Caucuses & Criticism

One of the best pieces of advice I got from a comrade (and friend) when I joined DSA in 2016 was "I don't want to be friends with everyone in this org". Someone can be both a comrade and a friend, but they don't need to be. You can struggle alongside someone politically without ever wanting to be friends with them, and you can be friends with someone while having political and strategic disagreements.

This may have been an easier thing to balance in historical socialist organizations, but the ways in which our society are fragmented complicate things. For many millenials and Gen-Zers, DSA or similar orgs have been some of the biggest ways they have made IRL friends. That's okay! The problem arises when there's not a broad agreement over what this combined political and social space means. People don't get that they don't have to be friends with everyone in the org, so they often need to make a smaller group where that is the case, and that's how caucuses get formed.

As someone who only got into Left Caucus in 2017 right before it dissolved, I do have an outsider's perspective on the different caucuses in DSA. As far as I can tell, many of the caucuses aside from the Libertarian Socialist Caucus and North Star aren't well-differentiated from one another. There are something like six communist/Marxist caucuses, there are two local communist/Marxist caucuses in Emerge and Red Star SF that don't seem to have any national caucus affiliation, and Bread & Roses and Socialist Majority don't seem to be that different aside from stating that they primarily focus on labor and electoral work, respectively (in practice they both seem to give relatively similar weight to both). Over time I've also been aware of internal political differences within caucuses, sometimes leading to them dissolving or splitting.

Why so many caucuses with so little difference between them, and with their own internal political differences? I believe that they're mostly differentiated by whichever friend group decided to form the caucus. Aside from getting members to vote in a bloc for leadership elections, there's not a huge amount of political cohesion. This makes campaigns less effective, because there's no clear ideological bent to chapter work. Everyone is just sort of agreeing to do something they don't have 100% enthusiasm about.

A major issue in the organization, and one that these caucus formations contribute to, is a lack of criticism. People don't want to speak up against their friends, so strategies get stuck in first draft mode. When things don't work out for a campaign, there's often no write-ups on what went right and wrong. This is an untenable situation. Like the chicken and the egg, theory begets practice and vice versa. We learn from our organizing, which molds our theory, which affects future practice.

Self-criticism is one skill that has to be practiced by writing about campaigns we've worked on, but just as important is knowing how to criticize others' work. This is a skill that I owe to writing classes in college. We would each write 25-40 pages of a screenplay every few weeks and our fellow students would read them and provide notes. When giving criticism you gave it with empathy, never tearing someone down, but earnestly trying to help the writer achieve what they wanted with the script. When receiving it, you had to stay focused on the fact that the criticism wasn't about you, it was about the work. I always looked forward to getting notes because it genuinely made my work better. You would also learn by the notes that people gave who had actually done the reading and paid attention, and you learned which notes to hold on to and which to discard.

While I'm not expecting every chapter to start creative writing working groups (unless...?), I think that giving and receiving criticism needs to be considered an important skill that must intentionally be developed, and should be given similar weight as "how to hold an organizing conversation". There needs to be a clear expectation of criticism when a campaign is proposed, when it is ongoing, and after it concludes. I understand that there may be trepidation around caucuses that are more ideological in nature leading to more factionalism, but at the same time the impulse to go along to get along has led the org to the point where even the National Director is talking about DSA being in a malaise. We need sharper critiques to move our work forward, and we can only do that with the commitment to struggle alongside each other even if we don't like each other that much.