One Member One Vote
Daniel G on Groundwork NY’s “One Member, One Vote” Resolution for the 2024 NYC-DSA Convention.
One of the most consequential events of the last decade for the American labor movement was not a strike, but a legal settlement. In 2021, after a consent decree with the Department of Justice, the United Auto Workers instituted a One Member One Vote system for electing their executive committee. Previously, the leadership was elected via a byzantine process by a few hundred delegates at the union’s annual convention, a process inaccessible to and removed from the hundreds of thousands of workers that made the union. Under the new system, they would be elected by the membership at large. I remember receiving the ballot for whether my union should approve One Member One Vote. It was the depths of the pandemic, but for me that ballot sitting politely in my mailbox represented hope, the potential for one of the world's oldest and most powerful unions to chart a new course.
I could never have guessed just how revolutionary that course would be. UAWD – the militant rank and file caucus of UAW made up of socialists and their allies – seized the organizing opportunity to elect Shawn Fain president. Two years later, a UAW strike wave across three major corporations had won a historic contract, UAW called for an end to all US military aid to Israel, and Shawn Fain was on national news calling for a general strike in 2028. UAW membership had spoken.
The lesson is a simple one: to engage in militant, mass-scale class struggle, an organization needs radical, mass-scale democracy and buy-in.
DSA must learn this lesson. We can overcome key disconnects in DSA that divide elected leadership from members and keep us from achieving the kind of ground-up buy-in needed to pull off the kind of evolution UAW has.
Elected leadership is generally made up of members who are highly versed in internal politics, while most members are not. The bar for meaningful participation in internal politics is too high, and structurally significant chances to weigh in are too infrequent. The bar for joining DSA, meanwhile, is relatively low and people are busy with jobs, kids, or life events – we live in capitalism and our time is a commodity. So DSA members must choose how to use it.
Many choose to focus on a particular campaign or working group. Some just show up for mass mobilizations and to vote for our candidates. Plenty remain “paper members,” generally inactive, but still dues-paying members. Either way, these members are members, yet outside conventions that happen every year or two, do not have enough say in our own organization’s decisions and directions.
The national AOC endorsement is a prime example. Groundwork advocated for a simple memberwide vote. Instead, members were allowed an input process through an online form — in which 69% of members who gave input advocated for an unconditional endorsement (an additional 5% asked for conditions, either saying “yes, but only if _____ ” or “no, unless _____”). Rather than follow through on this gauge of the will of members, the NPC attempted to place potentially illegal conditions on an endorsement that put the organization at risk, and finally released an aggressive statement that caught the attention of national media outlets, creating a comms crisis and straining NYC-DSA’s organizing with the country’s most prominent democratic socialist. The question here is bigger than whether DSA should have re-endorsed. The question is, why didn’t members get to decide?
This lack of ability to achieve a democratic mandate flows to many levels. DSA’s own statements, a primary way of reaching not just those outside the organization but our own members, often contradict each other. Same with our own committees, with recent ill-conceived statements from the International Committee undermining the democratic mass character of our project, in favor of polarizing and divisive messages that were disconnected from consensus organizing goals toward a permanent ceasefire in Palestine and an arms embargo against Israel. As the world burns, drowns, and wars en masse, the leadership of the biggest socialist organization in America is unable to lead decisively.
But we can change this.
Relative to its total size, NYC DSA has a much more engaged membership base than the national organization. In our recent convention delegate elections we had close to 1500 members vote, an all-time high. We have an advanced membership onboarding system with New Member 101s and social events, which are able to effectively plug members into our work, and we run transformative campaigns that provide easy onramps to potential members. The results speak for themselves. We have elected 11 socialists to office, won transformative reforms for tenants, as well as the biggest Green New Deal victory in the country with the Build Public Renewables Act.
But there are still easy ways that NYC DSA can be more democratic. The first is simple: We should elect the officers of the chapter who make up our Administrative Committee by a full membership vote. (Note: We already do this in years where we don't have a convention.) We should do it every year.
We should also give all members a say in federal endorsements, not just the members who live in the branches overlapping with the electoral district. Federal endorsements, like AOC’s, are incredibly important for the work of our organization and affect all members, so all members should get a say.
Finally, we should do more to regularly engage all members with straw polls on important organizing topics. Instead of flying blind, leadership should regularly engage with all members to find out their views on matters of political and strategic importance.
That last piece is particularly important. If you’ve ever been in a big group chat or used social media, you’ll recognize the "90-10" rule, where 10 percent of the people do 90 percent of the talking. This creates a skewed discourse. This tyranny of the loudest is not reflective of the views of membership at large. Currently, these are the voices most able to dominate political discourse in the chapter and are frequently the cause of our own leadership’s indecision and missteps.
Earlier this year, when Jamaal Bowman was under assault from AIPAC, he came to NYC DSA asking for help. If our chapter leadership had listened to voices in the general group chats, tweets on X, or the DSA forums, they would have concluded that Bowman had little support in the chapter. But when we took a straw poll of all members, 80% wanted to fight the corporate Zionist lobby and defend Bowman. After the poll and endorsement, NYC DSA members mass mobilized to fill thousands of canvassing shifts and place hundreds of thousands of calls to voters.
Sometimes within DSA, organizers argue that those who are doing the work should have the biggest say, and that paper members, largely disconnected from the organization, are ill-equipped to comment on our politics and strategic direction. But what if the opposite is true? What if political leaders who are disconnected from the political views of the majority of members are unable to make strategic decisions to benefit the organization and move us closer to socialism? What if instead of seeing paper members as disengaged members, we saw them as the embryonic "mass" of the future mass political party we all aspire to build? Instead of treating our members as though they shouldn't have a say, we should do all we can to bring them into our political process, and most importantly, build a political and strategic platform that reflects all of our collective views and desires.
We believe in democracy everywhere, from the government to the workplace. The world we envision is one where every person is empowered to collectively chart our shared future. So let's start with our own organization. Through One Member One Vote, we can unleash the power of democracy, giving all members a tangible stake in our work, and leadership a powerful tool for the advancement of our campaigns--an enthusiastic democratic mandate from our mass membership.
The chapter is at its most powerful when we model our own values. If we believe the world should be run democratically, let’s start with our own membership.
Agree? Vote YES on One Member One Vote this convention.
