by Why We Did What We Did, and Where We Went Wrong
By Jesse Dreyer, Maria Franzblau, Whitney Kahn, Eve Seitchik
Signed by: Jesse Dreyer, Maria Franzblau, Whitney Kahn, Eve Seitchik, Harris Liebermann, Sarah Milner, Spencer Mann, Ariel Moore, Venu Mattraw, Vee Edwards, Judith Chavarria, Oscar Alvarez, Ruy Martinez, Sean Case, Davin Weber, Code Delano, Marc I., Jenn Barfield
This article reflects the views of the signers, not necessarily the views of Reform & Revolution as a whole.
Delegates from Reform & Revolution went into this convention wanting to strengthen democracy in DSA because we believed it would advance the interests of the socialist movement. We are proud of much of what we proposed and achieved, but during the debate over Democratize DSA, a proposal by Socialist Majority Caucus to expand the NPC from 16 to 51 members, we believe our caucus lost the political context and cast a vote which would have hurt the organization.
The authors of this article are Reform & Revolution members who, while mostly standing by our initial support of Democratize DSA, are critical of several errors in the leadup to and during convention. Most notably, we believe some of the leaders of our caucus were mistaken in predicting a moderate majority on the NPC, in our collaboration and messaging with SMC, and that it was a mistake for a majority of our delegates to support a motion to reconsider Democratize DSA after it failed.
How We Got Here
Coming into this convention, R&R members believed that the democratic structures of DSA had to change. For the past two years the moderate majority on the National Political Committee, made up of Socialist Majority Caucus and the Green New Deal slate, had dominated the organization’s politics and drawn us closer to the Democratic Party. The organization’s leaders feared that any serious accountability measures would scare electeds away from DSA.
But when Rep. Jamaal Bowman voted for funding Israel’s Iron Dome in late 2021, chapters across the country called for Bowman’s expulsion. The response of the NPC was inadequate and not transparent. The NPC met privately with Bowman, but declined to publicly reveal what was discussed or hold a public meeting open to membership. After the vote, the NPC released a statement and a follow up condemning Bowman’s vote but stating that they would not censure or expel the congressman. Instead of organizing any internal DSA discussion on this important issue in response to the calls for expulsion, their statement claimed that Bowman had shown “considerable movement” in his views with no specification of what that movement consisted of, and said they would “maintain a high degree of discipline about what we communicate publicly.” Limiting information on democratic accountability is not the type of discipline we need from our leadership in DSA.
This lock-box of information meant there could be no membership review of their actions, or the extent to which they were able to move Bowman. Worse yet, the NPC later attempted to dissolve the BDS Working Group and suspend their leaders, which was perceived by many as political retaliation for their conduct during the Bowman Affair. Regardless of one’s views about BDS WG tweets, statements, or strategy, this was an undemocratic action that set a harmful precedent for the organization, and is why R&R fights for DSA to build party-like structures where our elected officials’ actions align with our platform, rather than the other way around.
A year later, DSA electeds gave the organization new reason to revolt. Railroad workers from several large unions were struggling for a better contract, including paid sick leave, and the threat of a railroad strike terrified the capitalist class and the major parties that served them. Interested in avoiding a strike at all costs, the Biden administration helped broker a Tentative Agreement missing several key demands, and when a majority of railroad workers voted to reject the TA, Biden moved to use his presidential power to block the strike. When it came to a vote, three DSA members in Congress – AOC, Cori Bush, and Jamaal Bowman – voted with Biden to ban the strike. Once again chapters petitioned for accountability, and once again the NPC acted inadequately, simply holding a call to “explain” the votes of the DSA electeds.
The NPC oriented to the electeds who violated our principles rather than the broader membership, tried to silence members and dissolve working groups who disagreed with them, and failed to be transparent to members. What kind of organization would DSA be if it went through two more years of this type of misleadership, lack of information, and lack of accountability?
Where We Succeeded
In the lead up to the convention, we got to work on a structural reform for DSA’s leadership so that members would have more ability to hold leadership accountable. We worked with the Marxist Unity Group to co-write a resolution for a National Delegates’ Council (NDC). This proposal would have created a large body with the ability to oversee the decisions of the NPC. This would be a huge check on the NPC keeping information under lock-and-key again, and delegates would have been elected per-chapter so that if there was another revolt against the NPC’s decisions like there was with the Bowman Affair, chapters could elect delegates that would enact their desires. It would have been a link between rank-and-file DSA members and the NPC. It wouldn’t have stopped a moderate NPC from taking similar actions, but at least they could be held accountable.
The NDC unfortunately didn’t make it onto the convention agenda. A majority of the caucus also voted to support Democratize DSA, a proposal brought forward by the Socialist Majority Caucus to expand the NPC from 16 to 51 members. This proposal was less strong than our NDC proposal. Most importantly, it had no viable recall method between conventions. While we did not agree with SMC that the former NPC’s issue was a capacity problem, we believe the proposal had three major advantages over changing nothing: first, that with 51 members there would be much more room for dissenting NPC members to get elected, leaning into the strength of DSA’s big-tent. Second, it would be far more difficult to keep information secret with 51 members in that body. Third, we believed that a larger national leadership body would tie a layer of chapter leaders to national work in a new way, strengthening DSA’s ability to conduct fighting national campaigns like the trans and reproductive rights campaign.
Many of our allies in caucuses on the left favored our NDC proposal, but the vast majority of them remained suspicious of SMC and wanted no part in supporting any of their proposals. Some on the left feared that SMC would find a way to stack a larger NPC with a moderate majority.
We knew we would not be popular amongst our likely NPC candidate voters for supporting Democratize DSA. We knew SMC would not rank our NPC candidates, and the Marxist caucuses who were unhappy with this move would most likely down-rank our candidates from what they were formerly planning. Still, we will proudly work with any caucus on any issue where we agree, even if we agree for different reasons, and even if it costs us politically.
To risk a repeat of the previous NPC’s secrecy was too big for us to fold on this issue, despite the political cost. People have accused us of horse-trading, but in reality it was the opposite. If we had been silent, we might have had one or even two R&R members on the NPC. We knew our willingness to support Democratize DSA would cost us votes, but we thought the reform would improve DSA, so we were still willing to do it, even if it damaged the chance of us getting R&R elected to the NPC.
We decided to support Democratize DSA and attempted to improve it. We proposed several amendments to ensure the whole NPC would have sufficient ability to hold the smaller Steering Committee accountable. R&R amendments included allowing the NPC to overturn decisions of the SC, giving the whole NPC the power to ratify decisions about hiring senior staff, and giving the NPC the explicit right to recall or alter the SC by a simple majority vote at any time. All of these were incorporated into the resolution by the authors.
We believe these suggestions dramatically improved the original proposal, and that the comrades who refused to support Democratize DSA due to the politics of its authors were wrong to do so and should rethink their method for good-faith participation in our big-tent organization. We did not get our candidates elected to the NPC, but as far as those lost votes are due to our support of Democratize DSA, we stand by our position as a principled approach, doing all we could to expand democracy in the organization.
Where We Went Wrong
We believe our caucus was generally too pessimistic in our analysis of the convention, collaborated too closely with SMC while promoting ‘Democratize DSA,’ and lost sight of the big picture when it came to parliamentary maneuvers for the proposal.
In the lead-up to the convention, NPC candidates from R&R and SMC co-authored an article in Socialist Forum arguing for delegates to support Democratize DSA. The article mentions that the comrades who wrote it have significant political disagreements, but in a playful manner, and the article contains very little criticism of the SMC-led NPC. A better alternative to the path we took could have been for R&R to publish our own article in support of Democratize DSA to our website, specifically appealing to the left caucuses to support the proposal while putting forward a harsh critique of SMC’s politics.
Given DSA’s membership decline and the lack of a coherent way forward for DSA under the Biden administration, many members of the caucus thought the left of DSA would be underrepresented in this convention. We are happy to say now that we were wrong on that. SMC did not have the majority we expected them to have, and the NPC election resulted in a majority for the left caucuses. It’s unclear yet what their joint plan is going to be and how they will lead, but it seems clear they have been elected with a mandate to not repeat either the secretive nature of the last NPC or the deferential strategy regarding our elected officials.
The biggest blunder R&R made during the convention was in parliamentary maneuvering, namely the motion to reconsider Democratize DSA. Everything we did was a good-faith attempt to try to ensure it passed and avoid repeating the dynamics of the last NPC, but in pursuit of this aim, we went too far and made mistakes that we want to own. During the convention, on the morning of the second day, a leader from SMC told one of our leading members about a strategy for passing Democratize DSA. They told us that they had found a left-wing delegate who had told them that even though they strongly opposed Democratize DSA, if it passed the 55% mark, they would want to change their vote to “Yes” to not block what a majority of delegates want, and would motion to reconsider so delegates could re-vote (the vote on Democratize DSA ended up being 62% approving, needing 66% to pass). So SMC didn’t have someone “fake-vote no” just to reconsider as some of the SMC-skeptics have said, but it was known in advance, including by some in our caucus.
When the motion to reconsider was made, most R&R members voted in favor of it, but have since regretted our votes. We believe that it wasn’t worth making such a big organizational change under circumstances that were not going to build trust between the left and moderate wings of DSA, even if we had been correct that the right-wing would win a majority and this resolution would help us avoid a repeat of the last NPC. Even if a re-vote had passed the 2/3 majority, it would have built up such division and suspicion between the wings of DSA that it would have weakened us as an organization. We were acting on our principles to expand accountability in DSA leadership, but we should have recognized when it got into this sort of ill considered and dillatory parliamentary maneuvering that it had gone too far, and would not strengthen DSA to pass the resolution in such a way. The authors of this article are happy that the vote to reconsider failed. To the extent that we lost votes because we engaged in parliamentary maneuvering in this way on a question as big as re-organizing DSA’s national leadership body, we feel we deserved to lose those votes.
Our actions around this ran completely counter to R&R members who played a leading role in bringing together caucuses to amend the convention agenda as a bloc. We helped set a mature tone for the convention, and then undermined it with support for the maneuvers around Democratize DSA.
The purpose of supporting proposals like Democratize DSA is to strengthen the socialist movement. But strengthening movements is not just an abstract process of passing the best resolutions, any more than winning socialism is an abstract process of electing the best representatives. We are not against ever making a parliamentary motion, but context matters, and the context of this vote would have been weakening and dividing DSA when our whole purpose was to strengthen it through increased visible democracy and accountability.
We paid a steep political price for this, and in its way, that speaks highly of the development of DSA. An internal system of correction and growing maturity, which can respond to potentially harmful actions and foster a healthy atmosphere of democratic decision-making, is a necessity for a movement which will survive to become or help build an independent workers’ party. Even though we did all we did in a good-faith effort to make DSA more democratically accountable, we should have rejected the motion for a re-vote.
Our mistakes were rooted in a flawed perspective about the current state of DSA. It seems the past few years of national DSA largely trailing liberal ideas and the Democratic Party have been more radicalizing than demoralizing for DSA’s left wing. Even though DSA is still in a crisis of how to build under Biden, the organization is in flux and the future looks much more optimistic than we thought going into the convention.
We think it’s important to own up to our mistakes. We aim to build a caucus which always acts on principles when organizing with others, puts Marxist politics first, and is always reflective. We believe only in learning through struggle can we help DSA become a stronger organization to assist the working-class in organizing for the revolutionary upheavals to come.
Jesse Dreyer
Jesse Dreyer is a member of Teamsters Local 162 and Portland DSA co-chair.
Maria Franzblau
Maria Franzblau (she/her) is a member of the YDSA at Florida International University and Miami DSA. She is also a member of the Steering Committee of Reform & Revolution.
Whitney Kahn
Whitney Kahn is a paraeducator in Seattle and a building representative with the Seattle Education Association. He is an active member of Seattle DSA and Labor for Black Lives.
Eve Seitchik
Eve Seitchik (they/them) is a member and former co-chair of Boston DSA.
