Author: Nikhil S.
In the beginning, there was the social movement. It was as expansive as the mutual aid and community groups, tenant and labor unions, and ultimately the parties it contained. These were, by and large, profoundly democratic spaces for deliberation and action.
But at repeated historical junctures in the U.S., these structures have come under attack. They often allowed for unmediated, minority, and proletarian power in ways that threatened the ruling class and challenged institutions with a reformist bent. For those reasons, from the end of Reconstruction through the Red Scares and Cointelpro and in the wake of the George Floyd uprising, liberal non-profits, co-opted identitarian advocacy groups, establishment-aligned churches, and anti-communist unions have sought to lead the agenda even when they didn’t crush dissent from within the movement.
The New Left in the late 1970s and 1980s came up with a novel solution to this dilemma. It managed the attrition of leading organizers and a social base of excluded groups by turning to a somewhat new form: the top-down, non-profit organization organized under the strictures of U.S. tax law.
The questions before us today, which arose out of those transformations, are novel but fundamental ones.
- Are big DSA chapters like NYC-DSA and advocacy groups able to break out of the bind of the top-down, leader-driven strategy?
- Can they sustain the type of organization necessary to confront our antagonists on the right and within the political and social institutions of a decaying empire and liberal order?
A Recent History of U.S. Disorganization
Social movements and independent working class institutions that were member-led and by turns autonomous or incorporated within party and social institutions, of course, preceded organizations that under federal tax law were required to have a board and directors. They recapitulated the split between ownership and control endemic in corporate law as public corporations took over from closely held and family firms. But they also reinforced a turn toward mediation of social forces that rendered social bases, members, and organizational staff alike inert except as a reserve army to be mobilized in crisis. Aside from big donors, the small shareholders were unable to achieve influence over the policy and goals of the organization.
There can be no dispute that the New Left had achieved notable successes by winning municipal government and congressional seats for leaders in the Black Panther and Students for a Democratic Society, ending the war in Vietnam, articulating a full-program for civil rights and autonomy from the Mississippi Delta to Puerto Rico to the Bronx, and delivering direct services to healthcare patients and children that were partially incorporated in state programs. But it also encountered reversals and a dissipation of movement energy after more than a decade of increasing militancy and organization.
In line with historical social movements, by contrast, the New Left had been a collection of member-led parties and autonomous groups that emphasized participatory democracy and centralist, member governance. But at a time of growing institutional sclerosis and repression and cooptation across the political and social system, the turn in the 1970s and 1980s led to unresponsive bureaucracy and weakness for social movements. It also led to a countermovement of autonomous, street and neighborhood movements.
In an environment of both social repression of excluded groups and first-world comfort, counterinsurgency did not always involve assassinations like Fred Hampton’s and the type of subversion that occurred to the Black Panther Party. It could come from competing elements that arose within an environment of liberalism in which political and organizational elements played a double role. On the one hand, they might deliver social welfare and delayed responses to urgent antiwar and community demands–the Black Panther Party’s breakfast program and school food legislation are exemplary–as well as coercion and repression of the most radical elements. Today, of course, the most reactionary elements in the state and society barely pretend to respond to social demands.
Perhaps the most insidious effect of transformations in organizational structure was that the common sense of both left liberals and the left became identified with a narrow professional-class vision that eschewed the need to develop a social base entirely. This strategy emphasized the role of self-selected, and at times corrupt or untested and incompetent leaders, and rhetorical rather than practical interventions. Some NGOs concluded it was better to condemn racism and exploitation and build an education and outreach program that could win funding from big donors than to confront those oligarchs and institutions directly. In the process, the horizon of building a more militant and independent class capable of winning radical demands disappeared. At the same juncture, we lost a social base and capacity to achieve social gains on terms other than those dictated by institutional actors.
This emerging class fraction was rooted in a relatively stable and comfortable white and middle-class community. Even as they operated at a distance from organic movements, they benefited from a dramatic expansion in college education as a result of the GI bill and social and technological transformations in the late 20th century. As such, this class cohort’s access to academic knowledge and training led it to emphasize technical and ultimately tactical interventions in electoral and legislative projects over deeper analysis and the democratic traditions of worker-led and independent working-class institutions. A dearth of radicalism was only one of the collateral consequences of this disorganizing transformation.
Autonomous Organization – A Partial Solution to Democratic Crises
In response to this dynamic, more radical elements rejected the organizational form entirely while leading a range of struggles in the streets, encampments, and occupied zones. While not a new strategy, newer iterations of autonomous and affinity groups often had a more tangential relationship with social movements than the old dual unionists, neighborhood tenant unionists, and syndicalists.
These formations were able to use affinity groups and response groups to engage in protest actions and to respond to emergencies. More recently, campus encampments against Gaza and rapid response to ICE abductions have successfully built ways of responding in the moment. They have relied as much on leadership by the most engaged, with those able to devote time and resources in inner circles and chats, and deliberation at assemblies as they have on new, secure communications technology.
But these formations confront issues of democratic form, participation, and deliberation as they grow in size and need to sustain long-term strategy and reevaluation of their priorities. The reliance on a small cadre can prevent effective responses to state repression of leaders while inhibiting the growth of organization and a base of supporters. Outside of a movement upsurge, they can be vulnerable to attrition and indifference as lightly organized protestors return to everyday concerns and obligations.
Membership Non-Profits In Crisis
In truth, the distinction between autonomous formations and membership organizations is more apparent than real. In a late 19th and early 20th century movement with more organic social institutions, notably, organizers participated in mutual aid groups, syndicalist unions, industrial organizations, and parties–all organizations with similar goals.
Mid-century liberalism focused its condemnation on democratic-centralist, Marxist-Leninist parties that championed the dictatorship of the proletariat. But the more immediate problems of social and class repression de jure and de facto in industrial capitalist society were a footnote, a problem to be overcome on the march toward a more perfect union (i.e. one that adhered to hard-fought guarantees of civil and social rights.)
Meanwhile, impenetrable bureaucracy and governance by a class of experts in actual existing liberalism not only dominated government institutions but ostensibly those social formations that fought for reforms to that system.
The leaders that emerged in this system were often untested and incompetent. They were unable to balance an organizational budget and unwilling to submit to membership demands or build a radical social base able to transcend demands for ameliorative reforms. At the same time, in organizations such as the Sierra Club and DSA, conflicts between leaders, members, and staff intensified questions of organizational control, strategy, and political tendency even as labor conflicts took on a more serious tenor.
As in the worst unions, leaders have fought against all types of challengers from within by means in conflict with fair, democratic practice or their own bylaws. The means to accomplish these goals involved the following:
- Treating members as volunteers to be mobilized or eliminating membership entirely
- Eliminating communications channels
- Establishing barriers to membership deliberation and voting
- Instituting Board vetos and supermajority requirements to limit the scope of membership proposals and organizational control
- Developing complicated internal structures that are difficult to navigate
- Employing internal grievance systems to prevent organizers from challenging leadership
- Not putting candidates for internal office on even footing with respect to funding, membership data, or communications
In a stable imperial order like the one that followed WWII in the U.S., the level of comfort and confidence was such that these structures rarely came under sustained critique and threat from both progressive forces and democratic critics within liberalism.
But the circumstances in which we find ourselves are such that a barely decade-old movement has elected mayors of major US cities. This happened just years after its national organization faced bankruptcy due to excessive spending on staff.
It also occurs in a context of an incredibly uneven balance of social forces. Not only are government militias abducting immigrants and murdering people with impunity but the power of tech oligarchs and their unstable surveillance and data economy has no parallel in economic or social history. The forces of liberal imperialism hover in the wings for a restoration after a period of unbridled warlordism, featuring invasions of Venezuela and support of Israeli genocide and subimperial adventures in Iran in violation of internal law. While immigrants have faced detention for expressing constitutionally protected positions, even citizens have lost their social positions and employment for honestly addressing these issues. Supporting opponents who are entirely within their rights under international law to engage in resistance has been defined in the mainstream press as terrorism.
In these conditions, the allure of politically “safe” protests (led by groups that aren’t penalized by the state because of their racial demographics and politics) and reformism is clear even if not justified by socialist strategy or deeper programmatic commitments.
But there can be no justification for what has become endemic in chapters like NYC-DSA: the decision to embrace bureaucracy over a powerful membership body.
Despite demands from liberals, no restoration of the liberal, imperial order is forthcoming and no alliance with reformist forces that aim to support the status quo is possible. The economic structure of late capitalism is in crisis as speculative financial and tech assets take over. The declining legitimacy of political actors who unintentionally fostered a revolt against social conditions, the so-called affordability or social reproduction crisis, is likely permanent. Any movement that, in the face of this transformation, fails to build a powerful social base as well as an independent organizational strategy and institutions will be at the mercy of reactionaries and corporatists–and even hostile entryists. We need a popular army to defeat the right.
DSA Cannot Follow the Progressive Left – It Must Lead
If the prescription is clear, the situation within the socialist and progressive left is less so. A lack of contested elections over at least a half decade in NYC-DSA–alongside subversion of working group votes and delegate elections in that chapter and LA DSA and Metro DCDSA are emblematic of this crisis. In organizations even more ensconced within the assumptions of the liberal order, the problem is even more severe. There’s no genuine member democracy in the Working Families Party and Sunrise Movement and no path to building it. We cannot advance our goals of socialism if we continue to oppose transformative projects and undermine membership power. What’s worse is that a reformist strategy that is not paired with militant action is likely to face the same obstacles to enactment and community cynicism and mistrust as the Democratic Party has garnered in a half-century of intensifying betrayals.
Recapitulating the internal and chapter conflicts and purges that affected the Socialist Party of America at its 1919 convention would be a foreseeable mistake. In the same way, retaining the complex system of mediation between the Citywide Leadership Committee and Steering Committee, with the latter serving on the former, and deepening their power would mark a potentially unresolvable error.
The DSA difference requires us to organize inside unions and alongside disruptive and radical community groups.
We will not be able to avoid political conflicts and develop an empowered base or even a set of servant leaders who are skilled and dedicated to our socialist horizon by avoiding conflicts or mollifying a set of key legislative and leadership figures.
At a moment in which European social democracy and left populism are in freefall, the U.S. is not immune to the economic and social factors driving deeper demands. We can build a different and more dynamic core that will enable us to overcome these limitations. But if we want to do so, we must embrace the simple plan that every honest popular organization knows is critical: membership power and unflinching strategy.