The left has not been winning. Or, while we’ve had more wins recently than in the previous few decades, we haven’t been winning as much as we want to win, or could be winning. The only thing we can control is our own organizing—and it’s very easy to point out the issues with our organizing.
Democratic organizing is difficult, and it takes some work to really set up. Organizations often don’t do the work, and they end up unstructured. When they manage to become structured (often through of a gradual process of institutionalizing norms) they might become structured around easily graspable goals and easily spreadable ideas. The world is more complicated, and issues are complexly interrelated—these first-glance, easily graspable goals are not necessarily the things with the most impact. Landing on a lowest common denominator set of goals allows people to plug in and start working, but we’re shooting ourselves in the foot if our goals are chosen by their visibility rather than their potential effectiveness. There is a lack of structured democratic decision-making and goal formation, and this leads many left organizations to be severely ineffective.
Many people on the left therefore feel like our organizations are impotent and inefficient. And they point to ineffective democratic structures as the problem.
This can—and does—lead many people to think that we need some sort of less-democratic, heavily structured organization. These agenda-setting tasks get delegated to, essentially, elites in the organization. This allows lots of leftists—who are less interested in agenda-setting, and more interested in doing good on-the-ground work—to focus their efforts on the practical work. This comes at the cost of losing some of their capacity to democratically guide the organization, but they are so tired of the left losing, that the promise of political efficacy makes this trade-off worth it to them.
The less-democratic organization can be effective, certainly in the short-to-medium term. But in the long term, there is reason to believe we would have been more effective if we had had a well-functioning deliberative, democratic structure.
I understand the appeal to leave logistically-impotent, democratic organizations for logistically-capable but less-democratic organizations. However, I think it is more desirable and practically achievable to design our organizations to be both logistically capable and highly democratic.
In ‘We Need A New Kind of Socialist Organization’, Matt Harman brings up issues of impotent logistics in DSA, and the organization’s focus on arguments and discussions that he believes are removed from the focused, practical work that is necessary to be productive and successful left organizers. He argues that a 1917 sort of model may be more helpful. He criticizes DSA for mimicking and relying on social media and capitalist tools, which he argues helps reproduce issues of popularity-based and visibility-based decision-making and voting. He says there is a clear benefit in the social bonds and connections people can find in DSA, but doesn’t think there’s much benefit in its style of democratic structure.
These are genuine concerns, but we also risk overshooting and restricting the benefits of highly democratic organizing if we lean too hard into closed and less-democratic structures. There are significant practical benefits of a well-structured, democratic, horizontal style of organizing. And while Harman criticizes DSA for sometimes reproducing the performative types of organizing that appeal to social media algorithms, I worry that eschewing highly democratic structures falls into a similar problem of reproducing the non-democratic control structures of capitalism.
Although it is clearly desirable, it is very difficult to set up democratic and effective structures. We do not land on them naturally—at least, not when the only thing people have experience with are capitalist modes of organizing. However, there are ways for us to develop these structures.
Success will come from separating ourselves from the starting point of organizing that finds its roots in a social-media-esque popularity-contest. This starting point can be effective at bringing people together in response to the failures of capitalism, but it has shown itself to be extremely ineffective as a foundation for useful long-term organizing.
We can develop effective democratic organizing structures by consciously framing our actions as a response to our material needs and conditions; rather than starting with a structure inspired by the points-scoring, social-media style of valuing goals and arguments, and then trying to gradually instantiate democratic norms. We can develop these structures through a process of generational learning of what works and what doesn’t—gradually built up and passed down over generations of organizing. We can develop these structures through deep theoretical examination of what makes an effective democratic structure; using that as our starting point for our organization’s structure, rather than the unstructured starting point of merely ‘sharing displeasure at the problems of contemporary capitalist society’.
We on the left like to talk about scientific socialism—this is how I understand we should go about doing that—at least in the context of setting up our org structures.
In the end, we will want to have a clear theoretical understanding of what works and what doesn’t. It’s not enough to land on an effective organizing structure by chance or by trial-and-error. If we want to pass this organizing structure down generations, or if we want it to spread—we need to consciously understand it, so that we can explain it to others, and so that they may go on to consciously modify, test, and improve it. We on the left like to talk about scientific socialism—this is how I understand we should go about doing that—at least in the context of setting up our org structures.
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How do we build something like this from scratch? We might need an initial group of elites to determine an initial democratic structure; propose its adoption; and then work to totally remove any non-democratic influence that they still hold.
It should be obvious that there is a risk in involving elite decisionmakers at all. If the organization does not have a clearly defined point for the elites to give up their power to democratic processes, they might (and sometimes do) become an institutionalized elite group that thinks they know better than democracy.
There are always going to be dangers posed by capitalist society on our organizing. This fact will be used to argue that we should keep the elite decision-making structure around. Usually, the argument goes that, “The people aren’t yet prepared enough to effectively and highly-democratically organize against capitalism.” The stated end goal is always that our lives should be democratic and free, but there’s a problem if the organization lacks a clear plan and guidelines for transferring elite power to a highly democratic structure. This causes practical problems—there are significant benefits to deliberative democratic styles of decision-making and organizing which we miss out on if we have less-democratic modes of organizing.
Additionally, if people don’t get the chance to practice highly-democratic organizing, then of course they’ll never appear to be ready to democratically organize. But this is a problem with the exclusive, less-democratic structures—not the fault of people themselves. It is probably best to—as early as possible—start and build from a highly-democratic organizing culture. I think this would be more effective than trying to course correct later on, when less-democratic structures have been institutionalized.
We should lean into democracy and use its practical benefits to our advantage. In fact, it might be one of the few advantages that we have. Capitalism and elite institutions are by definition anti-democratic. We can always be outspent by capital, but we can’t be out-democratized. We should use this asymmetry to our advantage, leaning hard into the effectiveness of democratic decision-making structures.
Elite groups nearly always form at some point in the lifespan of an organizing group. They get their elite role from being early members of the organization, sticking around even after others have left the organization, having more time or energy than others, or being delegated the role of leading the organization, to name a few routes. In my mind, the goal of these elite groups should be to set up democratic structures as quickly as possible. These structures should increase the organization’s democratic capacity and work to abolish the elite structure.
They can set up things like rotational facilitating roles, rotating and randomized decision-making juries, voting structures, and imaginative and caring ways to address internal conflict. They should build an effective democratic structure that doesn’t depend on them—one which they feel confident can go on to challenge capitalism and other powerful and repressive institutions. They should broadly raise people’s capacities, organizing experience, and confidence; so that people can organize effectively without needing as much direction from a superior in the hierarchy.
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This is not to say that some organizations might require a less-democratic structure. For some organizations, we might need a clear command structure, or an executive who is responsible for snap decisions. A military seems to require something like this. Most organizations will need some way to make time-sensitive emergency decisions, which eschew the normal, time-consuming deliberative process. Nevertheless, these structures and processes might be democratized as much as possible through things like democratically-created and continually-updated constitutions, and other organizational technologies.
We should have different organizing structures depending on the particular goals we’re trying to achieve, and the particular conditions of our organizing. But left organizing is always ultimately about abolishing those things that hold people back from living freely and flourishingly among each other. I think I have argued that this means we should aim to make our organizing as generally uplifting and democratic as possible, and that we should try to stretch our imaginations so we don’t settle for something less democratic than what is viable.
It is healthy and helpful to hold a basic level of skepticism against arguments that try to justify less-democratic structures. Truly democratic structures can be effective, and I think many people will be surprised by how rewarding and efficient a democratic organization can be.
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Less-democratic organizing is a shortcut. We might find some gains in the short-to-medium term, but it can raise significant issues in the long run. We should err on the side of expanding people’s capacity for democracy and democratic influence in liberatory organizations, as to prevent anti-democratic norms and elite groups from becoming institutionalized in our socialist organizations. We ought to be uncompromising and intentional in our attempts to create highly-democratic, effective organizing structures, and we ought not jump to the conclusion that we have exhausted our options for potential democratic structures.
However, I realize it’s not effective for me to simply criticize these organizations—especially if they are currently more politically effective than most of the organizations that try to go the horizontalist, democratic route and fall into a badly structured mess. I should also give a few positive proposals for how to design highly-democratic organizations that are equally or more politically effective. In doing so, I would hopefully give an alternative to people who are displeased with the political inefficacy of many left orgs. And even better, I will try to help create effective, active democratic organizations which can serve as proofs-of-concept.
I will try to write a post soon with more specific and practical proposals for designing an effective, highly democratic organizing structure.