Socialism is Worth the Effort
No more Laissez Faire Socialism. No more fiscal desperation. It’s time to organize for the economic foundation of the Party that Socialists deserve.
In the 2022 election cycle, New York DSA chapters raised a total of over one million dollars for a slate of candidates in NYC and the Hudson Valley. The same year. Paul Prescod, a Philadelphia DSA-endorsed State Senate candidate, raised over $300,000. That same spring DSA’s national recommitment drive raised 200,000 dollars over just 10 weeks.
Though you may not know it, DSA’s nationally raised just over five million dollars last year, and this year is on track to do at least the same, with the vast majority from dues paid by our tens of thousands of members. The subject of heated debate is that, until recently, DSA was on track to spend seven million, creating a clear issue in need of reconciliation, which over recent months the NPC attempted to negotiate–a process which has already lowered the gap by nearly a million so far. In doing so, our goal is not to preserve or “save” DSA. It is to grow DSA a hundredfold. So our immediate efforts have focused on building ourselves the near term stability required to make up for lost time.
Being faced with six or seven figure deficit numbers is not a soothing experience. It will naturally invite extreme and desperate reactions. But in the context of an 80,000 member organization that already raises millions without any kind of active fundraising campaign, the numbers are much more manageable than they appear, and largely indicative of a years of collective laissez faire socialism that treats fundraising as a passive process, rather than a terrain to actively and vigorously organize upon.
Socialists Don’t Settle
Amidst this naturally heated budget debate, what many have largely missed is that this difference is ultimately not a fiscal problem, but an organizing problem. For so long, we’ve talked about how far we can punch above our weight because of the DSA difference: our uncompromising socialist vision, and unparalleled dedication to organizing on the ground to make it a reality. About how despite so little funding, we can accomplish so much, especially compared to undemocratic, grant-funded and large donor run nonprofits/NGOs.
But in all our rightful praise of what we can accomplish on a shoestring budget… why do we have to settle for a shoestring budget in the first place?
Why can’t we punch as far above every other left organization when it comes to building the resources our work needs to grow to the next level?
The answer is something far larger than the more commonly provided answers such as convention voters, resolutions, stipends, staff, or even particular policies. And it is far simpler.
The answer is that we have never truly tried.
No More Laissez Faire Socialism
At the 2023 DSA National Convention, delegates adopted a resolution called “Act Like An Independent Party,” aiming to build our organization into a full fledged party infrastructure. To us, this means a party infrastructure fuels all our work from the foundations. On which we build a fully-funded DSA that actively recruits an army of new members 24/7, whose coordinated propaganda machine can go toe-to-toe with the billionaires trying to stop us, and makes our greatest victories over the last 7 years into a mere prelude to our next 7.
Less discussed is what moving towards this proto-party means moving away from: a set of practices that DSA Co-Chair Ashik S termed “laissez faire socialism”. That is, years of essentially passive fundraising, reactive recruiting, and an overall chaotic comms approach that defines us to the public by our loudest moments instead of our best. When our main recruiting tool is not a proactive campaign, but to simply wait for the news cycle to spit out something horrible so we can tweet the join DSA link? That’s laissez faire socialism.
The causes for this are overdetermined, making it easy to find scapegoats if you look for them. But overall, DSA has mainly grown through massive, exponential spurts, in ways much more shaped by political winds than our own deliberate efforts. To transition from one to the other requires an enormous amount of coordinated national organizing work for which there is no model in recent US memory.
Our entire modern growth period was defined by a never-ending series of epochal historical crises requiring the full might of our external organizing, from Trump, to COVID, to Palestine and beyond. In contrast, our funding comes largely from people who self-select into joining DSA and paying dues—not the kind of constant donor cultivation most political organizations rely on—making it easy for members at every level to take our funding source for granted.
Or to put it more simply: the reason we don’t have as much money as we should is because we are not organizing to get it.
Bet On DSA
During the 2022 DSA recommitment drive, as broken down in great detail in Socialist Forum, members made 31,612 total calls and 2,810 texts, raising $200,000 in ten weeks, exceeding its original monetary goal by 400%. And $113,000 of those funds were made as recurring contributions, which will support our work for years to come. As of this writing, DSA’s current interim budget will leave us 1.2 million short of breaking even–and should the currently approved consensus budget cuts pass, this will be reduced to around $990,000. Despite starting in April 2022, which until the very tail end was a fairly low political intensity moment compared to most major DSA member bump moments, and carried out with low organizational awareness and buy-in, the campaign still raised money at a rate that, were it held over the course of the entire year, would cover a 1 million dollar gap by itself.
Given this, we are willing to bet DSA’s future on the one thing we will never doubt: the collective organizing muscle of tens of thousands of DSA members who will do whatever it takes to rebuild the economic foundation of our political home.
Raising Expectations, Raising Funds
Even before campaigning for what would result in a landslide election as one of DSA’s first Co-Chairs, Ashik had struck a particularly acute blow against laissez faire socialism in his first NPC term, cutting through an often paralyzed body to finally implement income-based, solidarity dues. By treating each member according to our ability to fund DSA, we will ultimately reach a level of dues income much closer to what we need, which is why the resolution to prioritize Solidarity Dues at convention passed nearly unanimously.
But this must be just the start.
At the risk of making an obvious point, there are two ways to rectify a budget deficit: cutting spending, and increasing income. We see multiple complementary strategies to raise 1.2 million dollars this year. These include:
Solidarity Dues fundraising:
On top of the $200,000 already project to be raised by new Solidarity Dues conversions, the plan aims for an additional $520,000, reaching $720,000 in total. Since the money is raised over time, the amount of signups needed based on how soon they come. Using the average of $30 a month per new Solidarity Dues payer, there are many different permutations that will meet this goal.
2,000 members x net $30/month x 9 months (by March) = $540,000 (we just hit this!)
3,500 members x net $30/month x 5 months (by July) = $525,000
5,700 members x net $30/month x 3 months (by September) = $513,000
Etc.
Not only that, but these are recurring funds that would address the deficit not just this year but next year, too. The potential here is much higher. DSA’s Recommitment Drive recommitted 6000 members over two and half months. Gaining the same amount of Solidarity Dues commitment over a slightly longer three months would break 1.5 million dollars.
Major Gifts (aka “Engels Tier”) fundraising
Several experienced fundraisers have recounted large donors who have told them things to the effect of, “I would be happy to give DSA a lot more money, but they have never asked me to.” This is an easily avoidable organizing failure.
At the same time, we can all name various left wing celebrities and may have even “jokingly” Tweeted at them asking them to fund DSA. But despite DSA receiving over $150,000 a year in larger donations and major gifts, it is another failure of laissez-faire socialism that this donor base has never been systematically organized.
With two full time, elected Co-Chairs who have both the skill and time needed to make our case, and a fundraising team including seasoned Engels Tier fundraisers, we can aim for at least $250,000 on top of our $150,000 in large gifts averaging $2000, for a total of $400,000.
New member recruitment
For all our talk of new member recruitment, DSA has not organized a comprehensive national recruitment drive to do so in years. With average monthly dues of $12, doubling our current recruitment rate and gaining the increasingly familiar number of 6000 new members a year would get us to $432,000.
But given how much external political variables can drive new members to join DSA with little effort of our own, and the untapped potential to multiply these effects through much more deliberate preparation for those moments, coupled with more proactive recruitment outside them, the ceiling is far higher than this. We have seen that by proactively explaining what membership means, making join asks at multiple stages, and refusing to be timid about asking people to join DSA has been wildly effective in chapters like NYC. There is no reason we cannot bring this same level of proactive organizing to national.
As a whole, this proposal would raise 1.2 million dollars, much of it in recurring funds—which, as of the interim budget unanimously adopted by the NPC in January, would have us break even by years end. But this is the minimum—and as we saw from the recommitment drive, we are more than capable of outdoing our minimum targets.
The beauty of this proposal is its adaptability and multiplying effects. If Solidarity Dues are working especially well, we can double down on whatever techniques (phone banking, texting, peer-to-peer style asks through chapter and working group networks) are working best. If new member recruiting is, we can come back with the solidarity dues ask after a certain amount of time has elapsed.
We Believe That We Will Win
Of course, one must always prepare for the worst. What if we give it our all and still don’t raise enough to cover it? As the last decade has shown, attempting to predict the political future is a fruitless endeavor. We can never take anything off the table as an absolute last resort.
But to lay off our union workers should be our absolute last resort. Not just because we care about people’s jobs and livelihoods and working conditions. But because we need that level of capacity, experience, and dedication to the organization to actually build the party and bring DSA into the next phase of our political development.
And to lay off a third of our staff before we’ve even really given fundraising a shot is criminal negligence. We just voted on new members to the fundraising committee. Many NPC members haven’t even gotten on the dialer yet. We’ve had full-time co-chairs, who can do chapter visits and solidarity dues phonebanks and make major gifts and press appearances, for less than three months.
And the layoffs proposal that is on the table is based on the assumption that we will not raise a single cent this year or next. Where is the evidence for that? Why are so many NPCers unwilling to bet on DSA?
When members across the country collectively understand what is at stake, and have the outlets needed to organize about it, we have no doubt that we will rise to the occasion — just as members did for two months during the recommitment drive, and the New York chapters did in 2022. This isn’t a math problem -- it’s an organizing problem.
Socialists Must Lead
The coordinated fundraising and recruitment apparatus we must now build is just the start of the kind of interconnected party infrastructure DSA needs to become greater than the sum of its parts, and to do it at a level tangible to every single member. We know that while many members and chapters have strong connections to national—whether through field organizers, vital grants, technological support, and more—there are many others who view it, unfortunately , as almost a totally separate organization from their chapters.
This is the ultimate result of laissez-faire socialism: division. And as division is the ruling classes’ most effective tool at preventing working class formation, organization, and transformation of the world, we must work as hard to overcome it internally as we do externally. Not through surpassing democratic deliberation, but by ensuring all members begin from the foundation to truly engage in it.
As Naomi Klein wrote in the Shock Doctrine, a crisis makes leaders reach for whatever tools and ideas are most readily available. This moment of crisis has led some leaders to reach for mass layoffs before asking members to bring the same mass organizing we’ve brought to building the largest and most powerful socialist organization in generations to something as basic as “funding DSA.”
A Wake Up Call
So we say: let this be a wake up call. We believe in DSA, and we believe in DSA members’ willingness to fight for what we’ve built.
Our success will not be determined simply by those at the very top—it will come from the collective organizing leadership of the entire membership to build an economic foundation that can match the rest of our efforts.
We punch above our weight on everything else—why not fundraising too?
And why not start immediately? By:
Treat fundraising like a priority campaign, not an afterthought
Setting clear quarterly fundraising targets, detailed plans to hit those targets, and a shared agreement to make cuts if we don’t hit those targets.
Not laying off staff, but diverting staff capacity to the solidarity dues drive and fundraising.
Committing our leadership to a certain number of fundraising hours per month, with members being expected to report how much money they’ve brought in at NPC meetings.
Remembering that we do not have to reinvent the wheel -- there is a whole world of political fundraising expertise that we can tap into it and learn from. To that end, we look forward to finally unleashing our extensive fundraising capacity this week when the new round of fundraising team members meets for the first time.
These are the kinds of ideas we’ll be bringing to the table over the next two weeks on NPC. The kind that DSA members will be proud to tell their comrades they’re taking part in. The kind that, when not-yet-members see DSA engaging in, they will be inspired by rather than repelled. And the kind that will work.
So stand with the union. Join our March of Solidarity Today and Tuesday to ensure we never have another 6 person phonebank again. And see you at the most consequential NPC meeting in DSA history on Monday. It’s not too late to organize for the same kind of economic solidarity and might we deserve inside DSA as we fight for outside of it. So let’s get started.
