Conventions Matter
DSA’s 2019 National Convention (photo by Audra Melton, nytimes.com)
SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the author. To simplify citations, you can find the respective convention results linked in the headers of each event’s title.
To paraphrase an old Russian revolutionary: you may not be interested in the Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA’s) national convention, but it is interested in you. This upcoming National Convention, like the four before it, will be a test between those in DSA who want to do mass and coalition politics and those who prefer a sectarian approach that takes DSA in a more inward direction.
DSA’s national conventions have been held every two years since the organization was founded in 1982. Delegates are elected either at-large or by their DSA chapters to vote on our leadership, political positions, and priorities for the next two years. This three-day window is the only period in which major constitutional & by-laws changes can be made by rank-and-file members.
For many DSA members, even extremely active ones, the National Convention might seem like a foreign rather than domestic affair. Since the vast majority of DSA’s work is conducted at the local chapter level, the idea of voting on seemingly arcane resolutions concerning our stances on international issues or who serves on DSA’s nonprofit 501(c)4 board (AKA the National Political Committee) can seem of little consequence.
Yet the choices the delegates make at those conventions impact the day-to-day work of DSA members. If you want a DSA that is focused on growing socialist political influence together with unions and progressive organizations, as part of a project that combines building our own strength with working with others to defeat the radical right, you should strongly consider running for delegate and supporting those who do.
I have been a DSA member since 2003. For much of that time, DSA conventions didn’t matter so much. In his book The AOC Generation, journalist David Freedlander amusingly described my participation in pre-2017 conventions as: “He would often duck out to work on his graduate school homework or to meet up with friends while conventions descended into a debate over whether the group should sell T-shirts or whether it should use the word ‘should’ or ‘shall’ in its resolutions.”
This changed for me and the organization after the defeat of Hillary Clinton in the Electoral College in 2016, a year after the convention where we formally endorsed Bernie Sanders’ first presidential run.
DSA membership soared from around 7,000 when Donald Trump won his first election to over 25,000 comrades by the time of the 2017 convention. While we had struggled for a decade to get over 100 attendees, much less delegates, this time about 650 delegates—plus numerous observers from various domestic and international left organizations—were elected to that year’s convention in Chicago.
In retrospect, that gathering was more about modernizing DSA to reflect its latest base than changing its structures. Specifically, DSA delegates elected 14 new members of the National Political Committee (NPC). Only two incumbents running for re-election won and the newly elected body largely reflected DSA’s newer and younger membership (the organization’s median age went from 68 to 33 during this time). Politically, the convention moved DSA out of the Socialist International of social-democratic parties (without proposing a replacement global association) and endorsed the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement for Palestinian liberation.
While these political decisions were important for making DSA more aligned with worldwide democratic-socialist consensus, the delegates also avoided major internal structural changes. Most of the decisions made at the 2017 convention were therefore symbolic in nature. For example, a motion to expand the NPC failed, despite getting majority support, because it did not reach the supermajority threshold required for a by-law change. While DSA convention delegates also abolished the honorary chair and vice-chair positions, those ceremonial posts lacked any real or even informal power by the time of their elimination. This reform was partly inspired by at least two honorary chairs backing Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders the year before. While the event’s changes were largely of the housekeeping nature, there was a sectarian undercurrent brewing against coalitions with the liberal-left that has now reached a critical mass in DSA. Dan La Botz, a NYC-based convention delegate, expressed this trend in his convention reflection in New Politics:
Two different motions—I was involved with both—attempted to get DSA to adopt a more critical attitude toward the Democratic Party and especially toward the progressive Democrats in groups such as Indivisible, MoveOn.org, and Our Revolution. The motion failed, but received about two-fifths of the vote, another sign of the growing radicalization of the DSA membership. A third resolution that called for DSA to begin to transform itself into a political party was tabled on the grounds that there were legal questions about running candidates. And, finally, a motion to draft Bernie Sanders for a People's Party also went down to defeat by an overwhelming vote.
The next convention in Atlanta made up for the lack of structural reform ideas in Chicago. The 2019 gathering saw a range of proposals related to DSA’s basic structural configuration: would DSA become a more decentralized federal formation, or would it have a stronger national office and greater unitary direction? At this convention, supporters of a mass and coalitional political orientation tended to want more centralization to coordinate national work, while opponents of that orientation generally wanted more decentralization to facilitate more niche and localized forms of political action.
Resolutions included proposals for redistributing dues to chapters without any checks or balances in how the money would be used, replacing current DSA structures with a new Assembly of Locals, and funding a functionally independent Disability Working Group with hundreds of thousands of dollars of member dues money.
These recommendations were all defeated in favor of proposals that focused on growing and developing our national organization and a more coherent relationship between national and chapters. Winning these votes was the result of months of organizing and people standing up, including myself, against bad faith attacks on things like our opinion on the unique importance of small chapters’ role in DSA. The effort was worth it. With a stronger national organization, we grew to an unprecedented 90,000 members and played a strong role in the 2020 Bernie Sanders campaign and were better equipped to organize during the pandemic and the George Floyd protests of 2020.
The 2021 convention—our only fully remote gathering because of COVID—saw an internal focus shift with the creation of a new DSA program (to replace the largely ignored platform adopted at the 2015 convention) and debates over whether to pay elected national leadership. The latter included a successful passage of stipends to the DSA national leadership’s steering committee, but the effort to elect the National Director was defeated.
At this convention, sectarian efforts that would have largely limited DSA’s electoral efficacy were voted down. These inward-facing and discipline-focused resolutions and amendments included efforts to make DSA’s electoral work more narrow, such as putting many restrictions on socialist electeds and exploring building independent infrastructure for a future party. These proposals were defeated, but DSA members and caucuses who support a mass and coalitional approach to political work, like SMC and its allies in the predecessor formation that became Groundwork, only elected six of the 16 national leadership seats. During the course of that term, however, the NPC moved toward a mass politics majority through resignations and replacements, plus shifts in the personal political outlook of some NPC members.
2023 DSA Convention: Back to Chicago
The 2023 convention marginalized mass politics, as a focus on internal DSA questions took center-stage. The Bread and Roses caucus summary of that year’s event focused on three, mostly inward-facing achievements. These were: more concrete language around building an independent political party in the future (which I have argued on this blog is largely symbolic and ignored by those outside of DSA); more support for the already existing rank-and-file strategy (which SMC’s own Vincent Lima noted included distancing from even progressive established union leaders), and paid elected NPC co-chairs selected by the delegates.
SMC continued to push for expansion of our national leadership body, with the goal of making it more representative, responsive, and capable of organizing chapters to meet external political moments. The NPC still has 16 seats, despite the fact that DSA is twelve times as big as it was in 2016. Our proposal won over 60 percent of the delegate votes, but failed to meet the two-thirds required threshold for a change to the constitution. However, the general theme of the convention’s internal tone was struggles over so-called “red lines” and purity tests. Delegates debated and voted on resolutions to create disciplinary mechanisms around candidate endorsements and stances around anti-Zionism, One of SMC’s few victories in favor of mass politics was removing vague language that could result in socialist officeholders being punished for endorsing non-socialists to stop ultra-right Republicans from winning office, a crucial task for a left amid a rising fascist tide.
Look forward to the 2025 Convention
The upshot of having more self-marginalizing caucuses and sectarian candidates winning the majority of NPC seats has, unfortunately, had predictably damaging results. It has made DSA less politically relevant in the current moment, and the NPC has committed some rather embarrassing unforced errors. For example, the NPC responded to an application by the NYC-DSA chapter for AOC’s re-endorsement with a “conditional endorsement” letter sent the day before the primary election, without consultation with the campaign or chapter. This led NYC-DSA to withdraw the application and the NPC majority, consisting of members from the Red Star, Marxist Unity Group, and Bread and Roses caucuses, issued a statement on the DSA website that was critical of DSA’s most high-profile and politically influential member. The statement included factual errors that needed to be corrected, leading to public confusion among those not able to parse DSA’s often byzantine internal politics. Many people outside the organization erroneously thought AOC was kicked out of DSA, even though she was not. SMC formally rebuked this action by the NPC.
The current NPC majority’s aversion to mass politics was best exemplified in the orientation, or rather lack thereof, to the 2024 presidential elections. DSA endorsed no candidate for president, which was expected. Unfortunately, it prioritized promoting our political program Workers Demand More instead of providing guidance for how chapters and members might engage with the election cycle in order to prevent the worst possible outcome—the re-election of Donald Trump and a Republican governing trifecta in Washington, which ended up happening. It also voted down a resolution that included defending the Squad, who lost two DSA members in Congress last year. SMC and Groundwork offered ways for DSA activists to work to defeat Trump and his allies through our “Socialism Beats Fascism” project. However, even now, after Trump’s narrow victory, DSA still lacks a clear national direction in how to relate to resistance against the new regime, which is acting boldly and with few constraints.
Individual DSA chapters have taken good actions such as supporting trans rights and federal workers under attack. National DSA, on the other hand, voted against joining even a public organizing call with other progressives that attracted tens of thousands of participants at the beginning of the Trump administration. These calls were attended by angry, ordinary Americans hungry for political leadership and direction. And yet, the NPC majority chose to turn away from this opportunity to provide socialist leadership because the organizers of the call were ostensibly “too liberal.” Those liberal-left groups are the main organizations antagonizing establishment Democrats who aren't doing enough to fight Trump or putting forward a compelling alternative to MAGA authoritarianism. DSA should be at the forefront of that work, but too often we are missing in action and have failed to seize the moment.
This situation is unsustainable. Our country is in a profound constitutional crisis. DSA members need effective political leadership, and DSA chapters need programming and organizing campaigns coordinated with the national body. It is deeply unserious and irresponsible for our national leadership to issue statements and pronouncements about how dangerous the current Trump administration is, while refusing to join mass coalitions taking up the fight against it. We need a new direction.
Having a new NPC that understands the need for mass and coalition politics is critical for building DSA and the democratic socialist movement. We cannot build our own organization in isolation from the fight against MAGA authoritarianism—achieving the former requires deep, ongoing, good-faith participation in the latter. We need a leadership that takes supporting chapters, defeating the radical right in this country, and building together with coalitions of working and oppressed people fighting the current regime seriously. DSA is suffering in the absence of this.
To get there, we need DSA members who understand what must be done in the current moment to run for and win convention delegate seats. Decisions made at convention impact how our local chapters operate,from endorsements of electoral candidates to programming on defeating Trump. The current NPC majority has failed to do so. We need a new one.