All Power To The Members
1 Member 1 Vote, Members Decide, and the radical and necessary work of redistributing power to DSA’s rank and file
By Charlie H. | NYC-DSA
Why DSA Must Redistribute Power To Members
Try explaining the structure of national DSA to a new member, and you will quickly run up against a fact that, until recently, has gone strangely unnoticed: National DSA is run entirely top-down.
For all our talk of being a member-run, democratic organization, the structures of DSA’s national bodies give ordinary members just a single formal say in decision-making every two years: our vote for national convention delegates. These delegates go on to elect the National Political Committee (NPC), a 17-member group whose votes have all final say on all national decisions for the next two years, including the power to override any other national body.
Ordinary, rank-and-file members have no say in any of this. So when DSA members face major decisions about the direction of our national organization–on how to allocate resources, how to prioritize work, how to present our principles to the public, and of course, the kinds we’re debating right now of how organize when elected officials act in ways members rightfully oppose–we have no real power over national’s ultimate answer. The NPC chooses for us. And if we don’t like it, our only formal option is to wait two years to (indirectly) vote again.
As so many chapters soar, members approach each National Convention with higher expectations. To build and organize national power through a Federal Socialists in Office Committee. To create the infrastructure that unites chapters big and small into an independent party. This year, potentially, to run a viable socialist presidential campaign.
But when convention ends, our expectations soon crumble. National smashes headfirst into paralyzing crises, toxic social media battles, and damaging public spectacles that demoralize all those who need leadership from DSA. Each episode concludes without a real democratic decision, leaving us no stronger and no better equipped to face the next set of difficult choices, which repeats the same cycle.
As a result:
The NPC regularly ignores, pocket vetoes, or fully violates convention resolutions. This can be as big as not implementing a resolution shaping our entire 2024 presidential election (a resolution which even mandated for a memberwide vote on it), or as small as failing to follow a resolution to print a cardboard cutout of Bud for tabling.
Our federal power has crumbled. We’ve gone from four nationally endorsed Federal Socialists in Office to one. 50% of our national federal endorsements ended in organization-wide crisis and paralysis that spilled far beyond DSA and into national news, politics, and more. Our other 25%, Cori Bush, we were too weak to keep in office. Major campaigns would be right to view a national endorsement as a risk not worth the upside.
Our message is incoherent: National is not only unable to shape national issues; it cannot figure out how to talk about them. The NPC was too gridlocked to even come to a position on the 2024 presidential election, one of the most consequential events of our time. This lack of clarity and consistency means national DSA cannot shape narratives, let alone appeal to the working class at scale. Chapters are on their own.
These failings themselves are often why members decide to get more involved in national-level DSA politics. After all, we are a democratic organization, so we should be able to work to win over our comrades and fix problems democratically, the way we do in our most thriving chapters. However when first entering national DSA politics, members are likely to find inaccessible, difficult to understand, lore-steeped formations where battles are either destructively public or locked behind closed caucus doors. Whether we dive in or withdraw, the result is the same: a national DSA that seems designed to minimize member power as much as possible, and cannot do what members want as a result.
Fortunately, the solution is clear: a radical redistribution of member power from the few at the top to the many at the bottom. It’s a familiar solution that any socialist would likely support in any other walk of life: an end to top down rule and insider-dominated structures; a party where the leaders we elect to represent us must win us over to their vision rather than force it on us top down; a party that writes our belief that members can and must determine our direction into our very governing laws.
A DSA for all members, run by all members, by and for the working class. Because we can only win the world if we can decide how to do it together.
HOW DSA Must Redistribute Power To Members
In order to radically redistribute member power from the few at the top to the many at the bottom, we have introduced three convention resolutions. We will focus here on the two that most directly connect to redistributing decision-making power:
1 Member 1 Vote for Federal Endorsements: Enables every DSA member to vote on national DSA endorsements for Congress, Senate, and President. In the status quo, 17 NPC members vote to decide these endorsements, and members have no formal power to affect the decisions.
Members Decide: Enables 5% of DSA members (currently about 4000 members) to call for a national advisory vote on a national decision. In the status quo, 17 NPC members vote to make all final national decisions, and members have no formal power to affect the decisions.
(we will explore the third resolution, 1 Member 1 Vote for National Leadership, in an upcoming piece)
What 1 Member, 1 Vote for Federal Endorsements does:
Currently, National Federal Endorsements are decided through NPC votes. So once chapters presented the question of national endorsement to the NPC, the only opinions that really mattered about whether to endorse Jamaal Bowman, AOC, Cori Bush, and Rashida Tlaib were those of 9 NPC members.
Given that this decision-making process shuts nearly all DSA members out of a process that affects nearly all of us, is it any wonder they so often lead to rippling crises?
The way to fix this is simple: redistribute the power to decide to the members. With this resolution, a third of the NPC will be able to call for a national general membership vote on federal endorsements.* It will also mandate two all-member discussion forums, enable members to submit statements in favor or against, and require that these statements be sent to all members, along with recordings of the forums. This ensures all members are working from the same information before voting. None of this is currently required.
*This threshold is designed to be easy enough to meet when needed, but hard to overuse to delay non-controversial decisions
How this redistributes member power for a more democratic and powerful DSA:
Federal endorsements are an especially core political issue for all members not just because federal power is nationwide, but because federal elected officials have been, at least until recently, the most likely way that most people will encounter DSA. What we are deciding shapes the perception most people will have of DSA. And—especially in the absence of a well-funded external propaganda operation—that perception shapes mainstream reality. It shapes who will support, learn about, join, or organize in DSA, and who will not.
This is why National Federal Endorsements are historically the event most likely to cause the kinds of destructive crises that grind national DSA to a halt, damage organizing across DSA, and altogether drive members away.
Most explanations of this toxicity blame a nebulous “culture” or specific personalities. This is often accompanied by members accusing each other of being collaborationist sellouts, or purity-obsessed wreckers; of being “too online” to organize irl, or being visionless “do-the-work-ists.” But we have another theory: the toxicity is the result of national DSA’s undemocratic national structure.
That is, in the absence of formal member power, the only way for members to affect national decisions is through informal power. When people decry DSA’s toxic, destructive, and inaccessible methods of dealing with national decisions, they are almost always describing the three forms of informal power we are incentivized to use:
Public-facing social media pressure campaigns, which often descend into personal harassment and even threats.
Leveraging external, non-DSA organizations and institutions to shame the NPC into changing course (such as other organizations, left-wing celebrities or influencers, or the mainstream press).
Backroom dealmaking by the few people whose votes do matter: NPC members, their caucus leadership, and the select few who have their ears.
In practice, this leads to a system where, in the two years between conventions, a few dozen members of caucus steering committees have more power over national DSA than the other 70,000 members combined. One where the only way to influence the only handful of people who matter is through either highly public negative pressure, or invisible backroom lobbying with a few other well-connected people.
When major decisions are made for members rather than by members, most either withdraw from national events further, or dive into the toxic informal battles so many decry. The diversion of energy from productive to destructive debate creates a public spectacle that drags even unrelated DSA organizing projects into the fray, forcing more and more members to account for decisions and positions they had no say in, and may not have even known about. As a result, even strong chapters running cadre DSA candidates in similar races are now increasingly likely to view a national endorsement as more liability than asset. And even highly active chapter-level organizers are more likely to stick to chapter organizing, where unlike in national, they have a real say in its direction.
Seen in this structural light, the destructive infighting and toxicity that dominate so much of DSA’s national scene makes much more sense. Members wield alienating informal power because, in the absence of formal power, it is the only kind with any chance of working. Our undemocratic structure incentivizes and rewards it by locking members out of any other option.
What years of DSA organizing have shown is that the more deeply a decision affects our full membership, the more member power is needed to decide its legitimacy. And, the more destruction and illegitimacy we create by leaving them in the hands of just a few.
Fortunately, this is extremely fixable. As our only race of equivalent size and significance, the Zohran campaign has shown us that DSA can, in fact, run a major election without letting capital drive us apart. Every single member had the chance to vote on the endorsement in branches before it was ever approved at our chapter convention—and at that same convention, we passed a chapter-level 1M1V resolution so that a full member vote would be the final step next time.
To see how much of a difference it made, just compare the Zohran campaign to our national federal endorsements. Rather than a 50% disaster rate, the types of issues that have derailed other campaigns, especially around Israel and Palestine, didn’t destroy our bonds, but saw course corrections that every tendency in the chapter, including those more opposed to or skeptical of the initial endorsement, more or less hailed as a success. And as we continue to face capital’s attempts to divide us, we can do so knowing we have overcome them before, and will keep figuring out how to do it again.
Our top-down, undemocratic federal endorsement process has only ever left us more divided; while in NYC-DSA, the fact that every member had the chance to decide together means that every member felt far more compelled to see that decision through. Our largest ever campaign would not have worked unless every member had the chance to vote on it, including many of those who opposed it. And it’s next, even harder stages will not succeed without everyone who got it to this point together.
We’ve seen over and over that if a major project is simply forced on membership by a few people at the top, members are much more likely to respond to the challenges of the project by deciding the whole thing is illegitimate and organizing in ways that jeopardize the project as a whole. This fails supporters and opponents of the project alike: supporters cannot get the member power needed to make the project succeed, and opponents cannot get the member power needed to legitimize an alternative.
If a project is the result of a collective decision by all of our comrades, we’re much more likely to say: how do we fix this issue without destroying the project our comrades have decided to embark upon? No wonder our top-down federal endorsement process seems so often leaves us more divided, while our most democratically decided major campaign brought us together in a way few campaigns could.
Federal endorsements are such a lightning rod for crises of legitimacy that an easy lever for member power over the decision should be the default. But they are not the only ones.
WHAT MEMBERS DECIDE DOES:
Members Decide will enable five percent (5%) of DSA members to call for a national advisory vote (currently, this would be about 4000 members) on any matter.
It will also mandate two full-member discussion forums, enable members to submit statements in favor or against, and require that these statements be sent to all members, along with recordings of the forums, ensuring all members have access to the same information before voting.
Currently, there is no formal way for members to influence NPC decisions. There is no member check on the NPC’s total top-down power to make decisions, even when violating convention resolutions. There is also no requirement to provide information on these votes or their substance.
*A measure that also allows “members representing 20% of chapters” to call for a vote was left over from a previous draft, and will be amended out
How this redistributes member power for a more democratic and powerful DSA:
Some have asked, if you want all members to vote on some important decisions, why not on all of them? The answer is: our goal isn’t to have everyone vote on everything (which no one even wants), it’s to radically redistribute power from a few at the top to the many at the bottom, until our structure is that of an organization where the ultimate power truly does come from the membership.
The best way to do this in practice is to create an organization where every member can vote on enough decisions to feel that our decisions are legitimate. After all, much of the real power in a vote over a question lies in who writes the questions. In this light, the only answer that can actually protect member-driven democracy is: the members themselves.
Members Decide is what will truly transform DSA from an insider-led, top-down body into a truly member-run org. To one where “member driven” is not just a line people compete to ascribe to whatever they want to do already, but the actual law of the organization. Because with Members Decide, members will finally have the power to vote on national decisions, which we currently lack.
The 5% threshold is designed to be high but achievable. 4000 members is more than have been involved in any single internal decision besides the Bernie endorsement vote, so it will be difficult to constantly invoke in ways that grind operations to a halt. But it is achievable enough that, in the kinds of nationally significant situations that have paralyzed national DSA in the past, it’s completely feasible that a large enough portion of members will invoke it in order to reach the kind of member-powered, democratic outcome we’ve never had.
The move from 0 to 1 will remove the single biggest roadblock to a democratic and effective DSA, creating more trust in leadership by giving members the power to invoke member democracy when—but only when—it is needed, as determined by members themselves.
This is a win for everyone:
The NPC will be far more accountable to membership in decision-making, since they know members have the real power to formally influence those decisions.
Members will trust the NPC more, because we know they know they are now structurally accountable to us between conventions.
DSA as a whole will finally have ways to resolve decisions through direct, democratic, and constructive structures that bring more people in, instead of being forced into informal methods that push more people out.
By building every member accessible routes for meaningful involvement in shaping national direction, we can finally move away from the worst parts of current national DSA politics internally and externally. We can open the national organization to all members, not just those who have the time, resources, or inclination to wade through national’s often inscrutable, hostile, and undemocratic form. How many incredible organizers, strategists, theorists and more is our national membership losing out on because our undemocratic structure keeps them in their more democratic chapters? We owe it to every member to find out.
Importantly, Members Decide is not just about dealing with crises, but being proactive. Think about the kinds of national projects DSA members aspire to: a mass propaganda and recruitment campaign designed to bring in six or seven figures worth of new members, slates of DSA candidates with shared branding, and national salting networks. These are things you can only pull off with real bottom-up buy-in. After all, who decides what this branding is, and who decides that it’s representative enough of DSA membership to throw our whole org into pushing with the same collective solidarity and energy we throw into our most intense campaigns? Only the members themselves.
Imagine a future where, before engaging in major campaigns, we proactively call for national votes to ensure we have the buy-in to run them. The way cadre DSA members say they will not run for office without a DSA endorsement, our national party-level efforts would not proceed without a member endorsement.
To be sure, this will not transform DSA from a top-down patchwork into a mass party on its own. But in removing our greatest hindrances, it will achieve the most necessary precondition we must meet before meeting all others:. A radical redistribution of power from a few at the top to the many at the bottom, first inside DSA, and then across the world.
A DSA BY MEMBERS, FOR MEMBERS
These resolutions, along with 1M1V for National Leadership, will effect the greatest redistribution of power from a small number at the top of national DSA to the entire membership in DSA’s history---a long overdue transformation from rules that were designed for an organization with less than 1/10th our current membership, and an even smaller fraction of its power and material stakes.
They will change DSA from an organization in which our national structure incentivizes locking as many members out of the decision-making process as possible into one in which we bring as many members into it as possible.
They will change DSA from an organization whose debates are mainly held through toxic, undemocratic, informal power to one whose debates are resolved by the collective, democratically.
So if you are a convention delegate, please understand that thanks to your non-delegate comrades, you are now one of the most powerful socialists in the entire country. You are one of the only people with any say in the national direction of DSA.
Will you head home from convention knowing that the NPC can easily ignore and violate the resolutions your comrades elected you to pass?
Will you head home leaving in place a structure that gives the comrades who elected you to represent them to our national body no power over that body for the next two years?
Or will you head home knowing that national DSA is, finally, in the hands of the only people who make the existence of a national DSA possible: the members of DSA ourselves?
The idea that national DSA must be strange, inaccessible, and aggressive has become taken for granted. After spending enough time in it, it’s tempting to simply accept the worst aspects of the status quo as the best we can ever hope for, rather than the clear result of a structure that exacerbates them–and a structure that can be changed.
So please, think about who the unequal structure really serves. Is a national DSA where most members struggle to even know what is going on, have no way to formally affect it, and can at best engage in a process that most find alienating, the best we can do? Is the Democratic Socialists of America’s national organization best served by a structure that gives members of the Democratic Socialists of America virtually no power over it? And if we are so unequal and undemocratic inside our organization, how can we ever expect the working class to believe we will build a radically more equal and democratic world outside it?
Socialism is about putting the collective over the individual. And until we can make collective decisions that are regarded by the collective itself as legitimate enough to carry out without crisis, we cannot build a mass socialist party.
But as our greatest successes show, when we act together, we can change history at greater scale than ever before. And after so many years of crisis, we owe it to ourselves, our comrades, and our world to redistribute power within DSA the way we fight to redistribute power everywhere else.
This convention, let’s put DSA over ourselves. Pass 1M1V, let Members Decide, and build a DSA For All.
All power to the members.
Always.
This is the first in a series of articles on our 1M1V national convention resolutions. Questions about 1M1V? Email us at groundworkdsa@gmail.com, and we will do our best to answer in an upcoming FAQ!