One Member, One Vote and The Trot Box
One of the most contentious proposals at the upcoming Convention is the Groundwork-authored efforts to bring One Member, One Vote (1M1V) principles to federal endorsements and National Political Committee elections. The joint proposition is simple: instead of the National Political Committee (NPC) being elected by a delegated convention, and instead of the current deadlock about our congressional elected strategy among the DSA cognoscenti, we ask everyone in the membership what they think.
This has caused quite a bit of argument. In particular, Orthodox Marxists and similar tendencies within DSA (what Reform and Revolution (“R&R”) calls the “Trot Box” of R&R, Marxist Unity Group (MUG), and Bread & Roses) have objected to the proposal on the basis that it robs DSA internal democracy of a vital spark—that asking the full membership, including paper members, who should lead the organization would lead us down the pathway to being a paper-member, staff-driven nonprofit.
Behind the debate—rather than the pure-bad-faith-advantage-seeking you might expect from voting systems discourse—are a series of sharply conflicting assumptions about what internal democracy is and what it is for. Members of the mass wing of DSA (Socialist Majority, Groundwork) and the “Trot Box” no doubt think they would profit by either the change or the status quo, respectively. But they also take the positions they do because of deeply rooted political convictions about how and why we use democracy as an internal tool.
Other people have held up our side of the argument—that members are members and deserve voting rights irrespective of how many involvement boxes they tick—better than I could. What I want to examine are the (sincere and good faith) reasons the Trot Box in particular oppose the resolution, separated out from the broader set of tendencies composing the “sectarian wing” of DSA (additionally inclusive of Red Star, the Libertarian Socialist Caucus, and the Springs of Revolution slate, and the 21st Century Socialism Caucus).
While I use an article from Amy W., one of MUG’s current NPC representatives, about participatory democracy as an anchor point, I am also relying heavily on my memory of an exchange I had this summer with MUG members in my own chapter as part of a cross-caucus political education event on DSA caucuses. Which is to say we’re all relying on my own defective memory for this article to work, and I apologize in advance to my friends in Philly MUG if I got anything wrong.
Amy’s article makes the normative case for DSA as an internal democracy that achieves “common ground” through participatory methods. Debate and the amendment process “in the room” is for her an essential part of what makes DSA democracy work. What’s more, DSA’s internal democracy is a key agent of how DSA can make social transformation:
Through [internal democratic practice] we develop members as political actors—not just as voters, but as confident participants in governing. We help them build skills not just for DSA, but to take home to their workplaces, unions, and other communities. And through both recruitment and members taking their experiences onwards, we help to develop a society and a working class ready for self-governance.
While not directly aimed at 1M1V, one can imagine that she would categorize it as what she terms in the article “absentee voting.” Absentee voting, “ceases to be parliamentary procedure—it ceases to enable participation in the democratic process. It loses the ability of participatory democracy to develop members, to execute on the philosophy that every cook can govern.”
“I object to a philosophy that holds internal deliberation as the acme of DSA’s potential for working-class development.”
My comrade in Philadelphia summed up a similar position in directly opposing 1M1V, adding some theoretical detail in describing the task as developing the “protagonism of the working class.” To him, DSA internal deliberation was an exercise in forging a working-class tradition of self-government. He and MUG opposed 1M1V because in their eyes, it vitiates what makes DSA special: our internal culture of deliberation.
I agree with my friends in MUG that DSA does teach people that they can govern. In fact, I agree with them that it’s the most important thing we do.
I disagree with them about where it happens and whether 1M1V would disrupt it. DSA fits into the lives of working people in different ways at different points in their lives. Participation in debate and deliberation is a great thing, and I think we should do more of it. However, I object to a philosophy that holds internal deliberation as the acme of DSA’s potential for working-class development.
Little School of Liberty
First, “protagonistic development” can be patchy and uneven in the real world. Arguments that shortchange the more casual, workaday kinds of protagonism miss the forest for the trees. Developing the “proletarian class as a protagonist” (though I personally would prefer more staid and classical descriptions like, ”working class as citizen in the polity”) requires two different forms of politicization. The first is development of “cadre” for whom political activity is a way of life. The second, and the one that The Box does not place appropriate weight on, is extending as widely as possible among the working class the small sorts of political involvement that would seem puny anywhere but 21st-century America. One canvass or phonebank attended, or even merely paying dues to a mass organization, is a leap in consciousness most Americans do not take. A paper member of Democratic Socialists of America, even the kind who just signed up because a friend is an active member, is infinitely more a “protagonist” than their non-member counterpart who only shares YouTube video essays. I suspect MUG would agree with this last part.
The latter form is no less important than the first. In fact, I suspect it might be more so. America has a rich radical tradition and has never lacked a hard core of dreamers, intellects, activists, and cranks (as a budding crank myself, this last is essential). But the specter of working-class power does not begin to materialize when there are more cadre, but instead when millions begin to think about their lives slightly differently, believe that they have a role in politics, and take action in the course and context of their daily lives as part of a mass movement. The Flint sit-down strikes were not achieved by making every worker cadre. The March on Washington in 1963 was not attended by 300,000 professional organizers. Part of understanding mass political movements is understanding that they need to achieve a compromise with people’s ordinary lives. Our hard ask cannot be “If thou wilt be perfect, go and sell what thou hast and give to the poor,...and come and follow Me.” The consciousness and activism that the Box demands for a voice in our democracy is that of an Apostle, not of a church member.
“We cultivate protagonists by making sure that these skills proliferate through the organization as much as possible to the greatest number of people possible, and teaching them that they can be political actors in the real world. ”
Second, and this I suspect is the deeper disagreement between the mass wing and the Trot Box, or even the sectarian wing as a whole, is that protagonistic development does not happen principally as a result of participating in internal deliberation. The ways that DSA trains members of the working class to have power in the polity are not through reading or debate, but instead by training people in the basic fundamentals of organizing. DSA trains you to run a meeting. DSA trains you how to have an organizing conversation. DSA trains you to canvass. DSA trains you to be a functional public speaker. DSA trains you to plan, lead, and win campaigns. And, best of all, it trains you on how to train others to do so.
But even if you are only a casual participant, showing up to one canvass a year, it gives you something concrete. It does all of this not in the general meeting stack line, but for the most part out in the world, or in the campaign meeting, or in membership engagement work. We cultivate protagonists by making sure that these skills proliferate through the organization as much as possible to the greatest number of people possible, and teaching them that they can be political actors in the real world. Even in the minimal case where they learn how to canvass once, they have increased their potential as political actors and leaders a thousandfold.
Internal politics does not do this. Or to the extent that it does—in that internal politics can train you as a public speaker and as a vote-whipper—it does so only as a pale imitation of work in the real world.
“By itself, our process of deliberation is not a factory that produces a compelling rational Truth or Proletarian Empowerment.”
Third, I think internal debate is actually the second worst way to develop members as socialist intellects behind only outsourcing the task to TikTok. Even as chapters try to deepen discussion and deliberation, there are certain nigh insurmountable barriers to trying to put more content into meetings that are already three hours long on pure business. More to the point, attempting to shoehorn discussion into these contexts often cheapens it. While I’ve heard ideas that can be communicated forcefully in less than two minutes, I have never heard one that could be fully developed in that time.
At Convention, debate between delegates on resolutions consists of a series of short speeches that are made by local notables to an audience of delegates, 70 percent of whom are already convinced. The agenda is never debated all the way through, and the impulse to pass things means that resolutions overallocate the annual budget several times over. And, to address the way all of this interacts with 1M1V, there are no ‘in the room’ NPC debates and no official Q&As (though there is a cochair forum), merely the vote-whipping and grassroots gladhanding that no doubt prepares the candidates themselves to run for county commissioner, but does little to develop the Class. While you could argue that we could add all of these things, what exists already strains the available time and interest for even the most involved and sensitive delegates.
DSA’s democracy, though useful and necessary, is not the engine of proletarian development the advocates of internal protagonism want it to be. Nor, I suspect, does it have that potential. Our democracy is a necessary tool to make the engine run, and it does its job, if a little haphazardly. I would not want us to be the cults of personality or the old boys’ clubs that sectarian organizations are predisposed to be, nor would I want us to become the Sierra Club—merely an email list and a set of staffers. But, by itself, our process of deliberation is not a factory that produces a compelling rational Truth or Proletarian Empowerment.
“If the place we are developing DSA leaders as protagonists is the general meeting rather than on the doors, in campaign planning, and in informal discussion of the world outside, what kind of story are we writing anyway?”
This is not to advocate for or celebrate political ignorance: as I said earlier, intellectual inquiry and development are necessary, and figuring out how to do so is even more imperative given that the internal deliberative process is a poor tool for it. But to put it a little impishly: if the place we are developing DSA leaders as protagonists is the general meeting rather than on the doors, in campaign planning, and in informal discussion of the world outside, what kind of story are we writing anyway? If being the protagonist in the story of DSA requires meeting the Trot Box’s definition of an active citizen, should we write the 90, 80, 70 percent of the organization that would stubbornly maintain casual involvement even under the most strenuous internal organizing out of the narrative entirely?
DSA’s revolutionary potential as an educative institution of the working class is not as a rhetoric tutor or in teaching that change is possible through struggle within the organization. It is as a purveyor of a rough and rude set of tools that can be given to everyone and set on the outside world en masse. If DSA can make the working class protagonists, it cannot do so by writing a story about itself, and inward-looking protagonists rarely star in the kinds of stories we want to tell: stories of agency, of transformative change, of triumph. The transformative lesson of DSA isn’t that cooks can govern DSA (though they can and should); the lesson is that cooks can govern America.