I find that Dan Husman usually has fair and even-handed takes on East Bay DSA (EBDSA) drama, and this one on our bylaws situation is excellent. His second-to-last paragraph is key. Many of us in EBDSA have been trying to make this point to our Local Council for months, with little success:

Although there have been attempts to paint this kind of criticism of the current leadership as that of a small fringe, I can assure you that it is not. I am not affiliated with the Communist Caucus or with the L4A group. I have spoken with members outside these current battle lines and organizations, and there is a concern that leadership has isolated and ossified itself. Several members I know with these concerns, including those with leadership roles, are unwilling to criticize leadership openly. This is not a sign of a healthy organization.

Like Dan, I am not affiliated with the Communist Caucus or Leadership for All. Until recently I was most closely affiliated with the Local Council. I am not going to address the Communist Caucus or Leadership for All’s behavior, nor the specifics of various proposed bylaws (header image cat lied to you, sorry). Instead, I offer this analysis of the breakdown of trust between EBDSA membership and our Local Council in the hope that other chapters can avoid replicating our mistakes in their work.

Our Local Council’s first and most fundamental mistake is to equate dissent with opposition.

If you’re wondering why you always see the same names critiquing EBDSA online, it’s not because they’re the only ones who are unhappy with the direction of our chapter. The rest of us can’t speak up. Expressing or supporting dissent is seen as a personal attack and a mark of untrustworthiness. I have seen members of our Local Council monitor Facebook post likes and petition signatures, and make decisions about organizing assignments based on that. That means only members who are comfortable being, or are already, shut out of official EBDSA activities take the risk.

On the one hand, hey, fair. Why invite your political opposition to organize with you? On the less paranoid hand, dissent is not opposition. Critique is not opposition. Requesting clear and respectful communication is not opposition. Demanding transparency from elected leaders is not opposition. These are gifts from members to leadership, showing that we are actively engaged, we are passionate, and we want to participate in our chapter. Even if dissent were opposition, DSA is a big tent and a tiny movement. Is the sin of signing a critical petition really worth ostracizing a good organizer?

Our Local Council’s second mistake is to insist that all dissent or opposition comes from a tiny, radical, vocal minority trying to seize power for dubious ends.

This is simply factually incorrect. EBDSA organizers frequently hear (or share) frustrations from ordinary rank-and-file members similar to critiques we hear from more radical elements such as the Communist Caucus or Leadership for All: specifically that we are overly bureaucratic, that our Local Council’s decision-making is opaque and poorly communicated, and that there are few opportunities to genuinely influence the strategy of the campaigns we participate in. It’s not too hard to pick up on some of our chapter’s problems once you get involved. Noticing a problem and suggesting ways to solve it is not an attack from an unhinged fringe.

If you’re wondering why we don’t tell our leaders these things in private where they’re more likely to listen, we have. Usually by the time @rehbca or @mclumpen tweet, the situation has been discussed to death with Local Council members and other EBDSA organizers. Most of us try to escalate these frustrations to the Local Council quickly. Sometimes they are heard, and the Local Council does something like publish their meeting agendas online with a public commentary period. I think their recommended bylaws might be another example. That’s great! But I’ve found that most often, I was met with a lecture about what I should think, told that I have been misled by misanthropes, or most frequently, asked “Who said that?” This was not usually a question I felt comfortable answering because I worried that members would be punished for speaking up or expressing doubts.

Our Local Council’s third mistake, which does the most damage to our chapter, is to regard conflict resolution as a distraction from real organizing.

We don’t win solely on right ideas or snappy Jacobin pieces, we win on people. That means if you want socialism, you have to learn to work with people. The hard work of organizing is not building a relationship with people who will make photocopies or bring food to the canvass. It’s managing those relationships as they mature and learning to deal with conflict in a productive and healthy way.

To take one example, the current Local Council-Leadership for All bylaws conflict never needed to happen. Back in October, many EBDSA members were confused and concerned about the way our chapter engaged with the Bay to Brakelights project, a Local Council proposition about caucus language, and many smaller incidents that had added up to a big ball of anger on all sides. There was a flurry of organizing to convince the Local Council and leaders of some of the caucuses who now make up Leadership for All to have a mediated conversation and come to some kind of resolution on a path forward. This effort was shared among appointed organizers (including myself), elected leaders, and regular members. We represented a broad spectrum of members who asked for specific changes in our chapter to alleviate tension, not limited to mediation. I want to be clear that we did not suggest legal mediation, which is costly, but a conversation with a neutral party present to facilitate.

Members of the Local Council repeatedly told myself and others that this would cede power, which was unacceptable. You can see how neatly the mistakes compound: we dissented, which made us opposition; opposition made us a tiny minority (or meant we were misled by one) and we had to be ignored for the health of the chapter; therefore the entire effort was a waste of time and resources we could have spent on real organizing. This is precisely the same chain of logical leaps unfolding now over bylaws.

Since the fall our chapter hasn’t stopped spending massive amounts of time, energy, and resources on one unresolved conflict after another. Had the Local Council had a mediated discussion with the then-merely-frustrated caucus leaders, they could have started to build a more productive working relationship. Had all parties established some trust, the Local Council’s recent decision to agendize only 6 amendments might have been received in a more forgiving light. Perhaps they could have worked together to streamline the entire amendment process.

Members of EBDSA’s Local Council insist that dealing with interpersonal conflict is not real organizing work, which is one of the reasons why they are bad at it. Because our leaders do not resolve their own conflicts, they draw the rest of the chapter into them. This traps all of us — from the Local Council to the silent dissenters to the Communist Caucus — in ever-worsening cycles of wasted time and energy that inevitably lead to burnout. It turns out that maintaining healthy relationships is the real work, and we need to do it if we want to have a sustainable movement.

I respect many of the people on our Local Council. I genuinely believe that they are doing their best, but it gets increasingly more difficult to make the right decision when you’re weighed down by mistakes you can’t acknowledge. I also very much respect Daniel D, though I felt his analysis of our chapter in his recent Medium article was so egregiously incorrect that I had to write my own. I don’t enjoy seeing any of these people dragged on social media. But I hate our chapter’s toxic culture. I hate that I only now feel comfortable speaking up, after I stepped down from an appointed leader role and canceled my local dues.

Our Local Council’s fourth and final mistake is that they believe they haven’t lost any good organizers to their behavior.

I don’t really know what to say to that. I know I look around and note missing faces, people who only a few months ago showed up to every meeting with snacks, enthusiasm, determination, and skills they learned on the ground with us. The only thing I can say is what one of them told me back in October: this isn’t what I signed up for.