Dami O is a member of Metro DC DSA
DSA IS UNLIKE any organization in the United States. We have the ability to knock thousands of doors for political campaigns, organize union drives, and fight for tenants solely through volunteer commitment.
As our commitments and needs grow, greater investment will almost certainly be needed to do large-scale work in Metro DC DSA. A recent resolution introduced to the chapter, “Invest in Party Infrastructure: Staff for Metro DC DSA,” aims to make that investment by creating a chapter staff position. However, I believe the resolution as written is unwieldy, financially inadvisable, potentially exploitive, and very plainly fails to divide the needed labor between various groups in the organization that could use a helping hand. This resolution speaks to a clear need to expand MDC DSA’s organizing capacity, but makes inadequate or unstated assumptions about how much a staffer position will cost and what the staffer can be reasonably expected to carry out in a part-time position.
Metro DC DSA is organizing to new heights. Owing in part to the growth of the organization nationwide and socialist electoral victories locally and nationally, MDC DSA now has 2,500 members. That is an incredible milestone for socialist politics in the DMV, and it will also require a scaled up apparatus to match. This is a key juncture for a mass-based organization, and learning from other socialist and progressive organizations that use salaried staff is essential. If we truly value member-led democracy and the mass politics that DSA stands for, we must carefully assess our approach when dealing with the significant financial sums that staff require.
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Generations ago, socialists in the social democratic movement lamented how bourgeois administration was overwhelmingly changing the movement's character. Adam Prezowski, a Marxist scholar on the social democratic movement, once remarked:
“The struggle requires organization; it demands a permanent apparatus, a salaried bureaucracy; it calls for the movement to engage in economic activities of its own. Hence, socialist militants inevitably become bureaucrats, newspaper editors, managers of insurance companies, directors of funeral parlours, and even Parteibudiger — party bar keepers.”
The defining moment of classical social democracy, when the socialist movement argued for supporting their countries’ involvement in World War II, wasn’t born in a vacuum. It came when the specific dividing lines that had been part of the socialist movement since Engels began to break and were augmented by independent, non-organizationally driven politics related to the growing party bureaucracy.
Frederich Ebert, one of the most infamous socialists in the 20th century (known for his responsibility in the crushing of the Spartacist uprising in 1919) had his start as a secretary for the Social Democratic Party of Germany in 1905. He faced a daunting task, as he was assigned to manage the growth of the party, create internal statistics on party members, and manage regional structures. The flexibility given allowed him to create a large party machine made up of paid secretaries.
Most local outfits accepted these secretaries, and paid support for such large-scale duties seemed very helpful. However, the partification question grew after their losses in the 1907 election. That year, the right-wing junker class financially supported parties that opposed the SPD, using its money to create massive lists and launch door-to-door canvassing. Ebert and many of the non-radicals found it prudent to build their own equivalent, a well-staffed machine that could increase the number of members, dues, and donations for campaigns in the future.
The radical wave of labor had receded, so the paid bureaucrats did their duties in a much more conservative and risk-averse way. The purpose of the party was to build for specific electoral campaigns, so the development of radical socialist politics or any type of re-examination was opposed heavily, and the staffers leaned towards the party right. Ultimately, outside their jobs, they became the biggest surrogates of right-wing politics in the SPD.
Many know the end result: right-wing politics became the dominant tendency of the SPD at large. The SPD’s goals fused with the position of reformist workers and the petty nationalism of the German population at large — that imperialism was bad, but the workers’ interests aligned with supporting the first World War, so it was fine to support it.
The material consequences were clear: the revolutionary wing of the party was jettisoned in favor of a model that appealed to the most chauvinist and nationalist sectors of the working-class movement. By the time of the 1918-19 German Revolution, this group even chose to back far right militias instead of the growing workers’ movement in the country. Instead of socialists leading, they were running cover for a warmongering, bourgeois state.
This is not a unique problem: it is not uncommon for a party that has progressive ideals to morph into a body focused less on radical politics and more on “numbers.” Membership, gross income, and the interests of those who are salaried (primarily consultants and staff) begin to decide the membership decisions. And when a radical posture is needed to match working-class dissent, those interests prevent it. A good example is the way the DNC is starkly against the mass donor model proposed by Bernie Sanders and his affiliates, even though it's likely the Sanders model would be more popular among working people.
Returning to the present: Metro DC DSA now finds itself in an important moment. The "Invest in Party Infrastructure" resolution aims to confront our current juncture by devoting money to a part-time staffer position. However, the viability of that position is debatable.
The resolution’s proposal of a part-time staffer on a one-year contract making $25/hour and working 20 hours per week will cost approximately $26,000 a year. This means a salary of around $500 per week. The job duties outlined in the resolution that have money-making mechanisms rely primarily on the recruitment and retention of DSA members and on fundraising directly from members.
Simply put, this job will not “pay for itself.” National DSA gives approximately 20% of dues to chapters with over 200 people; the other 80% goes to the national organization. If we presume that every newly onboarded member pays an average of $10 a month (this being the national average per the 2025 convention report), the recruitment of one member would allocate approximately $2 per month for MDC DSA. To reproduce their wage based on recruitment or retention alone — to pull in more than $500 a week for an entire year — the staffer would have to recruit more than 167 members a month, hypothetically.
Just to put this in perspective, before this year, MDC DSA declined in membership the last three years (2022 through 2024). The most recent data I can find of membership growth in MDC DSA (aside from this year) is from 2021, when, on average, we gained 81 monthly members. Our 2025 average (which I primarily attribute to the Zohran bump), using data from January through August, is around 85 new members per month. That seems in line with the report of DSA’s Growth and Development Committee, which speculated that it is often external events (like high-profile elections) that bring membership growth to DSA.
Most chapters have a growth pattern similar to us, in that 2021-2024 represented a stagnant period for recruiting and membership. Chicago DSA, which is a similar size chapter to us, had a a part-time staffer with a focus on membership renewal between 2023 and 2025, and its membership declined as well. As much as staffers have been exalted as a centerpiece of big chapters and growth, the data shows that it has not created large-scale membership increases.
The staffer's other money-producing action would involve raising hundreds of dollars from DSA members or allies, which independently would require around $2,000 a month just to barely sustain their own wage; that dollar amount would decrease when paired with recruitment, but the needed fundraising still appears unsustainable.
Securing donations from one list of MDC DSA members — referred to in the resolution — has a substantial likelihood of diminishing returns. It requires repeat donations or continuous membership growth in a year, which is unsustainable as a model even if there exist non-member lists to recruit from. Without restructuring this or looking into more reliable ways of reproduction (perhaps external grant funding), this will simply drain the money used to hire the staffer.
The work needed to obtain this reproduction would require well above 20 hours a week. Successfully soliciting hundreds of members a month (not just contacting but actually recruiting) would require mobilizing that would far surpass what many national unions and even NYC DSA do collectively. The work of this job is that of a full-time position. Putting that much responsibility on a part-time staffer, on top of other administrative responsibilities, is a recipe for disaster.
The resolution language conceptualizes the staffer role as continuing past 2026 (on an opt-in basis), and the authors write that the staffer can contribute to an Office Fund to find a physical location for chapter activities. However, if the staffer is unable to fiscally reproduce itself, then including the Office Fund in the proposal reads more like a way to placate potential opponents to the resolution, and less like something that is financially possible.
The resolution also doesn't indicate what the staffer role will look like operationally. We haven't even identified the overhead needed for the staffer, what communication tools would be used, and the costs. What is assumed is just the money-wage; an actual financial proposal assessing the gross costs seems like an afterthought. The resolution has plenty of language about boosting local strength and membership; it does not contain much concrete information about expenses, surplus, and fiscal solvency. A proposal that has a net spend of $26,000 should have this listed out! Faulty estimations around the responsibilities, reasonable expectations, and productive capacity of staff can have serious consequences for an organization of our size.
While the resolution is intended to boost membership and local administrative abilities, it seems to be overreaching without considering the expenses required to get the staffer role off the ground. The resolution fails to identify the equipment that may be needed and hardly thinks of any complex overhead costs needed to sustain the role.
Barring some rewrite that includes a change in duties based on stronger financial analysis, we should assume that the staffer will probably not be reproducible year on year. Being honest about this allows us to admit that if the money does not have some outward cash growth benefit, it should meet the collective goals the membership views as priorities.
I will not hide my position: I align very closely with the camp that supports investment into an office. An office space would support work across the priority campaigns that members voted for at the local convention, as well as the goals of the program we are trying to build. It could function as a “movement space,” where MDC DSA could host chapter activities, small-scale meetings, and events. This space, especially if cultivated well, could be the center of our organizing efforts and a place we could call our home. We are already running into issues with reserving spaces at public venues, so to curtail that issue a private meeting space would work well. It’s unlikely an office will financially reproduce itself, but to me it's a worthy investment.
Whether MDC DSA invests in a staffer, an office space, or another option, I believe the best thing the chapter could do to begin addressing these concerns is facilitate a town hall hosted by the Membership Engagement Department. Could the administrative duties outlined for the staffer in the resolution be done on a larger timetable with some type of stipend to avoid the issues the staffer role presents? Knowing the specific needs and challenges of the membership and targeting them in a fiscally prudent way seems like the best way to proceed with the money we have.
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Metro DC DSA is in a moment of opportunity and risk. If we look at how non-radical, establishment left parties operate, like the British Labour Party, we can see an absence of radicalism driven by the type of ossification that the SPD experienced a century ago. Such operations risk total collapse, particularly in times of crisis: the more struggle is needed, the more working-class people are willing to disregard what they see as a bureaucratic organization and view it as an elitist formation.
Attempts at partification and growth could create a similar dynamic in our organization. The resolution proposing a staffer requires more deliberation, stronger financial analysis, and a great deal of scrutiny. If we are going to invest $26,000, let’s do it with a sound foundation for our radical priorities.
