(This is an essay I wrote last year and have previously circulated as a google document. I am uploading it to this blog in order to reference concepts from it in future writings. I still stand by most of what is in this essay, but it lacks vision for solutions to the problems it puts forward.)
2022 has seen the continuation of a period of stagnation across the political left. Prior to 2021, the rejection of Trump and enthusiasm around Bernie Sanders’ primary campaigns led to a resurgence of the American socialist movement . In 2022 under president Biden much of this energy has been reduced to dull resentment.
These boom years taught organizers the wrong lessons - a reliable flood of new membership meant little attention was paid to member development. When the flood dried up it rendered swathes of the ‘left’, from socialist political organizations to nonprofits, nonfunctional.
Following the repeal of Roe v. Wade and an ongoing Republican coup attempt, these trends have shown signs of reverse. However, we cannot take critical moments in history for granted. Instead we need to build member-led organizations strong enough to make our own moments.
Mobilizing vs Internal Organizing
Further Reading:
For the purposes of this essay I will use simple definitions of Mobilizing and Internal Organizing. There is more depth to this topic than brevity would allow, so I will focus on key concepts.
Mobilizing
Getting people to turn out for events or actions.
Example - Hosting a large rally
Internal Organizing
Developing members of your organization through education, communication and relationship building.
Example - Member Onboarding, Political Education
An effective left organization needs to employ both organizing and mobilizing, but which is the primary focus impacts organization structure and functionality. This in turn determines how organizations grow and adapt in the long term.
Mobilizing models are dependent on messaging and mass communication. Because turnout is the focus, mobilizing models pay less attention to developing membership and more to boosting one-off asks. This lends itself to mobilizing-focused organizations being run by a small number of self-selecting activists who are prone to burnout.
Mobilizing models are oriented towards the ‘short term’ but may be effective for several months. Ongoing mobilizing work, such as canvassing for candidates for office, can lend the appearance of an organizing model until the campaign comes to a close naturally or burns through its participants. One incorrect assumption is that campaigns are inherently effective at building membership; when exclusively focused on turnout they can actually burn through a membership base.
Reciprocity
Mobilization models can’t be called fruitless; they are useful for certain goals. Nonprofits use them effectively to draw attention to themselves and to build donor lists. What the mobilization model doesn’t work for is creating durable, member-driven organizations.
The issue with mobilization models is that they lack reciprocity between the organization and the mobilized. Reciprocity will be defined here as:
Having incentive for participation within an organization in the form of social connections, meaningful democratic participation and a sense that their contribution is significant to addressing the problems they wish to see fixed.
Reciprocity is equivalent to self-actualization within an organization.
Frequent attempts to mobilize membership without developing reciprocity leads to apathy or resentment. People experiencing this indicate that they feel they are being spammed or taken advantage of. Mobilization models respond to burning lists by relying even more on mobilization tools - creating a negative feedback loop.
Modern left organizations, which take inspiration from nonprofits, are addicted to mass-text platforms like Spoke for this reason. Spoking membership lists is the most effective way to drive turnout to important actions, but loses efficacy if used rashly. This also interferes with internal organizing work such as reach outs made to new members to set up 1-1 conversations. When people are being spammed they are less likely to respond to messages sent by real people because they have no way of identifying what is real and what is a mass text.
The most important element of reciprocity for developing new members is building community. No documentation is better at conveying the scope of an organization than chatting at the bar with veteran membership. The sense that one is doing meaningful work is also essential to reciprocity. The average new volunteer on a left campaign is open to socialism and wants to learn more, but is driven to action out of a desire to contribute.
If asks are being made to people who have no say and get nothing in return, they will be viewed as a burden rather than a shared duty. Reciprocity needs to be cultivated via internal organizing, relationship building and collective struggle. There is no future for a socialist movement not rooted in reciprocity.
The EcoSoc Model
The NYC DSA EcoSocialist Working Group is one of the largest working groups within the chapter. A reason for this success is an emphasis on membership and leadership development. This section will review the onboarding model built by the working group’s membership committee, which I was a member of for two years.
The ‘EcoSoc Model’ starts when new members opt in by signing up on a form on our website. At that point a trained onboarder is assigned to the member and reaches out to schedule an onboarding call. Onboarders are instructed to prioritize engaging but short discussions, around 15-30 minutes, focused on explaining the structure and goals of the working group. Onboarders are also expected to follow up with members they’ve onboarded at least once after the call to check in.
Historically we have prioritized training newer members as onboarders because we have found it is an effective ask for building reciprocity. New onboarders are provided training and a promise of support from senior membership, and the importance of the work is clear. Furthermore, the committee holds biweekly meetings open to all onboarders which focus on conveying the goals of the working group and democratic discussion on how to meet those goals.
The results of the ‘EcoSoc Model are mixed. It is effective at developing onboarders but didn’t retain new members at the rate we had hoped, and most other attempts to build something similar across DSA have burnt out.1
The weaknesses of the ‘EcoSoc Model’ are:
Workload
During high-signup periods onboarders are asked to make several calls a week. These calls are low-intensity but add up, and burnout has been common.
This hinders onboarders’ ability to develop relationships with their onboardees, the most impactful part of the work.
Support Cliff
New members face a drop off in support after the follow up.
Lack of Centrality
By assigning all the onboarding responsibilities to one committee, this model relegates member development to one corner of the organization.
Because onboarding is assumed to be ‘handled’ and not a group-wide practice, leaders are less involved.
Reconsidering Turnout: Recommendations
Full Participation Onboarding
Onboarding work shouldn’t be relegated to one committee - full participation should become the expectation, with every established member responsible for onboarding one or two new members at a time. In this model the role of membership committees should be the ‘bottom liner’ of onboarding work - responsible for making sure new members are being reached out to by onboarders without doing the reach outs in-house. Membership committees should also be in charge of developing tools to keep track of membership and training onboarders.
This has advantages for developing both new and active membership. By spreading out onboarding responsibilities, all members are provided with meaningful work while diminishing the risk of burnout. The onboarding training is also an opportunity for impressing organizing concepts onto membership, an example of ‘integrative political education’ which will be expanded on in the next section.
Furthermore, this model allows for onboarding centering relationship building rather than a simple 1:1 conversation. The onboarding process could persist for a month or more and involve additional steps such as pairing up for canvassing. A similar model called ‘the buddy system’ pairing experienced ‘senior’ canvassers with new ‘junior’ canvassers for recurring shifts was attempted towards the end of the Illapa campaign and showed promise. While juniors did not always show up, those who did were more likely to participate in repeated canvasses than members who only received onboarding calls.
Integrative Political Education
Organizers who understand the failings of mobilization models may become bogged down on political education (poli ed) as a solution, but this is a mistake. The traditional ‘academic’ model of poli ed as a seminar or reading group can defuse newly radicalized members by removing them from consequential work. This feeds into the Liberal tendency to conflate having the right opinion with meaningful action - leaving people satisfied despite accomplishing nothing.
Poli ed needs to move away from seminars, it should instead be integrated into the entire member experience. A focus on action doesn’t diminish the impact of poli ed but reinforces it, when provided at key points of participation such as canvas debriefs and embedded in member-facing materials, it evolves from lectures to praxis. This is in line with how learning happens organically - people learn best by doing and internalize information not all at once but via constant reinforcement supported by cultural osmosis.
The Sarahana Assembly campaign saw success retaining volunteers during a weak year for the left because they were deliberate about integrative poli ed.2 Before canvassing the campaign would discuss the stakes of the race clearly with new volunteering, along with canvassing strategy and their theory of change. After canvassing they would prioritize 1:1s with new members over tally sheets and use them as an opportunity to discuss conversations at the doors. They also developed messaging aimed at people already canvassing instead of taking them for granted and only targeting new volunteers. To quote one of their organizers - ‘the [poli ed] program needs to be married to the strategy’.
2.5 Organizing & Analysis Focused Poli Ed
Another common problem with ‘academic’ poli ed is prioritizing history and broad concepts over analysis of local politics and organizing skills. Both are necessary to senior organizers, but the latter are of greater benefit to new organizers because they build understanding of specific problems and provide tools for addressing them. Local conditions and organizing skills are also required to understand what campaigns organizers are running and why. This feeds into an important point - it is more impactful to show new members what you are thinking rather than what they should think. This gives them the tools required to critically engage with an organization and develop into more effective organizers.
Network-Based Turnout
Taking a page from Mobilizing models, many organizers view turnout in terms of email and spoke lists, but these decay when overused. Build spoke lists should be supplementary to expanding a dedicated membership base via reciprocity with the goal of establishing a turnout ‘floor’. When it comes to canvassing, one person showing up 10 times is more valuable than 5 people showing up once.
People are more likely to turnout when its importance is conveyed by a friend or someone they respect. The easiest way to improve turnout is by building a network yourself, especially if you are already doing onboarding work. This is more effective when done by people in positions of leadership, even more so when they teach network building skills to others.
Taking it a step further - connections with natural leaders are key. Even when not organizing a workplace an organizer should identify natural leaders. Natural leaders build networks around themselves within organizations, they are people you can work with to get buy-in for a project. Working your network and the networks of others is a structure test, giving you a sense of where an organization is strong and where it is weak.
Building a Leaderful Movement
Further reading:
Building a sense of collective ownership within an organization requires its members to have avenues for meaningful participation in decision making. ‘Full’ member democracy is a common solution but poses challenges to implementation and can be alienating to new members who don’t understand the context and stakes of decisions. An alternative is creating large, flexible leadership bodies with low barriers to entry based on participation. In this model all leaders receive full voting and participation rights for collective decision making.
This model transforms leadership into a self-selected membership body unified by shared duty. A large, motivated leadership body is an effective way to build a turnout ‘floor’ and comes with additional advantages. Newly appointed leaders participating in open meetings where experienced leaders discuss their positions is the best way to learn how they think, and reveals strategic considerations that may otherwise be obscured. In a well-run group this also demonstrates healthy communication, a foundational organizing skill that is difficult to understand without examples.
There are also several ways in which expanding a leadership body may improve its functionality. With more leaders, it becomes easier for strategic bottom liners to delegate and reduces their risk of overwork. The cost of individual bad leaders is reduced because they have less power when they are one vote out of many. Low barriers to exit as well as entry make pruning the leadership body of inactive members to maintain quorum practical, and since re-entry is easy this can be an amicable process. None of this happens automatically - at every step deliberate decisions need to be made, but facilitating a culture prioritizing this work is the best way to keep leadership healthy and accessible.
This is not to say the model was a waste of time. While we failed to break out of the structural weaknesses I believe are inherent to the model, we welcomed many people into the organization who otherwise may have been lost. Many members have cited the onboarding they received as the reason they stayed in the EcoSocialist Working Group - they had never been invited to a 1:1 conversation before.
As a counterpoint - Mid-Hudson Valley (MHV) DSA, the chapter backing Sarahana’s campaign, has the most impressive poli ed operation I have ever seen. Outside of the campaign, MHV DSA has built a socialist curriculum and holds regular, well publicized seminars which draw large crowds for a mid-sized chapter. MHV DSA uses ‘academic’ poli ed but it is advanced enough that it acts as an advertisement for the chapter and is part of their recruitment strategy. It could be that the ‘academic’ model is viable but that it needs to be refined and targeted to be effective.