No Shortcuts: Against Groundwork’s Spectacle of Democracy

The United States is undemocratic. Despite its self-proclamations of freedom and democracy, the majority of people in the US are disenfranchised from having any real sway over the direction of the country. The US continues to support wars and genocides despite widespread disapproval and refuses to implement popular majoritarian policies such as Medicare for All. Though we now have the most universally enfranchised population in the US’s long and sordid history, our actual democratic political practice is reduced to voting between two predetermined options every few years.

Most US citizens therefore do not regularly engage in political activity. We are largely reduced to spectators of a supposed democracy, experienced through curated media. Those who become active are often unable to affect change and are drowned out by the political machines of the corporate controlled duopoly. This discourages engagement, fosters apathy, and controls the people while offering the illusion of democracy, freedom, and choice. Up until this convention, DSA has represented something different.

The DSA Right’s Attack on Democracy

Groundwork’s many proposals along the lines of “one member one vote” (1M1V) seek to undercut the extensive democratic participation in DSA in the guise of expanding a limited decision making power to more members. While proponents of this massive change to our democracy have argued this will expand participation, the reality of the change will be that it silences member’s voices in large debates, disincentivizes the existing involvement of membership, and will prove unable to expand meaningful democratic participation to a significantly larger membership. In short: it undermines member organizing and democratic control over the organization.

Removing Debate

Groundwork has a history of silencing debates in DSA, often acting with the justification that they are maintaining a healthy organizing environment. In 2022, former Representative Jamaal Bowman’s vote to fund the Iron Dome caused a massive explosion of debate and frustration within DSA. As outlined by R&R comrade Ramy Khalil in “Stop the Crackdown on DSA’s BDS Working Group by the NPC”, members of the NPC who are now in Groundwork took part in silencing the debate around Bowman’s contentious vote by suspending members of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions Working Group (BDS WG) over some admittedly aggressive Tweets on their social media account. There was almost no effort from the NPC to organize public venues for debating the vote. Instead the debate was relegated to online spaces, and as a result the debate polarized and escalated, leading to all Groundwork members on the NPC voting to dissolve the BDS Working Group on March 18th for the groups’ criticisms of the NPC’s decision. NPC members have stated that the effects of this were visible in people leaving DSA, often stating it as a direct reason for them ending their membership. 

A more recent resolution to “Improve Moderation of Official Chapter Chats” in NYC DSA allows the leadership of the chapter – dominated by Socialist Majority Caucus (SMC) and Groundwork –  to shut down chats, moderate under standards that allows censures for members who post more than twice about a political issue or those “[m]aking highly negative and unconstructive criticisms of DSA.” We should be honest here: this is another example of Groundwork attempting to silence debate.

Whether or not the resolution was rhetorically put forward for administrative reasons: to handle toxic chats or to suppress long debates on leadership or elected officials, in essence what it does is undermine democratic discourse in a time where there are very little opportunities for members to raise their concerns in a chapter as large as New York City. The effect of these changes is to silence discourse and disagreement with leadership. 1M1V will do the same.

DSA’s Conventions have flaws, owing to the complicated challenge of hosting such a massive event. But what convention brings to the table is a higher level of engagement through the crafting of resolutions, hosting of debates, and the ability to elect leadership based on the decisions candidates take at the highest decision-making body of the organization. These members aren’t just a gaggle of random “DSA sickos” – they are duly elected by the members of their own chapters! 1M1V proposals definitionally weaken that, as power is centralized in a leadership elected not by a Convention of the active membership of DSA, but by an email poll reminiscent of any number of progressive activist organizations and “online parties”. 

 In such a scenario, why bother with complicated political debates and deliberation? One is better served by building a strong list and using it to email, text, and phonebank your way to victory or simply utilizing online influencers’ sway over thousands of audience members. Convention in and of itself practically has no effect on the organization without the members who will implement resolutions!

De-activating Organizers

Removing these important spaces for deliberation will disincentivize members from activity over time. It will eventually lead to working class organizers unable to have their voices heard, unable to propose their own solutions, and unable to sway debates without spending all of their time building internal lists, social media followings, and internal outreach campaigns – distracting from the mass work orientation that Groundwork professes to advocate for. As a result, 1M1V will certainly disincentivize working class members from participating in organizing where they have no decision making power. 

In their own way Groundwork acknowledges this phenomenon. In their featured article, “Voting Brought Me Back to DSA. Every Member Deserves a Voice,” Aaron B. describes being burnt out organizing in DSA and that 1M1V allowed active comrades to help them understand the dynamics and help inform how they voted. As a result: “Between all of this and the forty-hour work week, I found I didn’t have time for that same time sink I put into DSA previously.” This is not empowering working class members. It is telling the working class in DSA that they don’t need to participate, they will be contacted to vote when needed and should go about with their lives without needing to engage in organizing.

Apart from being patronizing, this is deeply damaging to the socialist movement. Our movement is not going to be successful through the bourgeois funded, top-down organizing models of non-profits and business unions. We need to engage the working class in political activity, to participate in organizing, deliberation and decision-making. This is so much more than voting. It’s about the sacrifice that thousands of working class DSA organizers make: to spend valuable, precious time actively organizing against the capitalist state. Organizing more and more members to make that sacrifice is what will bring socialism, not sending an online poll with predetermined options.

What is Democracy? 

When surrounded by staff driven NGO’s, workplace dictatorships, and two parties which both represent the rich, many members arrive in DSA and are baffled by experiencing an actual democratic system – with all of its tedium, frustrations, and unfamiliar rules. In order to examine what makes a system truly democratic, while drowning in a culture of the illusion of choice, it’s useful to break the idea of democracy down into two interrelated concepts:  democratic practice and democratic structure. 

Democratic Practice 

Democratic practice is the amount that organizations participate in democracy, and this is much more than just voting. Democratic practice includes the actual ability of members to participate in debates, deliberation, proposing solutions and campaigning in ways that can actually affect the choices the organization makes. This is in stark contrast to membership simply being presented with choices to vote on. 

Any of us who’ve organized campaigns and projects in DSA or our unions know that creating consistent democratic practice takes a lot of organizing. It often takes the majority of our time to drive participation through one on one conversations, creating space for debates, and to give decision making power with actual stakes to members. Yet, it is essential to making our organization run democratically. We do this work because we know there is no shortcut to it. 

Democratic Structure

Democratic structure is the basis for how democratic an organization has the potential to be. It is the amount of bargaining power the rank and file membership have and is interrelated to the practice of the rank and file implementing decisions themselves. While many unions do not have a thorough practice of democracy, they do have a strong democratic structure when the union’s power stems from the foundation of workers stopping production collectively through striking. However, this structure is eroded as unions focus more and more on legislative advocacy and the courts to achieve wins, giving a specialized group of professionals the exclusive role over the execution of union actions. 

The military, which has no democratic practice, begins to have a democratic structure during times of mass enlistment which surfaces as mass revolts of rank and file soldiers. Insurrection and desertion to revolutionary forces were essential in the Russian Revolution, the Chinese Revolution, and increasingly appeared towards the end of the Vietnam war when US soldiers were killing their own officers at record rates. Since then, the US military has been careful not to expand to a similar level of mass enlistment, relying on specialized officers and control over airspace in order to limit the threat of creating any potential democratic structure in their armed forces. 

DSA has a strong democratic structure as long as its power comes from the volunteer labor of rank and file organizers across the country running campaigns, organizing in their unions, and starting mutual aid projects for their communities. But we erode that structure by decreasing the amount of rank and file members who are actually engaged in organizing work. Over time, democratic practice can affect the basis of the democratic structure of an organization, especially with the most essential part of democratic practice: the member-led execution of decisions.

An NGO DSA Vs DSA As A Union

With this understanding of structure and practice let’s examine the results of chapters where Groundwork has implemented 1M1V: a marginal increase in voting and without an increase in organizing activity. In “Protect Convention,” B&R’s Ramsin Canon outlines how LA DSA’s implementation of mail voting was not shown to increase participation compared to other methods. The same article cites that a chapter campaign Power to Tenants engaged more members in actual organizing than their 1m1v steering committee election. 

At convention itself, the function that is currently most similar to 1M1V is the delegate poll informing various national committee’s decisions of what resolutions will make it on to the convention agenda. Yet the creation of the convention agenda is an area where our democracy could actually be dramatically improved by increasing engagement, debate, and deliberation around the convention agenda among delegates and even in chapters- moving away from the online poll model.

While proponents of 1M1V cite various union examples of 1M1V leading to wins for the left (conveniently leaving out that it was also part of Tony Blair’s “New Labour” right-wing rule changes in the UK Labour

Party), they forget labor organizing essentials. Instead, 1m1v models the empty democracy of the US government, which while having relatively expansive voting rights, maintains control by limiting implementation to a specialized set of government bureaucrats.To their credit many members of Groundwork genuinely believe 1m1v will bring more members into DSA, but there are no easy shortcuts to increasing engagement– we have to do the painstaking work of talking to members, agitating around the issues they care about, encouraging actions and providing a path for members to take action themselves.

 As a rank and file organizer, if I had to organize my shop without meeting, having one on one conversations, discussing in meetings, and engaging co-workers in shop floor actions, I would be completely unable to challenge the authority of those with more resources, contacts, and time: management. Empowering membership is an essential task all DSA members should be seeking to improve. We should all be encouraging new members to come back to a meeting, take on a project, and develop opinions in their work. An online poll of leadership will not fix our engagement issues, it’s likely to disengage those already active by removing their voice.

Our system isn’t perfect, but it should not be remodeled after the empty voting that is the US government’s shallow excuse for democracy. We have to continue to work to increase the intensity of our democratic practice, not undercut it with a simple poll. We should constantly seek to expand our democratic structure by engaging new members in day-to-day organizing. We should work to engage more members in regular, formal political debates and decision-making by taking the effort to involve more DSA members to engage as a community in the day-to-day aspects of DSA’s political work and creating in-person events for discourse. Democracy is not simply created by individuals voting– it is organized, through deliberation, debate, and, most importantly, the democratic, member-led execution of decisions.