Staff-Driven Socialists of America?

DSA Needs an Electoral Director who Supports Class-Struggle Elections and Works to Overcome the Dirty Stay

By Stephan Kimmerle

DSA’s elected national leadership, the National Political Committee (NPC), has arrived at an impasse which might last until the DSA National Convention in August. 

The membership of DSA got a glimpse of this stalemate on January 17  when it was reported that the vote for hiring an Electoral Director was blocked by nine of the 17 NPC members (including the two YDSA representatives who have only half votes) refusing to cast a vote, thus denying quorum. 

These nine NPC members, who represent the more left-wing section of the NPC, published an oppositional statement explaining their decision:  

“We believe that the Electoral Director should align with [the] vision of building an independent socialist electoral project and show an understanding of the limits of coalition with even the most progressive wings of the Democratic Party. Before voting for such a candidate, we must be given the opportunity to have a full political discussion regarding this position, the candidates who applied, and how all of this relates to our electoral strategy.

We also have concerns about this hiring process. The majority of the Personnel Committee – a group of some National Political Committee (NPC) members, senior staff, and appointed members that oversees hiring and other staff concerns–put forward this candidate for the NPC to vote on and insisted they were the most qualified. However, we were prevented from considering alternative candidates who may better align politically with a broader section of the NPC and who also have the experience necessary for the Electoral Director position. During any hiring process, only the Operations Director sees all the applications and decides which ones the Personnel Committee and ultimately the NPC considers. When an NPC member on the Personnel Committee asked staff to share all applicants with the full NPC, the majority on this committee refused.” 

The Reform & Revolution caucus agrees with these comrades that DSA staff are political actors. In a political organization like DSA there is no avoiding that staff will play a political role. The key is to select staff democratically and transparently, and to make sure they are subservient to the democratic will of the majority of the organization. 

Despite the formal pretense that DSA staff are non-political, the current reality is that the key staff leaders (starting with the National Director Maria Svart) are aligned with the moderate wing of our organization (represented by the Socialist Majority Caucus and the Green New Deal slate on the NPC). And this wing, including their staff supporters, promotes a specific political vision for DSA: one which keeps us closer to the Democratic Party, turns DSA more into a NGO-style organization, and limits membership influence.  

This wing had a majority of the NPC until a recent resignation from the NPC by one of its supporters. Now the NPC is deadlocked. There are eight votes for the DSA moderates around Socialist Majority and the Green New Deal slate and eight votes for the left wing (seven full NPC members and two half votes for the representatives of YDSA, composed of members of Bread & Roses and Emerge, as well as independents).

The deadlock in our leadership body will not help to overcome the current challenges to DSA. However even before this the NPC had not accomplished much. The former NPC majority stood out for its unwillingness to hold elected socialists accountable to representing DSA. There has been a deafening silence in the absence of initiatives that could have moved the largest socialist organization in the US into meaningful action. DSA’s membership decreased by around 15 percent (see NPC member Jenbo’s Tweet, November 4, 2022) and the level of activity is low compared to previous years. 

Despite a marked increase in DSA-endorsed elected officeholders, without a clear strategy to use these positions to promote socialist policies and build DSA as an alternative to the Democratic Party, these electoral successes on their own will be shallow and ineffective at building the socialist movement.

The open deadlock on the NPC also marks the beginning of DSA’s pre-convention period. The biannual DSA National Convention is the organization’s highest democratic decision-making body, and is where a new NPC will be elected. Chapters will elect delegates who will come together from August 4 to 6 in Chicago.

After two years of stagnation and underperformance by DSA, the membership will have an opportunity to make a course correction. To succeed, they will need to grapple with overcoming the lack of an understanding of the current political situation since Biden took office which has resulted in a decline of social struggles and protests, and a fall in member activity in DSA. The key to overcoming these challenges lies in revitalizing the democratic life in DSA and empowering our members to assess the current political moment, and develop a new course of action where DSA can have a more effective intervention in the class struggle and social movements. 

Accountability Starts in Our Own Organization

The list of frustrations about DSA’s elected officials – and the response from DSA’s leadership – is long. At the top: the lack of any significant consequences for DSA Congressmember Jamaal Bowman after voting for $1 billion in military aid for Israel’s racist regime; the lack of any serious consequences over the vote of three of the four DSA Congress members to take away the right of the railway workers to strike; the votes of three of the four Congress members to accept Biden’s 2023 federal budget that increased military spending above inflation while spending for everything else fell in real terms.

The NPC majority did not develop any kind of process to hold electeds accountable to represent DSA. DSA is currently stuck between the disempowering options of either accepting whatever elected officials do on the one hand, or on the other hand sterile calls for expulsions. No leadership was given to empower members to make their voices heard, to draw red lines, and to politically  counter the pressures on our elected officials by the Democratic Party and the liberal mass media.

These failures in political leadership by the NPC are rooted in real weaknesses within DSA itself in terms of the level of members’ political understanding, active engagement, and democratic control over the organization’s national leadership. In this context the priority for a national leadership should be to use each debate and crisis in the DSA as an opportunity to raise the political level of understanding and active participation of members in running our organization. That is why Reform & Revolution has called at various stages for the NPC to organize national town halls to discuss various challenges and controversies with members, as well as a national activist conference (a non-voting national conference as called for in the DSA national constitution) in the summer of 2022.

A clear example was when three members resigned from the NPC around the time of the Bowman affair. This took place against the background of widespread anger among DSA members about the opposition of the NPC to publicly censuring (or expeling) Bowman, and especially at the NPC for instead disbanding the BDS Working Group (which were lifted soon after due to fierce member backlash) and disciplining the leadership of the BDS Working Group (which still stands). Reform & Revolution advocated for an open debate within DSA on this crisis, and as part of that, new democratic elections to fill the NPC vacancies (either at an emergency national conference or at least national online town halls with candidates and with an online vote of all members). 

This would have likely resulted in strengthening the sentiment for a change of course, which would have been reflected in the election of the NPC members. Instead, the NPC never organized a serious national discussion which could engage active members and filled the three open NPC seats in a routinist fashion through appointments, which of course upheld the previous political majority on the NPC.  

In crisis? Empower the members! That needs to be the mantra of the leadership of a democratic organization. Unfortunately, the majority of the DSA leadership (especially Socialist Majority Caucus and the Green New Deal slate, but also at times Bread & Roses) has opposed such a conception.  Calls for a serious political debate and reflection at the time of the Bowman crisis were brushed aside with pragmatic appeals to not turn inward and instead focus on getting on with campaigning work. 

Unfortunately, it was entirely predictable that without a political course correction DSA would continue to see a decline in active membership, face new crises, and see its campaigning work suffer. Now, a year and a half later, the balance sheet is clear.

However, the former majority of the NPC repeats this mistaken approach in their reaction to the nine NPC members publicly informing the DSA membership of the current deadlock on the NPC, criticizing them for explaining their position openly. Once again they are downplaying the need for political debate by arguing it would delay the  hiring of a national Electoral Director which is needed to support DSA electoral work . 

But there is no disagreement that DSA’s electoral work is important and that hiring a national Electoral Director could strengthen it. The question is what political approach should the Electoral Director prioritize and who is the strongest candidate to play that role? The calls for “immediate action” are in practice a call to hire the preferred candidate of the moderate wing of DSA and thereby bypass a discussion on using the position to move DSA’s electoral work in the direction of building DSA as a party-type organization which runs candidates who represent DSA.

The nine members of the NPC responded to these points in an FAQ. One part answers the common question “But this shouldn’t be talked about publicly”:

“It feels that the only times issues have been given space for extensive discussion and debate among NPC members is AFTER issues were taken to the membership and people felt some kind of accountability. There are serious issues in this org – both structurally and politically and we’re unsure what other way there is for any type of change to happen regarding issues if members don’t become fully aware of them. These kinds of struggles should be had openly and transparently with membership, especially during a Convention year where delegates will be deciding what and who to vote for to carry out necessary steps for the future of our organization.”

Concrete Proposals to Overcome the Crisis of Accountability of the NPC and the Staff

Here are some concrete proposals DSA should discuss and vote on at the next Convention to address the democratic shortcomings that the experience of the last period has revealed: 

• Vacancies on the NPC should be filled by a democratic vote of membership of DSA. Reform & Revolution supported a constitutional amendment at the last Convention that proposed this, but it was unfortunately not adopted. In light of the experience since the 2021 Convention the upcoming Convention should reconsider. This amendment also added an important democratic check for members to be able to control the NPC – the right to recall NPC members. Democracy includes allowing the membership to be able to recall and remove leaders it no longer supports. This would have been a valuable tool to use when the majority of NPC members resisted efforts to correct Bowman (and AOCs) unprincipled vote on providing military aid to the Israeli state. (Changing the amendment to raise the minimum threshold to trigger a recall election would be worth considering).

• Empower the NPC to be able to lead DSA and to direct the work of national staff.  The last convention took an important step forward by agreeing to pay stipends to the five NPC Steering Committee members. This should be expanded to the whole NPC so all of its members are able to do the work of leading the organization and overseeing staff. 
• We need a National Director who is accountable to the NPC and does not shield information from the NPC and the membership. We don’t need more Non-Disclosure Agreements signed by NPC members; instead we need dramatically more transparency from the staff to the NPC, and from the NPC to the membership. That the NPC did not even get to see a full list of applicants for the Electoral Director position highlights these deficiencies. We appreciate the hard work and dedication of Maria Svart over many years and developing a national staff of over 32 comrades working for us. However, the key task of a National Director needs to be to hold the staff accountable to the elected leadership. Unfortunately, this has not been happening. It is time for a change in the position of the National Director. 
• We need a biannual National DSA Conference (in alternating years between the biannual Conventions) also known in the DSA constitution as a “National Activist Conference.” Such a conference exists in the constitution as a means of increasing membership democracy; to ignore it stunts participation and education. 

Breaking Free from the Dirty Stay

It’s no accident that the most visible recent conflict on the NPC centered around DSA’s electoral work. Formally, almost everybody in DSA is for working-class power and the aim of building toward a working-class party. In reality, DSA’s electeds have increasingly worked as a loyal opposition to the Democratic Party rather than offering a militant socialist opposition visible to the broad public. DSA electeds have played down their socialist branding, largely promoting a radical version of progressive or populist politics instead of socialist demands, and are not systematically using their positions to encourage supporters to join DSA and prioritize building movements from below over insider legislative tactics.

The lack of accountability of our electeds, the pressures they come under every day in the halls of power, the pressure of the mass media and the class collaborationist union and progressive leaders – all of that is treated like hiccups within an otherwise well-functioning system; maybe there are personal weaknesses or a lack of power of workers or of DSA – but a built-in problem was denied. Instead the argument has been – especially around the DSA Convention 2021 – to maintain the status quo: It has worked so well to gain positions while running on the Democratic Party ballot line, what’s the problem? 

This untenable state, where the political position of our organization is completely contradicted by our actual electoral practice, has come to be known as the “dirty stay.”   

Following the example of the 1-2-3-4 resolution in New York City, we need an alliance of comrades in DSA in favor of a break with the Democratic Party (dirty or clean) and of comrades aiming in a meaningful way to build a “party surrogate” to put forward a concrete proposals to overcome the current situation of a dirty stay. The 1-2-3-4 proposal did not win a majority in New York City, with all but one of the numerous elected officials in New York opposed to it. However, it started a necessary discussion on how to enact a different policy of holding elected officials accountable and clear expectations toward their work as well as an outline of how to use class struggle elections to promote democratic socialism and DSA even where comrades run on the Democratic Party ballot line.  

Concrete Proposals on  Electoral Strategy and Hiring an Electoral Director

Given the lack of accountability of our NPC and the fact that they may not even fill the open vacancy on the NPC anytime soon, DSA members don’t have much direct power to push for a course change. However, we can use the months ahead of the Convention in August to develop resolutions that we can vote on there, and to organize a full discussion among all active DSA members in preparation for the Convention and delegate elections. 

In the meantime, these steps should be taken: 

• No hiring of an Electoral Director before the Convention; we expect the left wing of the NPC to hold strong for a democratic process. 
• Develop a 1-2-3-4 style resolution to work to overcome the “dirty stay” situation as a basis for our coming electoral work and the work of a future Electoral Director.

The Reform & Revolution caucus is trying to bring comrades together to develop such resolutions and offer a Marxist alternative to the course of the previous NPC majority.