[Credit: Curbed NY]
The February Queens branch meeting was the first I attended and a case study on the chapter’s strategic orientation towards legislative campaigns. I was there to present on the Independent Working Class Organizing (IWCO) Tenant Basebuilding initiative, a resolution passed during the 2022 NYC Chapter Convention with near-universal support and acknowledgement of the tactical diversity required to build a mass workers movement.
In the weeks leading up to the Queens presentation, we learned another housing initiative called the Green Social Housing (GSH) campaign was also making the rounds at the branch meetings and would present alongside IWCO. The GSH campaign was doing so in order to obtain sufficient member votes to achieve Priority Campaign status, which allows issue-based campaigns access to the chapter’s financial resources. We first learned of this at an earlier branch meeting in the Bronx where our IWCO presenter was blindsided by the second housing-related presentation and a mistaken assumption among members that the initiatives were in competition with each other. Although IWCO was not running for priority campaign status (it is not a campaign after all), it raises the question as to how IWCO and other basebuilding initiatives might access equitable chapter resources through a priority-campaign-like status or other means.
At the Queens meeting a week later, the priority campaign confusion was cleared up thanks to the proactive efforts by the Queens OC who held a prep meeting with the two groups. The IWCO initiative presented first, highlighting the tactic of supporting and building independent organizations, politics that center tenants as protagonists and the tangible material gains won against landlords in Queens during IWCO’s inaugural year. Importantly, we clarified the difference between truly independent tenant-run organizations and those led by nonprofits accountable to their boards and funders. Due to technology issues at the start of the meeting, there was no time for Q&A or planned breakout group discussions, but we encouraged members to sign up for 1:1’s to learn how to organize their buildings.
The Green Social Housing presentation followed with professional slides and a vision of decommodified housing that garnered enthusiasm from the members present. Presumingly due to GSH’s status as a priority campaign contender, it was allotted far more time. The presentation left many questions unanswered including how DSA will hold the planned Social Housing Development Authority accountable without the sufficient political power to do so. Significantly, there was no discussion on how GSH was developed as a part of a broader statewide nonprofit coalition called Housing Justice for All (HJ4A) and by DSA members who are also paid nonprofit advocacy staffers and members of organizations like the development-friendly Open NY.
After the presentation, Queens members asked clarifying questions, but no-one outside of IWCO provided substantial critiques or questioned how GSH had been developed and by whom. As someone who has engaged with DSA primarily through IWCO and MUG, the apolitical orientation of the Queens branch meeting stood in stark contrast to the rigorous debate and active political discussion I was accustomed to in organizing spaces. It became clear that the current branch structure does not create sufficient room for political discussion and democratic decision-making among rank-and-file members, acting instead (at least in this case) as a vehicle for rubber stamping campaigns and recruiting volunteers for future canvases and trips to Albany.
Because of IWCO’s focus on building leaders and a political analysis that highlights DSA's liquidationist tendencies, IWCO members came prepared with questions. One was from a member who had studied a recent attempt at social housing in Germany called ‘Expropriate Deutsche Wohnen’ that failed due to a lack of engagement with rank-and-file tenants. “How will you ensure this doesn’t happen?”, she asked. The facilitator responded with, “we will do basebuilding”, and moved on to the next question. The structure of the Q&A did not allow members to ask more than one question or press the presenter on how they planned to “do basebuilding or had “done basebuilding” leading up to the creation of the campaign, or more specifically, whether GSH had engaged independent tenant unions and incorporated the perspectives of tenants alongside those of their nonprofit coalition partners.
The dominance of the legislative campaign over the basebuilding initiative at the Queens meeting calls the purpose of the branch structure into question. What does the branch do outside of championing statewide legislative and electoral campaigns in their communities? It is true that city and statewide campaigns are effective in raising working class consciousness, but what are the branches building and leading locally? How are the members in the room connected to their neighborhoods, developing their own leadership skills and that of their neighbors? What are members creating that will be sustained organizationally past the end of any given campaign or political tenure?
We need to think about how we restructure the role of the branches to create and attract more activated rank-and-file members, more space for rigorous political debate and more opportunity for democratic decision-making at the local level. Branches should be incubators for the development of neighborhood leaders and independent organizations. Through the seeding and support of new and existing tenant unions, labor unions, mutual aid and community safety groups, branches will collectively form the militant working-class base DSA needs but cannot yet count among its membership.
What would a politically activated membership at the branch level look like? First, it would have deep connections to local independent organizations led by rank-and-file members of the working class. It would actively represent the interests of their neighborhood organizations and therefore demand worker and tenant involvement in campaign development and implementation. It would require clarity on which campaign leaders are also paid nonprofit coalition staffers. In short, it would provide a sustained political critique of DSA’s work tailing nonprofit coalitions led by boards and funders representing the exact forces we aim to defeat.