Resisting DSA's Culture of Disposability to Win the World we Deserve.
It’s National Convention season in the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), the time when every caucus with 20 members and a twitter account pulls out the knives and the slander to win over the majority of delegates at the National Convention to their positions... only to have them promptly ignored. Accusations of bullying, harassment, targeted destruction of caucus literature are par-for-the-course if you want to be given the blessing of joining DSA’s National Political Committee (NPC) and have half the organization immediately hate you.
Obviously, I am being hyperbolic, but a nugget of truth resides here: DSA has an organizational culture problem. Many of our members enter into a democratically-run, working-class political organization for the first time when they join DSA, and when they do, they bring the trappings of our oppressive, exploitative, and hyper-individualistic capitalist society with them. We come to DSA with our axes-of-oppression and axes-of-privilege along with us: those of gender, race, class, disability, neurotype, sexuality, nationality, language, etc. We come to DSA with our past wounds and the harms that we ourselves have carried out, knowingly or unknowingly. Democracy is always hard because building and exercising collective power requires trusting others. The vast majority of people who come to the Left come to our side battered, belittled, and betrayed by our imperialist-white supremacist-capitalist-patriarchy and how it manifests in our day-to-day lives and interactions. Therefore, when we are wounded by someone, or someone’s, inside of our organization, we respond to that harm in the same ways that we are taught to respond to that harm in our dominant culture—in ways that dehumanize, violate, punish, belittle, shame, harm, and cage. This organizational culture of disposability cannot stand if we want our organization to persist, grow, and win.
I have been involved in my fair share of conflicts since I joined DSA in January 2017. Freshly 20 years old and full of revolutionary fervor, I was a queer kid who’d spent the better part of the previous 5 years being abused by adults in my community and my family-of-origin for being honest about who I was. I had no idea how the legacy of those very fresh inflictions of pain and isolation would manifest in my body-mind and in my relationships. Zero. I did not grow up in a home environment that encouraged emotional maturity and productive conflict. So, I did the best I could to cope and hurt a few people along the way, in my personal and organizational life. I have over-reacted and called people out on Twitter. I have gossiped about minor disagreements instead of approaching my comrade directly. I have guarded my heart from the pain of losing a difficult political fight by pointing fingers at the people organizing closest to me. I am sure that many of you have done similar things. These antisocial behaviors have never gotten me any closer to what I have ultimately wanted, which is personal healing, genuine connection, and the joy that comes from solidarity and collective action. They have lost me more than a few close relationships. They have soured promising organizing efforts. They have made me feel helpless and alone.
I have also experienced harm at the hands of people in DSA, sometimes immense harm that has lost me jobs, caused me mental anguish, and encouraged the darkest whispers in the back of my mind to grow louder. I am sure a lot of people in the organization have experienced these things too, and it sucks. I am sorry. There is no excuse. You deserved better and more. I deserved better and more, too. Ultimately, as I have moved between moments of movement activity and moments of personal rest, healing, and growth over my years in DSA, I have come to the conclusion that I am in this fight for the rest of my life. I am not, however, comfortable resigning myself to an organizational reality that our commitment to abolitionist principles of solidarity, anti-carcerality, universal dignity, and reciprocal care simply stops inside our general meetings, slack channels, signal groups, and comrade-to-comrade relationships.
Practically this means that mandatory censure, suspensions, and organizational expulsions (including de facto expulsions), cannot be entered into without democratic oversight and under the most extreme circumstances of harm. It means that when you sign-up to join DSA that you are committing yourself to practicing transformative justice and swear to respect the rights and dignity of every person in the organization, including those you do not personally like or politically disagree with, as long as they are willing to do the same. It means committing to the work of processing your own pain and refusing to project your past onto others. It means swallowing your ego and admitting when you are wrong or you have made a mistake. It means that when you inevitably fall short of these principles, that you agree to doing the hard thing, having the tough conversations, attending the restorative circle, learning about the importance of believing that none of your comrades are disposable, and committing yourself to furthering the work of solidarity and liberation. If all of us do not do this, if we give in to the forces (state-sanctioned, societal, and personal) that seek to pit us against one another and tear our organization down (as has happened many times before on the Left in the USA and abroad) then we lose.
Today, I invite you to lay down old grievances, dust out your mental cupboards of resentment, and recommit yourself to the work of reciprocal care, of loving your comrades more than you love being right, of embracing the blessing that is leaving that message or email in your drafts until you’ve had more time to reflect, of solidarity and liberation. We have a world to win after all.
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Much of this essay was inspired by the work and words of the amazing folks who created or participated in the following pieces of media, please support them!
https://truthout.org/audio/to-transform-conflict-in-movements-we-must-learn-how-to-stay-in-it-together/
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1922-let-this-radicalize-you
https://www.amazon.com/Break-Every-Yoke-Religion-Abolition/dp/0190949155
https://www.haymarketbooks.org/books/1108-how-we-get-free
https://www.amazon.com/Abolition-Feminism-Now-Abolitionist-Papers/dp/1642592587/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1686951405&sr=1-1
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