Collective Decisions, Collective Action, Collective Power: On the Importance of Party Discipline in NYC-DSA’s Electoral Program
Some thoughts about people getting mad at a Cambridge DSA member and then other people getting mad at the people who were mad at her.
Last week, there was a Twitter spat that began when a 17-year-old Cambridge DSA member and DSA national convention delegate posted photos of herself canvassing for Shahana Hanif, a Brooklyn city council candidate who identifies as a socialist but was not endorsed by DSA and ran in a field that also included the DSA-endorsed candidate Brandon West.
Some DSA members dunked on the canvasser for her lack of party discipline and undermining Brandon’s DSA-endorsed campaign. In some cases, it seems they were quite nasty. Then, other people called out the dunkers for a) harassing a teenager for canvassing for a DSA opponent who is otherwise perfectly fine and b) expressing a desire for “party discipline,” a value that these people seem to feel is a draconian and absurd thing to expect of members in a volunteer organization. I’m writing here to reflect on the incident.
Firstly, I want to make clear that I think it was inappropriate for people to be nasty to the volunteer online. As much as I wish that all 85,000+ DSA members were deeply committed to our organization, the truth is that there are many different kinds of DSA members. Right now, a huge swath of our membership consists of people who pay dues and perhaps come to meetings and volunteer on some of our campaigns, but who are not yet bought into the idea of DSA as the vehicle for organizing the working class and advancing a socialist agenda inside and outside the state. They either don’t know that we are building a party, or they don’t think we should try.
In this light, I don’t really expect a young and (I think) fairly new DSA member to appreciate why some DSA members would be angry at her for canvassing for a DSA opponent who is also a socialist, even if she has decided to run for convention delegate. Yelling at her online only makes us look mean to people who might one day become bought into our political project. Indeed, the volunteer in question may one day follow her fellow high-clout Zoomer Aaron Fernando to being a core member of her chapter’s electoral operation. But it will be thoughtful, generous one-on-one conversations that inspire her to do so — not mean tweets. Yes, it was definitely annoying that she went online and said that Brandon’s extremely viable campaign was not viable, especially in an election with ranked-choice voting. But that’s not an excuse for sending nasty DMs and tweets to a teenager.
With all that said, I was disappointed to see so many otherwise smart and thoughtful people be dismissive of the idea of “party discipline.” Maybe the phrase sounds harsh, but all party discipline means to me is that I am willing to give up some of my personal agency in order to carry out the collective will of our organization, as that will is expressed through our various democratic decision-making structures. That is, I am willing to be less of an “I” in order to hold the power that comes with being more of a “we.” Not me, us, you know?
When some of us suggest that helping DSA’s opponents defeat our endorsed candidates undermines the strength of our organization, there is often a chorus of people who accuse us of being a machine, a cult, and so on. “But isn’t there room for DSA members to disagree?”, they ask.
The answer is yes. There is in fact a great deal of strategic disagreement within our organization, and that’s one of the things that makes DSA such an exciting place to call my political home. When our organization makes its collective political decisions, our members call each other on the phone to “whip votes” for our favored endorsement applicants and policy resolutions, and we often make sharp, pointed critiques of one another’s opinions during arguments on the floor of our meetings. But once a vote is taken and a collective, democratic decision is reached, those of us who are committed to building DSA into a strong socialist party will respect and work to implement the decision, even if we personally disagree with it. Indeed, there were several prominent, well-respected leaders in the Brooklyn DSA electoral working group who thought it was unstrategic to endorse either Shahana or Brandon. But once our chapter endorsed Brandon, they began working hard to elect him.
This commitment to a shared political project isn’t just a matter of principle — it’s one of the most important sources of our strength as an organization. In the past four years, NYC-DSA has gone from a small political club to one of the most well-known and powerful organizations in electoral and legislative politics. And we’ve done it not by pursuing our personal political strategies as individuals, but by moving in unison to pursue political power as a collective.
Take what’s happened in Eastern Queens this cycle. Our endorsed candidate Jaslin Kaur has run a truly phenomenal campaign with a staggering volunteer field operation. On some days, they would get 50 people out to canvass in a part of Queens that is not particularly accessible by public transit and that has not previously been a hotbed of progressive political fervor, much less socialist politics. The secret to this success is that the campaign was filled with volunteer leaders. I think they had something like 18 volunteers leading canvasses and phonebanks — most local campaigns would be thrilled to have five.
Some of these “field leads” are DSA members and some of them are not, so I don’t want to make it seem like I am claiming an outsized share of the credit for DSA. And beyond the field operation, there were numerous in-district, non-DSA volunteers and supporters who did Herculean work we simply could not have done — using their personal relationships to organize their friends, neighbors, and family members for Jaslin in a variety of languages.
But what’s also true is that there would not be so many volunteer leaders on the campaign if it were not for the sense of party discipline that certain DSA members brought to the campaign early on. The moment we endorsed, a group of experienced DSA members deployed to the campaign to share the institutional knowledge we’ve gleaned over the past four years and build the infrastructure necessary to create a scalable volunteer field operation. The campaign’s two full-time staffers were DSA leaders, and they have been laser focused on developing new volunteer leaders because they are committed to building DSA as a long-term political project. They know that the only way we win the world we want to win is by recruiting and nurturing new leaders — not for a one-off campaign, but for years of organized political struggle.
A few of the people who’ve played key roles on the Jaslin campaign live a ways away from the district. DSA members who did not share their disciplined commitment to a broader political project may have chosen to devote their time to other progressive campaigns closer to home. Certainly, it would have been easier to roll out of their apartments, knock a few doors, and then be done in time to hit the bar before heading home. But instead, they organized carpools and schlepped out to Bellerose once a week — and sometimes more — because they know that the only way we can win socialism is with a strong organization that can move enough members in unison to generate the collective power we need to challenge the real estate lobby, the police, and all the other institutions that prevent working people from claiming power and living lives of dignity.
There is a lot more that can be said about how important party discipline and a strong DSA are to advancing a socialist agenda. Indeed, all one needs to do is look at the sharp differences between how our Socialists in Office and the non-endorsed Good Progressives fought (or didn’t) for renewable energy and a sustainable planet in Albany this legislative session.
But for now, I will leave you with this: DSA has grown into a powerful force in New York City politics because our members make collective decisions, take collective action, and exercise collective power. The union makes us strong.
Aaron Taube is a co-chair of the Queens DSA electoral working group. The views expressed here are his personal thoughts and do not reflect an official stance of any DSA body.
