Note: Cross-published from the MUG National Bulletin in response to a prompt in “Comrade Query”, “a space in the bulletin for MUG members to ask questions and get advice about issues they are facing in their local chapter.” The authors decided this article would be useful for a general audience in clarifying the structure of a generally opaque institution.
Prompt: My chapter doesn’t have an SIO structure, but there’s interest in creating one. How did yours come to be? What’s good and bad about it? What should we consider as we build our own?
A. New York City is the largest chapter in DSA with approximately ~5000 members, and accordingly has the largest bloc of socialist electeds within its jurisdiction: 11 and counting, including 3 active insurgent campaigns for state assembly. Its current electoral trajectory can be traced to the meteoric rise of DSA nationally post-2016, and the SIO has emerged over time as a realization of practical concerns of electoral leadership, largely away from the eyes of membership. For this reason its origins and development can be hard to trace. We were able to access a couple SIO documents upon request, but others remain secret.
The SIO committee is made up of a mix of positions, including (allegedly) the admin committee on the NYC steering committee (7 positions, all elected), the steering member from each branch (geographic divisions in NYC, all elected), 1 YDSA representative (elected), and 1 secretary (unelected). The aforementioned ‘socialists not in office’ (SNIOs) are joined by the elected officials themselves (SIOs). Other groups, like the electoral working group and citywide priority campaigns, are offered unelected positions but may or may not take them. Importantly, none of these positions appear to be elected in races explicitly for SIO committee positions, aside from possibly the YDSA representative. It is also clear that previously elected leaders and other “stakeholders” hold a great deal of informal sway on the SIO (e.g. unelected leaders were instrumental in lobbying Bowman to apply for a DSA endorsement.)
The SIO is, in practice, an organizing body and not a disciplinary body (you will frequently hear members of the DSA Right talking of “organizing electeds,” this is what they mean). As such, the SIO is a reflection of the kinds of relationships individual members have with electeds. Like all relationships, there are two sides: “us” (the interests of NYC DSA refracted through the mediation of SIO stakeholders) and the electeds. The existence of the SIO as a body is justified by these individual relationships, and not any formal resolution passed. Because of this a lot goes unsaid publicly, in meetings, etc. During Bowman’s endorsement forum, it became clear that he considered relationships with individual leaders to be equivalent with a relationship to the organization as a whole - this is a testament to this outlook in practice.
Asks are made to electeds based on the evaluation of both the value and the danger of each ask, (at least to the committee's self-understanding, ultimately resulting from the calculus of the small number of people in the room). This balance of power is a real consideration, but the presentation of a binary between the chapter and electeds does justice neither to the political composition of the chapter nor to the relationships between the electeds themselves. Some SIOs on the committee, for example, are far more sympathetic to things like block voting on the budget then some of the SNIOs. These differences arise from competing interests (even unelected SNIOs will have factional or organizational constituencies within the chapter), political calculations, and petty conflict between committee members and particularly the SIOs themselves.
The recent controversy with the budget demonstrates that the SIO as a project is still alive but reeling (2 DSA electeds broke from the socialist block to vote Yes on a demonstrably bad state budget). Without the SIO committee, undoubtedly more electeds would have voted for the budget - but its weakness and lack of democratic accountability led to a split vote outcome. This contradiction is also the result of a split in the electoral Right who are more or less willing to accept breaking the voting block. The split vote was also a result, in part, of the contradiction between party and constituency, and the justification for electeds “winning gains” for their district vs. being representatives of DSA.
Ultimately, the lack of democratic accountability in the SIO is inextricably linked to a lack of expression of democratic sovereignty of the membership in NYC DSA. Members are only able to directly interact with the chapter decision-making in their branches (outside of atomized chapter-wide polls), but this is not where power is located. The chapter leadership committee (CLC) is formally elected as the highest decision-making body in the chapter. In practice, however, the infrequent meetings and unwillingness to challenge leadership decisions lead to most important decisions being made by the steering committee, with CLC as a rubber stamp.
The current site of sovereignty (in line with a prevailing “do the work” ideology of political authority) is the (pressure/electoral) campaign, where fighting for campaign democracy is integral to breaking the power of the organic politics of the reformist-dominated praktiki. SIO elections do need to be further politicized, but more importantly, it is impossible to discipline electeds without programmatic unity, or even the possibility of democratically deliberating politics among the membership. Solutions in the SIO will undoubtedly be tied to broader chapter democratization which allows the membership to express its sovereignty through real deliberative democracy. Whether the SIO model needs to be expanded on, reimagined, or rejected, the crucial question that we face as an organization is navigating the contradictions between electoral success and democratic accountability as we chart a course for a parliamentary strategy that can advance tribunes on the local and national stage.
Further Reading:
State SIO Website (By electeds, not DSA)