Sam Dee is a member of the Metro DC Democratic Socialists of America. Views and analysis are his own.
CAPITALISM DISPERSES popular political sovereignty, our abilities of collective self-determination. Theorists Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri argue that the end of the era of globalization has fundamentally reconfigured how sovereignty works, without destroying it.1 The feudal throne was, nominally, assumed by a democratic, bourgeois politic, but now that throne lies empty. For socialists, the question is how such a throne — vacant, possessed, and malign — can be destroyed and a new, egalitarian world born. The solution to this, for Marxists, is building the working class’s collective power and, through that, its ability to act as an autonomous political subject.
For the Metro DC chapter of the Democratic Socialists of America to participate in that process, we need to build a shared sense of strategic reflection, one that goes beyond identifying individual problems with single aspects of our projects. After reviewing a recent debate in the Washington Socialist, I believe our chapter can increase its political independence through a different approach to leadership positions and the chapter program, which was democratically ratified as our local strategy at MDC DSA’s December convention.
Last year, Maxwell Rott wrote a comradely critique of both my and Sam G’s articles on the University of Maryland (UMD) graduate student union drive and Metro DC DSA, respectively. I recounted the failures of the UMD Graduate Labor Union-UAW to develop a campaign distinct from UAW’s strategy of seeking voluntary recognition from UMD, without securing prior material victories for workers; Sam G upbraided our local chapter for its overrepresentation of the professional classes. Comrade Rott largely agreed with our diagnoses but not our prescriptions — in both cases, we Sams had not considered the problem of “organizational underdevelopment.” By this, Rott defined the UMD drive and our local DSA chapter as “organizations that are incapable of defining their own political goals due to their subordinate relationship to other political organizations.” That is, he believes the organizations we wrote about could not implement our recommendations, even if desired. And so, in failing to consider a larger ecosystem of political organizations, Rott claimed, we missed the source of the internal dysfunction we want to resolve.
At its core, Rott’s analysis is correct. Both MDC DSA and UMD GLU continue to exhibit problems of organizational underdevelopment, as he described it. At time of writing, UMD GLU still has not secured recognition from the employer, two years after the legislative session where UAW’s influence was supposed to have secured collective bargaining rights for graduate workers. Following Zohran Mamdani’s election as mayor of New York City, MDC DSA is looking toward a year that will likely be defined by an onslaught of electoral work, leading to neglect on a number of important issues for the working class in the area, e.g., a slew of data center fights in suburban Maryland that will be settled long before cadre candidates could even be elected, take office, and put resources into those battles. Our local still struggles to identify clear chapter-wide objectives that would push our politics across the DMV. To answer the question, “what are the exact social components of a socialist National Capital Region, and how can we win them?,” our answer must be much more specific than “better labor contracts, more tenant unions, more cadre electeds, less carceral funding.”
Rott suggested that our chapter program would be a solution. I believe, however, that recent developments pose some challenges to Rott’s theory, which I will try to unspool here. Because UMD GLU’s situation is not much changed, I will focus my response on Metro DC DSA, where a revitalized local has won some respectable victories and seen growth in membership.2 This revitalization, however, has not solved the problem of organizational underdevelopment. Our chapter’s internal underdevelopment reflects our inability to set, pursue, and win collective objectives that reshape the conditions of the DMV into those favorable for socialism. To the extent that we do so in ways that are predetermined by other, non-socialist organizations, our ability to choose how we act, even in solidarity, is foreclosed. Resolving this problem will take a long time, but I believe there are at least two necessary components to a solution: de-emphasizing independent relationships with external political organizations, and recursively shaping our local program so it develops into the unifying force Rott described.
Organizational underdevelopment for Metro DC DSA is produced by the specific political economy of the DMV region as a center of political capital. As Rott explained, “MDC DSA’s structures and priorities are defined from the outside. We are underdeveloped vis-á-vis the District’s massive ecosystem of ‘progressive’ organizations.” This underdevelopment, as any good Marxist should expect, is caused by material conditions. As an example, we could consider the outsize effect this ecosystem has on how political issues are reported in the bourgeois press and, consequently, how DSA members understand political conditions in the DMV. But for the purpose of this article, I will focus on how this ecosystem affects the chapter internally. The most directly visible result in our chapter is the presence of members in leadership with paid staff positions in political organizations.
Extending Rott’s metaphor of colonial development theory, staffers produce an effect comparable to “elite capture” on our chapter. As philosopher Olúfemi Táíwò defines it, elite capture occurs when “the advantaged few steer resources and institutions that could serve the many toward their own narrower interests and aims.”3 He develops his argument to explain how liberal hijacking of identity politics has facilitated elite capture of liberatory politics, engraining a kind of “deference epistemology” that favors those able to secure representation of a disadvantaged class. Reconsidered as “staff capture” in the context of the chapter, debates over our socialist politics can turn into struggles over which organization should be allowed to substitute its lines for ours.4 And in these struggles, connections to other organizations become an important source of political capital within the chapter.5
But how does this affect the chapter’s direction? Rott criticized Sam G and me for our overreliance on simple “class demographics” to explain the problems we identified — we implied, he argued, that a deliberate shift of our organization’s internal class composition would in itself resolve the problems we described. Rott, however, adopted the same kind of flattened explanation of underdevelopment when he pointed to the fact that more than 60% of chapter Steering Committee members had “at the time of serving, been employed by political organizations” from 2021 to 2024. His theory, in this case, was too simple. It also matters which organizations our cadre and leadership serve in.
As Sam G pointed out, paid staff of political organizations are able to dedicate far more time to chapter work than most of the working class — the success of their job and (as they see it) of the chapter overlap. This recreates the problem of voluntarism that the Collective Power Network’s “Metro DC Socialist Mobilization Model” was meant to address: “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.”
How those committed members, specifically paid staffers, spend their time in these cases is often defined by outside organizations — namely, their employers. Sociologist Clèment Petitjean explains the resulting dilemma in his social history of United States organizing:
“Community organizing and organizers’ expertise gained legitimacy through their incorporation into other neighboring social fields (philanthropy, organized labor, electoral politics), but the ways in which these forms of incorporation happened nested community organizing into a minority, subaltern position. [...] The capacity to present oneself as being close to ‘the people’ and to be recognized as such, to claim the ability to ‘organize for change at the grassroots,’ as Obama put it, became a political resource with increased value.”6
Paid organizers also bring their specific kind of professional expertise to bear on chapter organizing, which gives an additional weight to their priorities — even as those priorities are potentially shaped by their employer. We see this when members make arguments on chapter issues primarily based on their experiences as organizers at work.
Alternatively, we find a similar dynamic in the way organizations relate to chapter members as organizers. I recently saw an example of this play out in a meeting between MDC DSA members and an elected official, where the official’s staff tried to smooth over concerns about political disagreement by mentioning forthcoming paid organizer positions. While some felt that this indicated good will, an establishment of partnership and acknowledgement of shared goals, I believe it represented a moment of potential chapter underdevelopment, whereby some members would find their priorities reoriented through their paid labor. Those proffered positions, implicitly, were a substitute for our principles.
I use this example to deepen our understanding of how organizational underdevelopment works. While a general overrepresentation of the professional class fraction in our chapter is a problem in itself, the specifics of the organizations that can capture our chapter’s efforts matter far more. Our strategic priorities are too easily defined by those organizations that members already work within. To the extent that chapter leaders hold salaried staff positions where their paid work overlaps directly with the work they do in the chapter, they create a relation of dependence — of our chapter on their employer. (Changing class composition can also drastically affect underdevelopment as, for example, many of the chapter’s professionals have recently found themselves in a new level of workplace precarity or shunted into other, allied industries.) A larger organization, to which our chapter is in some way subordinated, also can itself be dysfunctional and depend on our chapter in pursuit of its goals. This can, on the one hand, produce a dependence on our chapter’s work that will draw our chapter and that organization closer together. That might be a desirable result. It can, on the other hand, be a huge waste of capacity.
We need to keep those dynamics in mind as we consider how our chapter’s organizational underdevelopment can be addressed. We need to find ways to articulate and pursue political goals that do not overlap with those of the DMV’s progressive ecosystem — e.g., the end of capitalism.
Rott struggled to articulate a solution to this complicated problem. He argued, however, that a political program could develop collective sovereignty by “distinguishing the organization through its specific political objectives. The particularity (or lack) of those specific objectives demarcates how an organization stands in relation to others.” He looked to the newly instituted Metro DC DSA Program Development Commission as a source of this potential self-determination. A program, however, needs to do more than just distinguish an organization from those that surround it. As Steven Thompson describes in his critique of Socialist Alternative’s executive clique, overdeveloped programs can isolate an organization and hinder it from acting in unison with a broader Left. In these cases, organizations instead develop a dependency on their own “artisanal politics” — remaining independent, but often irrelevant.
Further, Rott wrote that a program must be “constitutionally binding.” This is necessary because, he said, “the disjointed nature of the organization gives rise to an active membership that is itself invested in maintaining an organizational form that allows them to work on uncoordinated projects based on individual interest, without reference to any goals outside a vaguely defined notion of ‘socialism.’” Rott, however, did not describe how a program can acquire the force necessary to direct the chapter’s collective work. A political body is not a golem, to be animated by script inserted under its tongue and rendered inert when that script is removed. A program, or any other constitutive document, has the power that it does because the people it applies to feel and enforce it as a material bound on behavior. That can be messy in practice, but it is still real.
According to Rott’s criteria, then, the newly passed chapter program is not fit for purpose. Although ratified at the chapter’s 2025 convention, it does not materially bind the chapter’s activities, it does not directly interact with the priority campaign process, and it does not contain many bounded goals for the chapter to attain. I would argue, however, that we are simply at a necessary, preliminary step. Through the extensive work of the Program Development Commission, we have a democratically ratified document that captures an image of our chapter, its work, and its relationship to the region. It is, itself, an exertion of our collective political will over an entire year. That is no small thing.
We should understand a program as the product of work and organizing, one that ideally feeds back into and shapes organizing but does not possess a motive spirit of its own. For it to build unity, we now need to define how the program will shape our work and, in turn, be reshaped itself. The state of our program will serve as evidence of our progress, not an end in itself.
To continue to build our chapter into an independent organization, we need concrete steps to climb. I outline a few ideas below of what we need to build, on a much bigger scale. Hardt and Negri warn, “Empire cannot be resisted by a project aimed at a local, limited autonomy.”7 If we cannot practice self-determination among ourselves, we cannot hope to challenge capital.
Our chapter needs to address the problem of staff capture of our strategic priorities. A start would be building up basic standards for accountability and identifying conflicts of interest in, at the very least, Steering Committee votes. The chapter should know what political organizations are employers of members elected to steering or branch leadership, and those members should disentangle the interest of their employer from that of the chapter. Making questions like that a part of candidate statements would be a simple first step. Working groups could also dissuade staffers from leadership positions in cases where their paid positions overlap with the remit of the working group. That could take the form of transparency and conflict-of-interest articles in their bylaws and election policies, more informal social norms discouraging the practice, or defining such potential conflicts of interest as something to look out for. A formalization of relations between our chapter and other organizations — much like the new Socialists in Office committee attempts to do — would also prevent influence from existing solely through personal connections. Rather than creating new bodies to do that work, however, formations could create liaison positions to regular coalition partners; rotating positions would ensure a broader swath of membership develops relationships with those partners and would prevent any one member from overdetermining our chapter’s relationship to an ally.
The chapter program needs to be regularly circulated among members and even used as part of new member education. Our program should be a key explanatory tool when members are confused about our internal structure and campaigns. Its clauses and goals need to be large enough that they do not map neatly onto existing chapter formations; they should instead be developed so that they coordinate actions across MDC DSA. The chapter should determine a process of regular, collaborative review of the program as it develops, to prevent any one formation from overdetermining the chapter’s approach to an area of work. For example, the chapter’s current electoral strategy (as described in the program) bears marked similarity to the MDC Groundwork caucus’s published electoral guide — in fact, the entire electoral strategy reflects that caucus’s framework of “class-struggle” and “cadre” candidates in service of “class alignment.”8 By lifting concepts wholesale from specific formations into our collective strategy, we avoid the necessary, difficult discussions that will help us find a workable synthesis that can guide as many of our actions as possible.
Further revisions should hone the program’s listed goals and initial abstract to as fine a point as possible — part of what made documents like the Black Panther Party’s Ten Point Program so powerful was concision and particularity. The program should not, however, become myopic and isolating such that it makes DSA unable to unify the working class or unite with other organizations that represent it, as Thompson warns about SAlt. Steps like these are necessary so that the program does not become, as Rott warned, “a powerless, inert document.”
Finally, even if we have a full program, we do not currently have the means to enact one. Our priority campaign structure needs to be reworked, as it is no longer fit for purpose. Currently, priority campaign elections allocate the material resources of the chapter to the most popular campaigns, selected via an annual vote of the membership. This provides some incentive for campaigns to grow, but it also stunts other chapter work by making access to financial support arduous and causes conflict between formations. It pushes members to identify themselves with the atomized projects of each campaign, rather than the chapter as a whole. We should move away from this model. Working groups of a certain size should simply have regular budget line items. Priority campaigns should be annual proposals that bring multiple formations together to meet some clear element of our program.
Organizational underdevelopment is a problem that particularly plagues the Metro DC chapter, but it also afflicts DSA and the US Left more broadly. To confront this problem, we have to renew our understanding of how solidarity works — not by allowing individuals to replace their employer’s priorities with our own, but by understanding the role that our class fractions (and that of others) plays in the wider empowerment of the entire working class.
If we uncover a path to resolving that ambiguity in MDC DSA, it is one that we can and should share. Let us begin.
1 - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Harvard University Press, 2000).
2 - For example, looking at the Steering Committee’s 2025 report, the chapter’s recent successes partially comprise: a revitalized Membership Engagement Department, with regular New Member Cohort programming and socials; the elections of Shayla Adams-Stafford and Frankie Fritz in Maryland; several successful local Emergency Workers Organizing Committee campaigns; passage of a LGBTQIA+ sanctuary bill in Alexandria; the foundation of a Northern Virginia Mutual Aid Working Group; and a successful coalition campaign to revoke Arlington’s 287(g) collaboration with ICE.
3 - Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took over Identity Politics (and Everything Else) (Haymarket Books, 2022), 23.
4 - See, for example: Patrick Dalton, “Turning Our Focus Inward to Avoid Reaching Out,” Washington Socialist, Winter 2025.
5 - I expect a critique of my argument here would be to say that the unification of our chapter’s projects with other organizations, e.g., specific unions, is a good thing. A cursory response: it is, but only to the extent that is a deliberate decision of the chapter, as a collective, that advances our political objectives. Supporting another organization without a full understanding of how our objectives overlap or diverge prevents that. This article arguably requires a much more nuanced exploration of solidarity — how a socialist organization develops itself through solidarity and socialist organizations’ necessary interdependence with other organizations that represent elements of the working class. I will leave that exploration as beyond my scope but acknowledge its lack.
6 - Clèment Petitjean, Occupation: Organizer: A Critical History of Community Organizing in America (Haymarket Books, 2023), 213.
7 - Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire, 206.
8 - The two documents’ definitions of a class-struggle candidate are identical. This is a candidate that “cleanly divides all of labor and progressive forces against all of capital. Such a candidate may not necessarily be a true DSA candidate who is accountable to the organization.” Considering the DMV’s political economy of progressive organizations, promotion of “class-struggle” candidates who are unaccountable to the chapter will likely exacerbate Metro DC’s organizational underdevelopment.
