. For AOC, Bowman and others to continue to
speak out as socialists, we need to back them up, not unquestioningly,
but by building resources that they can use to set policy. This also
raises an important question about who we think we can recruit to our
cause.

 If we look at the American political spectrum, DSA is on the far
left. The main groups to our left are the sectarians. If we have any
hope of achieving even a small fraction of our goals, we are going to
have to convince a lot of people to our right and evicting Bowman from
DSA for taking a position that many in DSA hold or at least have
questions about would do just the opposite. Max lays this out well:
“…alliances with a wide range of other progressive groups were
both necessary and possible. And many non-socialist progressives ran
for office on programs that were all but indistinguishable from those
advanced by socialist DSA members.” How we back them up, provide
them with support on policy issues, maintain open lines of
communication—all that needs further discussion.

1970s Left no less nasty

Max’s characterization of the differences between today’s Left and
that of the 1970s and ‘80s also deserves attention. He writes, “My
generation is no stranger nasty and destructive internal Left debate.
The sectarian wars we conducted during the 1970s and ’80s were
counter-productive to say the least. But it was political
sectarianism: we lost any sense of proportion, exaggerated small
differences, and gave our opponents’ views every negative label in
the book. But for the most part, we considered our opponents carriers
of bad—even counter-revolutionary—lines, not bad people.” Here I
disagree—my experience of the destructiveness of debates on the Left
is that it was more than equivalent to today’s cancel culture. It
was personal and highly damaging.

I was in the Chicago Women’s Liberation Union. Over the course of
its history, every left group in the alphabet soup of groups that then
existed tried to tell us how we should work for women’s liberation,
what was the “correct line” that we needed to take on socialist
feminism and gay liberation. Some of us were threatened in our own
homes or neighborhoods. But the problem was not simply personal
antipathy. Rather it was the destructive way in which these groups
interacted with CWLU and other similar organizations.

In 1975 a conference of socialist feminists was held in Yellow
Springs, OH. Initiated by the New American Movement and organized by
representatives of the ten or so socialist feminist organizations in
the U.S., the conference brought together more than 1,000 socialist
feminists, making it one of the largest (if not the largest) socialist
conferences in the mid-20th century. Two years later almost all those
women’s groups were gone, largely due to the dispiriting and
crushing influence of the left sectarian groups. Am I bitter about
that—what do you think? I’m not alone. Unfortunately, I see many
of the same things happening today and I don’t think we do ourselves
or others any favors by downplaying the dangers represented by these
groups. Social media simply makes it much easier to be nasty and
destructive at a distance.

What happens next?

Finally, I think one particularly important question must be
addressed: What do we do now? How do we spark a real debate on DSA’s
National Political Committee, how do we reach outside our own circles
(like North Star), and, if we do figure out a way to go beyond this
group of people, what do we do then?

So, I’ve got three questions that I think we need to answer:

* What can we do to support DSA elected officials?
* What can we do to deal with the changing nature of the
organization?
* How can we reach beyond our own ranks?

For several years a few of us have been proposing a meeting of
socialist elected officials. This could have a follow-up goal of
developing a policy shop that could provide legislators at all levels
with ideas and models for legislation, à la ALEC
[[link removed]], or perhaps more appropriately, the State
Innovation Exchange [[link removed]] (SIX). I think it
might also provide an opportunity to connect with legislators who
don’t describe themselves as socialists, but who share many of the
same goals and values.

As far as the organization goes, there are a couple of things that
would help DSA “find itself.” A recent survey of the members
revealed some things that are helpful in understanding DSA. It also
might be helpful to do a more focused survey of the membership. I
haven’t taken a close look at that earlier survey, but I suspect
that participants included a higher proportion of active members than
are really represented in the membership.

If I’m correct that a high proportion of members are at-large and
don’t participate in the daily activities of chapters, then a second
thing that would be useful would be restoring the budget
of _Democratic Left, _DSA’s outreach publication_._ Some may
scoff at the idea of spending on print when so much of social media is
free, but for the members in Appleton, Wisconsin or Mankato,
Minnesota, getting something delivered to their mailbox on a regular
basis could create a closer tie to the organization.

Perhaps most important is the question of how those of us reading this
can reach beyond our own ranks. From what I’ve seen Max’s article
has reached a largely older group of activists, many of whom got their
start in the activism of the ‘60s and ‘70s. While there are likely
some younger people who have read it, simply having a discussion among
mainly “old-timers” is not going to change anything. If we agree
with the ideas in the article overall, we need to determine how to
engage in a discussion with the leadership of DSA. I’ve proposed a
DSA webinar on socialism across the generations as a way to start the
dialogue. I think that, if planned and publicized properly, that could
be a starting point for a larger organization-wide
discussion—perhaps even the beginning of some political education
that goes beyond organizing training and moves us in the direction of
thinking strategically.

_[CHRISTINE R. RIDDIOUGH was a leader in the Chicago Women’s
Liberation Union in the 1970s and founder of in Blazing Star lesbian
group and newspaper. She was chair of the Gay and Lesbian Coalition of
Metropolitan Chicago and the Illinois Gay and Lesbian Task Force. She
later served as director of lesbian rights for the National
Organization for Women, and executive director of the Gay and Lesbian
Democrats of America. Publications and presentations include: -
Publishing Feminisms: A Case Study on Organizational Publications,
presentation with Margaret Schmid at Publishing Feminisms Conference,
Banff, Canada, May 2015. - The Feminine Mystique at 50: Activists
Panel, presentation at Newberry Library, published in Frontiers, Vol.
36, No. 2, 2015. - Strategy and Action in the Chicago Women's
Liberation Union: The Example of the Lesbian Group, presentation at
the A Revolutionary Moment: Women’s Liberation in the Late 1960s and
Early 1970s, Boston, MA, March 2014. - Thinking About Gender, and
other posts at [link removed]. - Culture and Politics, in
Working Papers on Gay and Lesbian Liberation, New American Movement,
1979. - Lesbianism and Socialist Feminism, position paper of the CWLU,
1972. She has a bachelor's degree in astronomy from Carleton College,
and a master's degree and Ph.D. candidacy in astrophysics from
Northwestern University. She currently teaches computer programming
and statistics and lives in Washington DC.]_

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