Democratic Socialists of America and Multiracial Organizing
By: Abdullah Younus, New York City DSA
Organizing in the COVID-19 Moment
The current crisis continues to deepen the suffering in many of our communities. The way forward requires a concerted effort to prevent further fragmentation across different communities and bases, and the geographies and sectors within which we organize. We need to find ways to cohere through shared interests, beyond the traditional framework of coalition politics, city by city. Otherwise the aftermath of the crisis might be worse than we can imagine.
Democratic Socialists of America’s Role
Since 2016, the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) have grown in number, from approximately 5,000 to roughly 65,000. This growth can largely be attributed to passive membership bumps through online sign ups as opposed to the result of active recruitment. It mainly arose from key electoral developments nationally and locally: the 2016 Democratic Party primary where Senator Bernie Sanders ran as an open democratic socialist; Donald Trump becoming the president of the United States; the election of long-shot DSA-supported candidate Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress; and the end of Sanders’ second presidential campaign. While this growth has been impressive, it is not sufficient for the sort of change socialists seek in the United States. The most recent Democratic presidential primary was strong evidence of that.
Furthermore, the last few years of growth have not shifted DSA’s demographic composition. That DSA remains a disproportionately white formation has not gone unnoticed, either by our own membership or by potential political allies. This makes it unlikely that we can win most of the demands that we put forward, since the fight to dismantle capitalism and systemic racism in America will require a multiracial working class movement for liberation. A segregated movement is fundamentally weaker than an interacial one, and among both white and POC communities, the vast majority of people remain completely politically unorganized. Addressing DSA’s demographic composition and increasing the level of working class organization in the US will require work across all communities. We have not done enough to reflect on how we got here or how we should reorient our work to address this weakness.
I believe that DSA’s continued growth with college-educated whites, particularly in more diverse urban settings, is a direct result of our values-based approach to recruitment, which ends up creating a mobilization framework instead of an organizing one. If we want to have a broader segment of working class people, including more people of color within DSA, we need to focus on interest-based reasons for more of us to join. What materially does a person of color gain by becoming a member of DSA? I think the answer is threefold: the capacity of fielding leftists of color in primaries independent of the Democratic Party; the ability to run national campaigns for non-reformist reforms in core sectors of organizing (housing, healthcare, anti-war, and environmental) without needing foundation backing; and the chance to test out different left strategies and understand what types of work succeeds under what conditions.
I base this primarily on my own observations as a member of color in the New York City chapter and a leader on DSA’s National Political Committee, compared to what organizing has felt like within the labor movement, the immigration justice movement, and organizing in the Muslim community here in New York City and nationwide.
Well-meaning DSA members have often put forward “solutions” to our whiteness. Some common things people think will help are: frequently noting in public that the group is all white or racist; taking policy positions that they (usually a white person) insist “communities of color” demand; thinking that one good canvassing conversation with a person of color means that they know their full breadth of experience; and treating a lack of diversity as evidence of exclusively an internal cultural problem rather than also an external organizing problem. This has not worked.
However, a few effective steps have also been taken to help retain people of color who do join DSA, from the introduction of quota systems for elected leadership to ensure strategy and political direction is informed by people with a relevant set of experiences; to the creation of the Afrosocialists and Socialists of Color (Afrosoc) Caucus at the 2017 National Convention in Chicago to create much-needed spaces for leftists to connect with each other within DSA and identify ways to confront anti-Blackness within collective spaces on the left. And several of our campaigns have often employed successful first-contact strategies to reach new bases, including people of color, from tabling at community events to canvassing for electoral or issues-based work to mutual aid projects such as brake light clinics that offer people a needed service under the banner of DSA. Yet few of these first contact strategies have fed into what we need - a long-term base-building strategy.
Why “people power” is a confusing term
To me, DSA’s stubborn whiteness, at least in its major metropolitan chapters, is a product of two related dynamics. The first is that DSA is currently more of a mobilizing outfit than an organizing powerhouse, which means it primarily serves as a place where people who already identify as having the same values come together. In a 2019 interview on the distinctions between mobilizing and organizing, organizer Jane McAlevey described a situation that feels incredibly familiar:
People get confused, they say...we called a meeting and we invited anyone to come, and people came, and we’re going to do an action. All of those things involve people. So because they involve people, people think they are organizing.
The second is the reasons people commit to being active members of a collective organization, which can be categorized in one of the following three ways: instrumental (based on wanting to address tangible material interests); affective (based on forging personal or emotional connections with others in the same group); and normative (based on upholding certain core principles or values). If we overlay McAlevey’s definition of organizing with this framework, it stands to reason that mobilizing tends to reach those who have a values-based relationship to DSA, drawn out of an affinity to the value of Democratic Socialism, while organizing may be better at reaching those who would be most likely to join out of an interest-based orientation.
The people that come to DSA meetings of their own initiative because they are drawn to the liberatory ideals of socialism tend overwhelmingly to be white. In urban centers, many of these white members appear to join DSA primarily for reasons two and three; affective draws may be especially strong for those members who are recent transplants to a diverse city where they know relatively few people. These same individuals are often working in sectors that operate on a burnout model. Their commitment to democratic socialist values comes out of a response to a core set of material conditions, to be sure, which can be traced back to the radicalization that occured in the aftermath of the 2008 crash. Reduced economic prospects for an entire generation, even for those with a college degree—something we are likely to see again with the COVID-19 crisis—have led to increasingly harsh workloads, the kind that gives rise to enormous alienation. This is a condition endemic to capitalism, bent on squeezing as much profit out of each worker as possible, that working-class people experience to a far greater extent. But it may be that the particular experience of younger, professional-class white people makes them especially drawn to, or in search of, a collective project.
Once in DSA, these members who joined based on their normative commitments to socialism often recruit from within their own networks (usually other younger, professional, college-educated whites). They have helped DSA develop an organizational culture that holds an affective appeal to these groups, but may be off putting to others like me who joined out of more instrumental or interest-based reasons. I knew I needed a large group of people to help me in my efforts to push back against a violent Islamophobia that threatens the well-being of the people I love, having grown up in New York after September 11th. I joined DSA expecting to connect with other people who joined for similar reasons, for their own communities.
Of course white people must also be organized into the socialist project, everywhere they live. They are still large in number, and many are very poor in communities all around the country. A mass movement of the poor and disenfranchised, the kind of movement we need for liberation, must include poor white people, working class white people, and rural, suburban, and urban chapters. There are lots of skilled white organizers, particularly in the labor movement, who are invaluable to the fight. But that requires working alongside people that are grounded in the communities they come from, as well as the ones in which they live.
Continuing on this path, I have no doubt that DSA will accomplish our stated goal from the 2019 convention of reaching 100,000 members. But in the long term, if we continue to grow using the same model of mobilization and passive recruitment, we will continue in the same demographic track.
Many have suggested that the solution to these conditions is coalition work that brings us into closer proximity to working class organizations with bases of people of color. I have also been a proponent of this argument. What I realize now is that working side by side is a necessary but not sufficient condition for growing DSA into a more diverse organization.
We have seen that the membership of DSA does not transform even after successful coalition campaigns. In my personal experience in New York City, I am thinking of the Khader El Yateem city council race, which simultaneously strengthened Arab organizations and DSA within South Brooklyn, but by and large as separate entities, or the most recent Rent Law wins, which have strengthened housing organizations and increased DSA’s profile as a statewide player in progressive politics, but has not increased the size of DSA.
While many people are unorganized, there are also many base-building organizations that people join for material reasons and that have a different affective appeal to different demographics. These groups have organic leaders, be they staff, elected leaders, clergy or community members who can mobilize other sectors of the working class. Coalition is a first step, but eventually we must see the socialist movement as a home for a diverse layer of working class leaders in different communities, working on different issues
We should have a deliberate, public strategy of inviting leaders of existing working-class, POC, base building organizations to join DSA as members, but not through the mergers and acquisitions or affiliation conversations that most national networks pursue. We are not looking for access to funders, staff positions, dues money, or branding credentials. We are looking to win socialism, and that can’t be done if DSA continues to look the way it does and expand the way it has been. In order to make DSA a home for working class leaders, we need to be able to lay out to people the specific things they would stand to gain, materially, through membership.
What leaders would inherit
What DSA has been able to build through a shared commitment to a national project that is anti-capitalist and a healthy dose of gumption is the beginning of an alternative to three existing political spaces: the Democratic Party, the non-profit foundation world, and the sectarianism of most explicitly socialist organizations.
Electoral capacity
DSA has been able to start building an electoral apparatus that is in essence independent of the Democratic Party’s existing power center. We are doing well at this, with approximately 100 DSA members currently in office, and this has been how most of the outside world has experienced DSA. We should lean into this strength and recognize the mutual benefit that comes from working class leaders with their own bases joining forces with DSA.
Radical electoral work requires a significant level of experience and independent funding, where there can be little to no reliance on the existing Democratic Party infrastructure. Over the last few years, DSA has developed an extremely strong electoral program on the local level in many parts of the country. We have a deeply democratic structure that generates the buy-in necessary for a strong field program of volunteer canvassers. Our funding model is new, relying on small donors and rejecting corporate donors and large fundraisers. We expand the base of voters we target beyond the traditional “triple prime” frequent voter. Perhaps most importantly, we have proven that unafraid, unabashed ideological work is not elitist if it is grounded in peoples' own interests and invites them to join and have a genuine voice in the direction of the work.
The infrastructure for targeted campaigns and an ability to engage in national work for smaller orgs
Additionally, DSA already has a national infrastructure to lend to groups outside of the mainstream non-profit sector, which has historically been intolerant of anti-capitalist organizing. All we require is a shared commitment to the same socialist principles underpinning any issue area. DSA can provide smaller left organizations national reach and access to the more pointed tactics that a 501(c)(4) or PAC structure affords.
Since DSA is independent of major foundations and major unions, it creates greater flexibility for the positions we can take, and our democracy is open for smaller organizations to make a sizable impact. Any leader that joins forces with DSA will also have the opportunity to convince their fellow members that we should endorse and marshall resources for their particular issue-based campaign, whether it be a coordinated campaign to pass broad reaching rent reforms or fight the next tech behemoth out of their neighborhood. In so doing, we can build an alternative to the larger well-funded issue-based advocacy groups that often take a more conservative approach.
An arena for experimentation
While the left has an unfortunate history of sectarian splintering, DSA appears to have replaced that dynamic with a fairly constant wave of online feuding (which I wish we would do more privately) amongst a small fraction of its membership coupled with a somewhat stable "big tent" orientation, where caucuses reflect different ideological commitments. Our organizational form is also a “big tent” both spatially and temporally. We have neighborhood-based branches, issue area working groups, and electoral and labor work. We also have a varied temporality to our campaigns: some follow the arc of a corporate or targeted campaign, others are legislative fights, and still others follow an electoral campaign or a crisis/response/cadre model. We work to understand which is the most appropriate approach in which conditions, and in many ways, we could become a very useful lab for the Left to try out different approaches.
However, because there is very little unifying us other than broadly speaking anti-capitalist ideology, and many of us lack any rigorous training in organizing practice, the capacity for reflection on this high effort work becomes stunted, rendering true praxis in our organization hard to come by. Instead, to the degree there is discussion of efficacy, debates between ideological factions lead to each defending their ideas rather than the creation of new ideas based in concrete campaign experiences. The opportunity to work alongside more seasoned movement comrades would therefore be hugely beneficial for the political development of DSA members.
Conclusion
When a member of a community organization or labor union becomes an active member of DSA and participates in either a working group or branch space, they will then have all the standing they need to be a part of endorsement decisions and build the relationships within the organization to push their preferred candidates or issue campaigns forward.
Without this dynamism, and a shift to the true practice of organizing, we don’t have a chance of winning. But this change cannot come from the top. We need to develop a way for DSA to leverage our chapters for mass organizing nationally while building transformative relationships locally so that we may execute the grand visions that we know are the solutions to the peril we face. I believe the way to start on that path is to invite leaders into our organization from trusted allies with whom we have already been in shared struggle. Anything less than a decisive action will make DSA a losing bet, and I for one have too much on the line for the left to be able to falter now.