A Return to Robert's Rules
Over the past few decades, debate has been given an unfair shake. Derided as unproductive for socialist organizations and slandered as the realm of undergraduate dude-bros in ill-fitting suits, it seems as though the Left’s appetite for spirited debate is still on the wane. This is a dangerous proposition, because it will leave our organizations, especially ones as democratic as DSA, incapable of responding to the visions of its membership.
Recently, in Central Brooklyn DSA, our general meetings have been asked to consider two priority proposals, one on supporting public renewable energy (BPRA) and another on the fight for Green Social Housing (GSH). These proposals, which earmark a significant amount of chapter funding for a particular issue campaign, were presented to membership by their motivators. Afterwards, members are allowed to line up for a short number of one minute speeches, stacking either for or against the proposal. In both cases, comrades in and adjacent to MUG expressed serious and coherent dissatisfaction with how these campaigns intended to make tenants and workers protagonists of our present-day struggles. In the second campaign, MUG members published a zine offering critiques of the structure and strategy of the GSH effort, which were distributed outside the meeting with some difficulty.
This should not have needed to happen. Ideally, these general meetings should be spaces in which coherent debate on proposals like these can occur. But with speeches limited to just one minute, and a general lack of enforcement of Robert’s rules, the debate portion of these proposals often feels like a formality more than anything else. Despite the fact that priority campaigns often are approved by large margins, our comrades prepared a serious and coherent document pushing for changes to the Green Social Housing proposal, including finding ways to center autonomous tenant unions and work to bring their members into DSA.
These are complicated issues that cannot be properly expressed in minute-long speeches. General meetings of branches can become meaningful if meaningful decisions are made there, and with organization and chairing that takes seriously the gravity of being in the only truly democratic mass socialist organization in the country. We need to enter our meetings with a real recognition that comradely debate and disagreement are supposed to happen here, and that we need to build and buttress structures that allow for that.
The fight over the national budget has revealed that the internal and external political persuasions of our organization are shifting. Online discourse has revealed a (thankfully small) segment of our party that has lost its willingness to engage charitably having lost its political majority. This is unfortunate, but I believe that it is merely a growing pain of a multi-tendency socialist party that is growing intellectually as we rediscover how to disagree with each other over important matters. Building a culture of charitable disagreement, however, begins at the local level, by allowing our general meetings expanded time for debate and adherence to (at least some of) the formality and dignity of Robert’s Rules of Order. We have to be prepared for decades, if not centuries, of building spaces for us to disagree as we fight for our socialist future.