Leadership Pledge Retrospective, Part One

Check back the next few days for Parts 2 and 3 of this retrospective!

Introduction

In the lead-up to the 2023 DSA Convention, Red Star launched a Leadership Pledge. In this pledge, our candidates (and many other candidates who signed on) committed to nine promises toward establishing a robust, rigorous socialist democratic culture within DSA. Now, at the end of this NPC term, we look back and evaluate this pledge.

As scientific socialists, Red Star views constructive criticism as a cornerstone of our organizing. In this spirit, we are evaluating how we as a caucus, and our NPC members, have fulfilled the tenets of our Pledge, where we’ve fallen short, and how we intend to improve in the upcoming NPC term.

This NPC term was defined by crisis and growth – an inherited budget shortfall and falling membership numbers shaped the first part of the term, the genocide in Gaza shifted the political conversation inside and outside DSA, and the 2024 presidential election brought a growing membership base demanding more from its national leadership. It was also defined by transformation – the first term with paid full time co-chairs, expanding the Growth & Development Committee to recruit and empower local organizers, democratizing our editorial boards, and beginning to reshape how DSA approaches grievances, financial decision-making, and communications. 

We worked to shift DSA away from top-down decision making towards member-led democracy, from reactive crisis management toward sustainable structures, and from opaque to transparent democratic processes. At some points, we succeeded. At others, we’ve made mistakes. Throughout we have remained committed to the values that brought us to this work: democratic processes, collective responsibility, and the belief in instilling mass protagonism in our membership and the working class. 

Looking ahead, we carry forward the progress we have made and the self-critique we have offered. We are proud of the ways we have tried to lead DSA these past two years, and at the same time understand the limitations of ‘good governance’ as shared value. Our goal is not only to govern better, but to build a DSA that can grow stronger, more resilient, and deeply rooted in the will and understanding of its members.

Part One of this retrospective covers the first three points of the Leadership Pledge. Parts Two and Three will be released as separate articles over the next few days.

Improving DSA’s Publications

– Christina W

1. I will ensure DSA’s editorial work better reflects the political development of the organization and its members since 2017. I will vote to open up the editorial positions for Socialist Forum and Democratic Left, move our platforms to be more political and agitational in nature, and invest in regular political education for the NPC.

Over the course of this NPC term, Red Star’s NPC members helped to oversee the opening up of DSA’s publications under the mandate of the 2023 Convention’s resolution on creating a new Editorial Board. This was a rousing success. The new board was up and running early in the term, newly staffed with experienced and enthusiastic editors, including Red Star’s own Sudip B.

Red Star members have also been active contributors to DSA’s national publications, with many members contributing articles, and the caucus encouraging our members, when possible, to submit to official DSA publications rather than caucus publications.

There were also some setbacks. Democratic Left lost its printing budget during the budget cuts in early 2024, despite Red Star’s NPC members voting to preserve it, meaning it is now an entirely online publication. In the future, we hope to bring back print editions that can help connect both members and non-members to DSA around the country. We strongly encourage delegates at convention this year to pass CB03: Bylaws Amendment Clarifying Setting Fee Structures for the Organization’s Print Publications, allowing the Editorial Board greater flexibility to relaunch print editions of Democratic Left when feasible. 

We also hope to see the NPC more actively involved in political education, as both teachers and participants. While this did not come to fruition during the current term, providing our leadership with continuous opportunities to learn from each other and develop politically remains something Red Star will continue to push for.

Our national publications also provide an underutilized opportunity to connect the national organizations with chapters, partnering with existing chapter publications and highlighting the work they’re doing. Democratic Left’s monthly “Chapter and Verse” roundup of local wins is a promising step in this direction. 

DSA’s renewed publication projects show the promise of an organization that takes political debate and development seriously. We will continue to bring more attention and resources to our publications, grow the culture of members writing and submitting, and highlight the great work that organizers are doing to people inside and outside of DSA.

Building a Socialists in Office Committee

– Megan R and Christina W

2. I will begin rebuilding connections to federal, state, and local electeds that have been neglected by voting to hold regular meetings with key electeds and develop an Active and engaged Socialists in Office Committee. 

Toward the beginning of this term, the NPC set up a Federal Socialists in Office (FSIO) Committee, a five-person cross-tendency body that would be responsible for liaising with and supporting DSA members in Congress. In its first several weeks of existence, this committee did meet with staffers from the offices of AOC, Cori Bush, and Rashida Tlaib.

However, several problems with this conception of a FSIO committee quickly became apparent. Chapters were very protective of their relationships with their local socialists in office, making it difficult to even make direct connections. While it’s understandable that chapters feel this way, as they have the closest connections with their local electeds, it speaks to the lack of connection between chapters and the national organization that needs to be more built up.

We also ran into problems with caucuses that hold personal relationships with the offices of our socialists in office, who prefer backchanneling instead of utilizing organizational structures like the FSIO Committee. This method of interaction is deeply ingrained in many parts of the organization, to the extent that we were called naive for attempting to bring these backchannels instead into DSA’s democratic structures.

Finally, the meetings we did hold were challenging because many lacked a goal or structure. We didn’t have an idea of what the purpose of the meetings were, or specific asks. The structure worked better when we were running specific campaigns. For example, the meetings and conversations around the No Money for Massacres campaign were more structured and more productive. But DSA isn’t currently doing a lot of federal legislation work, so there’s not much reason to spend time in FSIO meetings. Without an FSIO strategy, the FSIO Committee is a dead end.

That isn’t to say we shouldn’t keep trying. If our federal socialists in office see DSA as just another pressure group to be placated, or at best as a volunteer labor pool for their projects, any attempt at an FSIO will continue to spin its wheels. Our mistake was trying to set up the committee without knowing what we wanted it to do. We need a strong vision of what DSA’s FSIO strategy is before we continue down this path.

Elsewhere DSA’s electoral project has continued to mature the past two years, notching exciting wins across the country. Increasingly we're seeing cadre DSA members run in local and state elections (including multiple Red Star members) and chapters building up party-like capacities and demonstrating principled socialist values are mass politics. We look forward to seeing how this Convention weighs in on political questions such as national DSA endorsements.

We're also excited about the direction of the National Electoral Commission over the past two years and the work of comrades across the organization in making that body increasingly member-driven (in spite of the byzantine and undemocratic election process used to seat its inaugural steering committee in late 2023, something Red Star has previously written about and critiqued our own failure to act more decisively against).

We look forward to supporting the Socialists-In-Office Network proposed in this year's NEC Consensus Resolution. Currently this work mostly happens through the DSA Fund, and even National Co-Chairs have been prevented from fully participating in Fund programming for DSA electeds and staffers. We hope to see the DSA Fund transition this responsibility to the SIO Network next term and support bringing more of our shared electoral project under our internal democratic processes. We believe this will help strengthen our shared electoral project and build up deeper, stronger relationships with our elected members rooted in shared organizational structures rather than individual relationships and backchannels.

Improving the Functioning of the NPC

– Christian CW and Adithya P

3. I will improve the National Political Committee’s functions to ensure a clear, efficient, democratic process visible to membership, including increasing the frequency of full-NPC meetings and training the NPC in parliamentary procedure.

Red Star made 3 significant interventions to improve the democratic processes of the NPC: socializing and enforcing Robert’s Rules of Order and the NPC’s standing rules, our Cabinet support work, and improving caucus relations and overall transparency.

The previous NPC term ostensibly had standing rules for their full-body meetings. However, they were often not followed, with the body flipping in and out of adherence. A common occurrence would be NPC members having an open-ended, vibes-y conversation around a topic, then ending with a vote on a motion that was not directly referenced in the conversation. This led to unclear decision-making for both participants and observers, hampering deliberative democratic process.

After a poorly facilitated meeting in the first month of the term, our NPC members intervened and offered to run a Robert’s Rules chairing workshop for the rest of the NPC, using a training developed in DSA SF. Sam HL and other Red Star members helped run this training for participating NPC members from Groundwork, Socialist Majority Caucus, Bread & Roses, and Marxist Unity Group. We saw notable improvements in meeting chairs’ facilitation skills afterwards. This training has now been picked up by the newly opened up Growth and Development Committee and scheduled regularly for all DSA members.

Our NPC members also helped move full NPC meetings to happen monthly instead of the previous quarterly frequency, placing more decisions in the hands of the full leadership body rather than just the Steering Committee. In between meetings, our NPC members have made themselves extremely accessible to members, regularly answering questions and responding to critiques publicly without flinching.

While NPC meetings have significantly improved, there are still some standing issues. The most serious defect is the lack of reasonable decorum in contentious meetings. Good order must be maintained if work is to be carried out. In particular, the NPC needs to improve on these points within the adopted standing rules:

• State facts not innuendo;
• Speak to the proposed action/motion not to the maker of the motion;
• Disruptive behavior and/or personal attacks shall result in an invitation to leave the meeting.

Part of this is a cultural problem in DSA around political disagreement and conflict that Red Star is acutely aware of and works to improve at both the local and national level. The other part is making sure that chairs are willing to enforce decorum, including on their political allies. One example of this came during the 3/17/24 NPC meeting, where Groundwork members were not called to order by the chair after directly accusing the Treasurer of fabricating DSA’s financial position, despite calls by other NPC members. Red Star takes this type of conduct very seriously and trusts our own NPC members to act as principled leaders and not respond in kind. 

For most of this term, the NPC and the NPC Steering Committee have not had up-to-date minutes. This makes it harder for members to know what’s going on in the NPC, only being able to see exact decisions several months after the fact. Having up-to-date minutes is also an important part of complying with non-profit law. For all the worry around the Trump administration targeting DSA, this should be a top priority, since it would be an incredibly easy pretense to trigger an audit. 

Red Star voted to reseat the NPC secretary twice when they were unable to keep up with minutes. Early in the term, Red Star members also helped spin up the People’s Notes, a member-led effort with volunteer notetakers covering NPC meetings. Despite our efforts, we were unable to convince multiple NPC Secretaries to institutionalize this and delegate out minutes responsibilities rather than doing it themselves. Next term we will ensure NPC members are no longer expected to be notetakers for their own meetings, and support the next Secretary in spinning up a national administrative committee or similar formation to handle tasks like these.

Our work on improving the NPC is made possible by our cabinet structure. There is so much to juggle with being an NPC member, between meetings, diplomacy, liaising with (or in some cases managing) national committees and campaigns, administrative work, etc. This is magnified for the treasurer, secretary, or members of the NPC Steering Committee (none of whom are currently paid apart from co-chairs). Even for paid or stipended leaders, DSA commitments exist alongside life’s other responsibilities, like family, work, and personal well-being.

One way that this has manifested is with asynchronous votes, where making quorum has been a challenge. Intentionally denying quorum is sometimes used to quietly kill a resolution without having to vote “no”, or to block appointments to committees such that no one can be seated. Beyond the few politicized votes, most asynchronous votes are uncontroversial administrative tasks like chartering new DSA chapters, dechartering inactive chapters, approving national endorsements recommended by the NEC, etc. Even then, routine votes often fail to reach quorum, requiring more effort from Co-Chair Megan or other members to organize the rest of the NPC to simply take a vote just so that DSA can function.

National DSA always has a lot going on, and it’s hard for any individual to keep track of everything, much less develop well-informed positions on every issue. But this also speaks to an issue with proposals to expand the NPC, where increasing the size of the leadership body actually means increasing the amount of work it takes to wrangle and coordinate leaders to take votes and make decisions.

Chapters often make this mistake, inflating their leadership size and seeing lack of leadership capacity as a structural issue rather than also a political and organizational one, requiring increased focus on leadership development and accountability. Several Red Star members cut their teeth in Metro DC DSA helping develop the still-running Administrative Committee (AdCom). While it isn’t perfect, it’s a model that relieved the administrative burden on political leadership, allowing them to act, deliberate, and develop the chapter, instead of burning through several chapter secretaries a term.

Our Cabinet is somewhat of a stopgap for that missing administrative assistance for NPCers, and we’ve helped or inspired other caucuses to also stand up similar structures. Having a cabinet helped us to navigate difficult situations like the budget crisis, and helped us resist institutional pressure like signing the overly restrictive confidentiality agreement that previous NPCs had. Overall, the proliferation of the Cabinet model, along with a better NPC culture and practice, is a significant contributor to why there was only one NPC resignation as compared to four resignations last term.

Having this additional capacity also helps us work to make the NPC more transparent in its operations. While of course diplomacy and discussion happens between caucuses outside of meetings, we’ve made a point to prioritize deliberating important political decisions at meetings, putting forward our politics clearly and making decisions as transparently as possible. Following the 2023 Convention, we also supported this through publishing monthly newsletters highlighting the work we were doing, as well as longer articles explaining our rationale for key political decisions.

We're glad to see other caucuses follow our lead and also publish their positions more regularly, making the political lines on the NPC clearer than in previous terms and helping cohere political tendencies across the organization. While there is still plenty of room for improvement, we believe the past NPC term has been a signficant step forward for developing a robust, rigorous socialist democratic culture within DSA.

Further Discussion

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