“ONE MEMBER ONE VOTE” (1M1V) AND INTERNAL DEMOCRACY
There is a set of resolutions and bylaws amendments on offer for the national DSA convention under the banner of “One Member One Vote” (1M1V). Specifically, these resolutions and constitutional amendments seek to establish that federal endorsements by national DSA and elections for DSA’s highest elected leadership body, the National Political Committee (NPC), will be decided via email votes open to all DSA members in good standing. Another constitutional amendment seeks to make it easier for members to petition for the NPC to conduct advisory polls of the membership on “major political issues”.
Alluding to similarly named struggles in the labor movement, the proponents of 1M1V advance two main arguments.
First, they argue that all members of democratic organizations getting to vote on more questions is an inherent good – to make this point they draw in particular from the recent effort in UAW to win direct election of national officers by union members. “Many of our comrades have fought for the right for the membership to directly elect national officers of their unions,” the argument goes. “So why shouldn’t DSA do the same?” This argument suggests that more national membership-wide votes will lead to a more member-led, engaged, and democratic DSA.
At the risk of stating the obvious, DSA is not a labor union. In labor unions, the primary site of struggle is the individual shop floor or employer, a place where most members spend 40 or more hours a week and therefore have a great deal of knowledge about what they need from their union. DSA members have no such structural reason to know as much about the targets of new campaigns or the political stakes of an internal political question.
DSA does not have the direct impact over the quality of its member’s lives that union leadership does – not only do unions negotiate contracts that dictate pay and benefits, but unions also often oversee or at least have influence over the administration of pension funds and health insurance. DSA leadership is not subject to the same sorts of structural pressure from capital, requiring a check against corruption and switching to the side of the boss, that union leaders are. Five percent of DSA’s 70,000+ rank-and-file members give 1% or more of our income to national, while paying 1% (or more) of your income to your union is the basic price of admission to membership in the vast majority of unions today.
All these factors create a membership with a more intensely shared interest (namely, improving their lives at work) and stake in decisions being made- as well as a leadership that can marshal far vaster resources and is subject to much more intense pressure by capital – than can be found in DSA.
The second main argument from 1M1V proponents is that the NPC elected at the 2023 convention is unacceptable and out of touch with the broader national membership. At least some proponents of 1M1V, then, see this proposed structural change as a way to achieve different political outcomes in terms of who we endorse and who leads the national organization between conventions.
Democracy is not about getting to passively weigh in on pre-set choices determined by someone else – whether those choices are delivered to your email inbox or presented to you in a voting booth. There is not a neat, linear correlation between the number of votes you take and how democratic a body is – whether that body is a state, a political organization, or a union. California is not more democratic than New York because there are more questions put to the voters by ballot.
How democratic a body is is determined by how much power members have to shape the agenda of the organization, rather than just ratify or vote down a set of predetermined binary choices on specific questions. In DSA, any member can submit a resolution and run for leadership, activities that are much more important for democracy than national email votes.
What’s at stake in the set of 1M1V resolutions and bylaws changes up for debate at convention is a fundamental question of what it means for DSA to be a democratic organization.
The vision of democracy put forward by proponents is one where as long as the whole membership gets to weigh in on a question, the outcome of that process is inherently democratic. This risks turning DSA’s deliberative democracy into a contest between dueling email-vote lists – who has the most contacts they can mobilize to open their email inboxes and vote on a yes or no question?
This vision misses what makes DSA special and more democratic than any other national political organization of its size in the US – our commitment to deliberation and debate on organizational decisions. Embedded in this vision is a faith in the possibility that open, honest debate can change our comrades’ minds.
This faith is most often rewarded when combined with a commitment to seeing our disagreements with comrades as rooted in good-faith political differences. We’re also more likely to win over our comrades when we try to tailor our proposals to try to appeal to a broad swath of political tendencies, rather than trying to ram through exactly what we want with a narrow majority of a given body on our side. Whether that body is the NPC, a chapter general meeting, or the entire national membership, matters less than whether the people on that body see value in appealing to and working with comrades who they disagree with.
DSA leaders are at our best when we see political differences as coming in good faith, when we strive to appeal to people outside of our political tendency or caucus or committee, when we allow comrades to influence our thinking and to change us as organizers. In a volunteer-led organization, all that narrowly winning a debate or email vote accomplishes is guaranteeing that a huge portion of the organization’s active membership is unlikely to spend time on implementing it.
There is no substitute for in-person debate and deliberation, which is why it is so important that every two years, more than one out of every one hundred DSA members is brought together for a national convention where we can hear each other out, be reminded that the people we debate against online are real, and figure out how to move forward together as a national body. DSA is one of the only spaces on the US left seeking to recover the lost art of making and implementing political decisions with people we disagree with – and to learn how to do that sometimes requires showing up to a zoom or in-person meeting.
The convention body is not only representative of the organization’s membership, but – perhaps more importantly in an organization where nothing gets done without sweat, blood, and tears from volunteers – representative of the active layer of organizational membership.
The road to a more engaged and empowered membership does not lead through email voting, but through the hard work of figuring out how to make leadership positions and decision-making meetings accessible to the busy working class people we want to bring into DSA. Translation of meetings and materials, childcare, adopting the recommendations of the multi-tendency Democracy Commission, and changing our organizational culture to be warmer towards each other and more welcoming to new comrades will do more for our shared political home than a thousand national email votes.
Moreover, genuinely democratizing our work and putting the movement and its resources into the hands of an increasingly diverse and representative working class will require deeper transformations to both the kind of political work we do, and the places we do democracy. It is true that intensive deliberative democracy can have barriers, particularly when it is heavily mediated across various online spaces or relegated to lengthy conferences many miles from home.
Too often in DSA, the places where we practice democracy are not the places where external facing political work happens. In many places, particularly the places where DSA is largest, the homes for democracy – such as branch meetings or general membership meetings – are quite disarticulated from the places that an engaged member might come to join in DSA’s various political projects: a canvass, an education event, strike solidarity, a demonstration, etc. That puts a difficult choice before members: with limited time, do I simply become a volunteer for a DSA project, or do I prioritize participation in internal deliberation?
When we urge comrades to practice politics on the terrain of everyday life, and to root our projects in buildings, blocks, neighborhoods and jobsites where working class people – including us – congregate and spend the majority of our time, it’s not only because we think these are the prized places where classes are formed and unformed, made and unmade. We also believe that these places, by virtue of being accessible and close to the shape of proletarian lives already, make for easy ground to join the transformative aspects of deliberative democracy and the life-changing dimensions of external facing organizing rooted in collective political action. It’s here where deliberation and ease of participation come together, and it’s where DSA should be experimenting, orienting, and organizing.
For these reasons, we strongly recommend a no vote on 1M1V.
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