Over the last year, the Publications working group and editorial board has been revitalizing the Washington Socialist and renewing constructive discussion about chapter politics. The Washington Socialist itself was founded in 2012 as part of a renewal of our chapter, documented in our internal history. I thought the first issue of this year would be a good place to do some retrospection — not just on what we’ve published in 2024 but what theories and strategies our chapter has struggled with in writing.
I wrote this article as a scoped review. I scanned each issue for campaign reflections, steering committee reports and analysis of DMV conditions, and then everything in most popular and DMV tags. My hope is that this exercise, as a column, will renew interest in these discussions and also point out where chapter thought remains silent.
THE METRO DC DSA CHAPTER was once much smaller—small enough that its membership could fit in a single room. Part of the chapter revival in 2009 solidified around a practice of “socialist salons.” These monthly salons took place at restaurants or libraries and members would meet and hold themed discussions on socialist issues like the Greek debt crisis or the history of gender oppression. Kurt Stand describes an entire year of these salons, facilitated by local activists, academics, and historians, in 2016:
“[D]iscussion that aids thinking through the ever-changing world around us is critical both to sustaining our activism and helping us engage most effectively. Metro DC DSA’s monthly Socialist Salon has sought to strike that middle ground by providing a pathway between gut responses and theoretical constructs.”
These events reflect an older chapter consensus around the importance of in-person events and meetings (an easier proposition pre-Covid). Later social media experiments brought these salons onto streams or social media debate.
As the chapter grew, however, these salons fell out of practice. A local Socialist Heritage Caucus kept similar restaurant gatherings going while conducting much of the historical research that makes up the Washington Socialist records. As the chapter grew, it had to develop new means of onboarding, socializing, and training that would work across the entire metro region. For example, we can contrast those previous informal educational and social events with the more formal cadre and cohort building programs the Membership Engagement Department (MED) developed several years ago.
Along with growth of the chapter and DSA nationally came an interest in tools of scale—technology. Where before members might have been able to navigate the chapter through a couple of carefully sourced conversations, it is now easy for new members to be overwhelmed. With five priority campaigns, three branches, several national caucuses present, and organizing across nearly every leftist issue, it is hard to grasp our chapter’s scope even if you’ve been a member for years. The chapter’s solution was to build out its administrative capacity, in 2020, through the conversion of the chapter tech committee into the Administrative Committee (AdCom), which MED and other infrastructural functions are now housed within. The idea was that this division of labor would save working groups, and the chapter as a whole, from spending time away from organizing to tackle redundant technical tasks. As comrade Michael M. wrote:
"As AdCom works independently of our individual working groups and campaigns, it facilitates their activities with low friction. [...] This has allowed our teams’ activists and organizers to focus on building the sophisticated political strategies needed to advance their respective causes, and it’s helped in preventing our teams from getting caught up in the minutia of executing tactics."
Use of “open source” software for these tech tools promised a chapter independent from the capitalist tech industry—to mixed success, in my opinion.
This dream of a division of labor expanded as the chapter grew during an onrush of members during the 2020 Bernie campaign and the George Floyd uprisings. How could new or inactive “paper” members find routes into the social life and projects of the chapter? As a response, AdCom made itself more than just a labor-saving technology formation but a conduit of organizing efforts. AdCom volunteers developed a pipeline process to orient new members and direct them towards specific tasks the chapter needed to accomplish: this became the Metro DC Socialist Mobilization Model. Mobilizers would contact members on the phone or via text and have 1:1 conversations on building the chapter. The idea was that the direct asks from these conversations would help the chapter avoid affinity-based organizing:
“While letting members ‘vote with their feet’ might seem like a participatory model, it mostly just caters to the already committed members instead of empowering the rank and file. It is more suited to creating a cheap volunteer pool than it is for building a serious vehicle for worker power.”
This approach was supported by MDC’s Collective Power Network caucus, which wanted to rationalize DSA’s still-coalescing infrastructure. More recently, and in contrast, the short-lived Community & Solidarity Caucus successfully advocated for hybrid general body meetings and better resolution tracking to make engagement with the chapter easier for newer members.
In all of the different efforts above, MDC members grappled with how to maintain the chapter itself, build consensus around strategic choices, and then implement them. Looking back at Stand’s support for salons, there is a stark divide between the purposes for these two models. Salons, small and intimate, were a less-directed way to socialize and develop strategic consensus at the same time—something our chapter can no longer do in a single sitting. Their closest analog, our chapter’s socials and political-education reading groups or socialist night schools, divide those two functions. The mobilizer model, in comparison, built and continually creates the tools for a 21st-century machine.
In his call for DSA to build a “political machine” regardless of its larger political aims, chapter member Patrick Dalton stresses that the machine is a neutral structure: “It is an organization that is almost single-mindedly focused on electing and reelecting its members. As such, it is value-neutral as a tactic.” Dalton presents the creation of a machine as a natural evolution out of organization (although I doubt this, myself). If that’s the case, however, what is the machine for? I don’t think we’ve figured that out yet. I suspect opposition to my reading here would say our chapter does have a program. We’ve won things (I82, Zachary Parker’s seat, etc), haven’t we? Yes, but there’s a difference between capacity and intent. Socialism is too lofty a goal, when we need to decide among a near infinity of options for local, directed campaigns to build DSA and socialism in the DMV.
A lot of current chapter debate now seems to be around how we do that better. Our priority campaign structure provides one mechanism. It, however, seems to no longer serve the mass coordinating purpose it was meant to have—the chapter is too large! As one Bernie campaign reflection observed, five years ago:
“Members should know when current internal debates are actually reflections of larger historical debates within the left. We should also work to eliminate the amorphous, ideologically hollow, anti-establishment “progressivism” that is often against all of the right people but for all of the wrong reasons. [...] This is on us for not putting out a clear program.”
One approach: our political education program has developed significantly over the last couple years. Specific reading groups and walking tours are planned to build working groups and active campaigns. Several chapter resolutions passed at convention mandated specific political education in the coming year—what would happen if we could align plans like that with a long-term political program? Another approach, a program itself: comrade Hayden L. proposed a chapter strategic research committee earlier this year; although it differs procedurally, the Program Development Committee resolution from last year’s convention would likely fit the bill. But that question—how we decide what to do with the capacity we’ve built—will always remain. That is, until we answer it for ourselves.
