To Build A Diverse Socialist Movement—Invest In Membership

Membership work in a mass membership organization such as DSA requires a high amount of capacity, especially during major growth periods such as the last two years. This is especially true for NYC-DSA, which at 15k members is the largest DSA chapter and well over twice as large as the runner-up DSA LA. Successfully onboarding new members at this scale requires an operation that can grow without sacrificing consistency. It also needs to be adapted for irregular growth—there are periods where NYC-DSA grew by 100 members in one month and by 1,000 in the next.

These conditions result in a high demand for administrative labor, but administrative work is one of the most difficult things to maintain and reproduce using volunteer organizers. This has placed enormous pressure on the Membership Committee, the body charged with onboarding and organizing new members. If the Membership Committee is unable to adequately scale to meet the moment there will be negative implications for NYC-DSA’s ability to grow. Just as significantly, this will also adversely affect NYC-DSA’s ability to continue to diversify beyond the predominantly white activist base that joined en masse following the Bernie 2016 and 2020 campaigns. This is not a niche issue but a serious strategic concern. At NYC-DSA’s size, failure to diversify our base risks limiting our growth.

The most direct way to address this issue, and to continue to ensure NYC-DSA is positioned to recruit an increasingly representative section of the multiracial working class, is to allocate more resources to member organizing and recruitment work. One of the most effective ways to do this would be to hire additional staff to assist with the administrative overhead. The benefits of this could be further enhanced by additionally tasking staff with assisting Affinity Groups (chapter bodies focused on recruiting and organizing members of specific demographics) and by investing in a membership drive in coordination with these Affinity Groups to facilitate targeted recruitment and leadership development of comrades of color.

The ‘Pro-Growth Approach’ & Demographic Expansion

Much of the Membership Committee’s ability to expand has relied on it functioning as a ‘countercyclical’ outlet for organizing work where participation slows down during the peak of field operations but surges after elections are over. Recognizing this, Membership Committee organizers have increasingly operated based on ‘quarterly absorption plans’ planned around these cycles. However, we have had a difficult time sustaining this strategy in recent months, in part owing to the consistent administrative burden required to maintain existing initiatives. So while the Membership Committee has managed to meet the moment by onboarding more members than ever before it has not expanded its operations evenly. In particular our sponsoring of socials, clubs and large events (sometimes referred to as spectacles) has not advanced on par with the ‘bread and butter’ work of onboarding, coffee with comrades and 101s. 

This is a problem because these socials, clubs and spectacles have been a key component of NYC-DSA’s growth and diversification strategy for the last two years. This strategy has its origins in insights that as NYC-DSA’s existing demographic imbalances were already the norm, committing to more proactive recruitment may ameliorate the problem—even if that recruitment is not explicitly targeting people of color as it necessarily entails engaging with new bases. This approach, which I will refer to as the “Pro-Growth Approach,” requires further refinement but has proven effective—NYC-DSA has grown several times larger and gradually more diverse since its application. We still have a long way to go, but uneven member demographics is an issue that has been taken seriously and one which we have been making progress on.

Obviously both this growth and subsequent improvement of demographic imbalances owe much to our high-profile electoral victories, especially Zohran and Darializa’s. But we also know that growth can be driven by strong fundamentals such as listbuilding, which implies that the quality of the list being built impacts demographic distribution of growth. To this point: socials, clubs and spectacles have consistently been among NYC-DSA’s biggest listbuilders and several of them, such as our Socialist Soccer League, are among the most diverse spaces in the organization on racial lines. If NYC-DSA cannot expand and refine these offerings, it increases the risk that our growth among underrepresented demographics such as Black and Latinx comrades stalls out.

Affinity Groups & Developing Diverse Leadership 

In addition to the ‘Pro-Growth Approach’ outlined, developing and supporting Affinity Groups is another prominent strategy NYC-DSA has adopted to address demographic imbalances. Affinity groups are well positioned to run their own socials and other listbuilding approaches oriented towards their target demographics. They can also help address issues outside of recruitment by identifying and recommending practices which accommodate people outside of NYC-DSA’s largest bases (including but not limited to parents, people with disabilities and older comrades) and developing a ‘middle layer’ of organizers which can eventually feed into chapter leadership. This last detail is an essential consideration in conversations about internal diversity and equity - diverse membership that does not eventually feed into diverse leadership is ultimately not reflective of an equitable organization.

While improved coordination with chapter Affinity Groups has repeatedly been identified as a priority by Membership Committee leadership, capacity constraints have again made this difficult to act on to the full extent necessary. This is not to say the Membership Committee has been passive. Members of the Organizing Committee (the MC OC) have repeatedly met with their leaders, prioritized their events for promotion to new members, and have been working on integrating Affinity Groups into existing onboarding workflows. Individuals within the Membership Committee have also advised the creation of our newest Affinity Group DesiSocialists and are in the process of supporting organizers attempting to create additional bodies. But ultimately more work needs to be done here, and that work will be difficult to maintain without additional resources. Administrative support is especially important here as coordinating between various chapter bodies is infamously capacity consuming.

Invest In Membership

While NYC-DSA has an existing staffer tasked with membership duties, they have a wide range of additional responsibilities such as supporting leadership priorities, managing offices, overseeing chapter elections and other important tasks. Beyond this the investment has been minimal, and the Membership Committee, in coordination with the Tech & Tools Committee, has done incredible work with next to nothing. Most of our tools are developed in-house by Tech and Tools and we have grown skilled at identifying free or cheap venues for events. By doing so we have continued to operate with minimal cost to the organization. Our largest events have added tens of thousands of contacts to the chapter list, and directly contributed to hundreds of joins, which more than accounts for anything we have spent. There is a case to be made that the benefits of hiring a staffer dedicated to supporting membership organizing would fully or partially pay for themselves in the form of increased recruitment and especially increased retention.

Furthermore, as we continue to grow our demographic imbalances are increasingly becoming a liability as a line of attack. While the sincerity of our detractors is up for debate, the most effective smears often have a grain of truth. This risks hindering our expansion as we build ourselves through the Party Surrogate model as we likely need to make stronger inroads with older Black communities to succeed. 

I am proud to say NYC-DSA has invested serious time, consideration and effort into membership work - but I would like to be able to say we’ve done even more. There are currently three resolutions up for consideration in NYC-DSA’s City Convention in November which I feel would substantially aid these efforts - Put Members First: Hire an additional Membership Staffer and Organize our Base: Black and Latinx Membership Drive and Sustaining Engagement, Retention, and Leadership Cultivation of South Asian Working-Class Socialists in NYC-DSA . Combined, these resolutions represent a strategic investment in chapter membership and a commitment to building the diversity that our organization requires to succeed.