We Can’t “Onboard” the Working Class

Feb 17

A Critique of the GDC’s "State of DSA 2024-25" Report

By Gigi G.

DSA has recently achieved 100,000 members, but there is significant disagreement, and significant mystery, about the origins of its growth. The "State of DSA" report, published across two installments in February 2025 and February 2026 by the Growth and Development Committee (GDC), attempts to answer the question: where does DSA's growth come from? What is the best thing a DSA chapter can do to spur its own growth?

The report represents eighteen months of intense quantitative and qualitative analysis—pseudonymized membership data spanning a decade and covering over 175,000 member records, cross-chapter comparisons segmented by size and cohort, retention curves tracked across annual joining classes. [1] It controlled for chapter size and found, to its evident surprise, that size confers no recruitment advantage. It looked for outliers, identified them, and proposed follow-up investigation. It even structured interviews with chapter leaders across the country. [2]

In short, it did real research.

The committee deserves commendation for this work. It deserves commendation all the more because the work was so thorough, so methodical, and so honest in its presentation of results that it has accomplished something far more valuable than what the authors intended:

It has falsified not only every single one of its conclusions, but also its premises.

A. Methodology

Let us begin with an insight so stunning, it should have changed the trajectory of analysis the moment it appeared. The report states:

We were unable to identify chapters that have been able to consistently recruit and grow at a faster rate than other chapters. [...] there aren’t yet any long-lasting innovations that specific chapters have been able to implement to build their own momentum outside of broader political moments.” [3]

The GDC analyzed its mountain of data and produced null results. A dishonest committee could have refused to accept this, inflated the significance of marginal variations, and presented them as best practices. The GDC did not do this. It reports, with admirable candor, that different forms of internal growth and development taken alone have no measurable effect on recruitment.

Before examining the findings further, we must examine the method. The method determines what the investigation can and cannot perceive, and, in the case of the GDC report, the method is precisely what has predetermined the conclusions.

The committee divides chapter organizing into two domains: "internal power" and "external power." [4]

Internal power encompasses “organizational capacity, democratic processes, and membership engagement”—like recruitment, retention, chapter structure, political education.

External power encompasses “the chapter's ability to influence political and material conditions through collective action”—electoral campaigns, labor organizing, tenant organizing, mutual aid, etc.

The committee then decides: we will not be analyzing external power. They never explicitly say this, but we can easily see this is implicitly true. Their research methods are "insufficient to draw concrete conclusions about how the internal dimensions of power truly shape and interact with external power," [5] and the authors straightforwardly state they "could have spent more time exploring external areas of organizing in our listening sessions.” [6]

Of 8 sessions, there were none dedicated to external organizing. The committee controlled for external power both quantitatively and qualitatively. External power, the campaigns, the elections, the fights—is, as the report shows by omission, the half that actually produces growth and development. The report has falsified the premise that "internal power" drives DSA’s historic growth or development at all.

The GDC has adopted a Taylorist approach to science. Frederick Winslow Taylor, in The Principles of Scientific Management, articulated the premise on which his entire system rested: “Among the various methods and implements used in each element of each trade there is always one method and one implement which is quicker and better than any of the rest.” He then posited, after identifying that method, to implement it uniformly across all workers.

The GDC, like Taylor, went looking for internal power methods that are quicker and better. It compared chapters of every size. It cross-referenced tactics with outcomes across four consecutive years of chapter surveys. It searched for the statistically significant relationship between what chapters do internally and how fast they grow.

It found that no such method exists, or rather, the methods were deemed not to be significantly different from each other. The chapters are all doing the same thing—producing at fundamentally the same rate—regardless of the variations between what they do. "The correlations between chapter recruitment methods and chapter growth were both small and not statistically significant." [7] The committee presents this as a puzzle, and a methodological limitation. "More intimate research should be done at the chapter level to investigate specific conditions, strategies adopted, and their resulting effects."[8]

This is not a puzzle, it is the finding.

The idea that there is always one method quicker and better than the rest—has been refuted. The methods we have are all relatively highly efficient in regards to internal power, and basically distributed throughout the organization. A null result, the result the GDC finds—is evidence that there is no room left for this form of scientific management to improve! The GDC report is a monument to this ideology.

B. Case Studies Confirm the Null Data

The report's three case studies, intended to augment the null quantitative findings through qualitative depth, confirm what the data already shows: membership retention and growth is derivative of successful politics.

Chapter A, a large suburban chapter in the Northeast with 250-500 members, presents a textbook case of the internal apparatus in crisis. The interviewees describe an accumulation of dysfunction: "persistent structural challenges" including "leadership turnover, low participation in general meetings, and minimal coordination between working groups." The chapter's leadership model is described as "top-down, with little room for member input and frequent siloing among teams, committees, and working groups." Political education "had become sparse and irregular post-2021." DSA 101 orientations "often fail to plug new members into sustained involvement." "Communication breakdowns, member and leader turnover, and a lack of in-person events further hindered continuity, momentum, member development, and engagement."[9] The committee reads this as a story of institutional weakness.

But the interviewees themselves tell a different story. They note that the chapter's moments of vitality came from "the 2022 midterm electoral campaign and more recently with Palestine and immigrant solidarity work"[9]. These were moments that produced "upticks in engagement." The external campaigns produced engagement. The internal apparatus did not.

What we see in Chapter A is the contradiction between the organization's internal life and its external activity. The internal apparatus has become a fetter on the organization's development—a set of procedures and structures that impede rather than facilitate the organization's real work. Yet the committee reads this as a problem to be solved by more internal apparatus, more procedures, more structures. It cannot see that the apparatus’ relation to the external work is the problem. The interviewees have started to perceive this. The committee does not, because its framework has excluded it.

Chapter B, neighboring Chapter A and dramatically outperforming it, presents a mirror image. This chapter "focuses a lot on external work and assigns specific roles within campaigns to develop new leaders, utilizing a ladder of engagement model." Its political education is "relatively small scale [...] most of the consistent poli-ed is focused on onboarding members into norms and providing them with training" while "education that focuses on socialist analysis of specific issues is more sporadic." [10] And yet its retention is among the highest in the organization. The chapter integrates members through external campaigns, not through orientations. Its focus on external work is the source of its growth—but this is controlled out by the methodology established.

This chapter, in effect, has solved the problem that Chapter A failed to solve: it has subordinated its internal apparatus to its external activity. The apparatus exists to serve the campaigns, not the other way around. The committee records this but cannot theorize it, because its framework treats the internal and the external as separate domains rather than as in a dialectical unity.

Chapter C, a smaller West Coast chapter with under 250 members, appears, at first glance, to be a counterexample: here is a chapter where external campaigns appear to have damaged the organization. Its retention has "fluctuated from very-low to very-high"—very low with external electoral campaigns, and very high without external electoral campaigns. But examine what kind of campaigns damaged it. One interviewee "recounted a situation in which a chapter leader ran for office sparking tensions within the chapter about conflict of interest when they were perceived as using their position in the chapter to benefit their campaign." The result: "those who the interviewee identified as the 'progressive wing' are described as having left the chapter." Another "recounted another electoral story where they elected someone to office who they feel went rogue." Both agreed: "the last three electoral campaigns made the chapter weaker."[11]

This appears to contradict the argument that campaigns produce vitality until we examine what kind of campaigns damaged the chapter. These were not mass-mobilization efforts integrating hundreds of volunteers into a shared struggle. They were mired in endorsement disputes, conflict-of-interest scandals, negotiations with a rogue official. They did not originate in the course of mass struggle, but the internal actions of individual activists. In other words—an internal apparatus in visible, externally facing crisis. The GDC framework neglects this dimension.

On the other hand, both interviewees "expressed hope in the labor working group and Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) work." The chapter "has been developing labor leaders in their region and in local YDSA work. Their labor group meets weekly and is focused on new organizing for unions: helping local campaigns and hosting workshops with union members." The chapter has "seen strong momentum in campus organizing where socialists have integrated with worker organizing. YDSA members are active contributors to the chapter, including taking leadership roles."[11] The external labor work is showing potential dividends and growth! And the interviewees make no mention of the role of internal power in regard to this entirely.

What Chapter C reveals is that campaigns are not a magic bullet. Good campaigns, campaigns that genuinely engage masses of people, that are rooted in the real struggles of the working class, that develop leadership, are the ones which produce growth. Bad campaigns, campaigns that are sectarian, that are detached from mass struggle, that reflect the organization's internal pathologies, produce decline.

Chapter A withers without campaigns, Chapter B thrives through them, and Chapter C's retention rises and falls with the character of its external engagement with the world.

These are not separate, qualitative findings which contextualize a flawed report with null data—they are the confirmation that the data successfully controlled for external power, and confirmation that external power is the driving variable source of growth.

The committee has documented this in excruciating detail, but it has not understood it.

C. Prescription vs. Evidence

We return now to the innermost contradiction of the report—the point at which the data and the analysis collide with sufficient force to shatter one or the other. The report states:

We were unable to identify chapters that have been able to consistently recruit and grow at a faster rate than other chapters. [...] there aren’t yet any long-lasting innovations that specific chapters have been able to implement to build their own momentum outside of broader political moments. [3]

The committee, having documented that no internal chapter-level tactic produces measurably different outcomes, proceeds to prescribe internal chapter-level tactics. It does this without irony, without embarrassment, without even the saving grace of acknowledging the contradiction. The report presents a menu of "best practices" as though they were the distilled wisdom of successful chapters—even while admitting that chapters have not generally been able to implement them sustainably over time, or demonstrate that these practices lead to growth:

Standardized Onboarding: Structured programs to provide a "clear pathway to participate" and "New Member Orientations held either monthly or quarterly."
"Freshman" Focus: One-on-one meetings where new members are "offered a meeting with a more established chapter member" to combat the "freshman retention challenge."
Social Cohesion: Events ranging "from roller derby potlucks to hikes" to build "social fabric."
Formalized Internal Labor: Creating "established membership committees" and "investing in strong democratic cultures."

Marx once wrote of Proudhon that "M. Proudhon has the misfortune of being peculiarly misunderstood in Europe. In France, he has the right to be a bad economist, because he is reputed to be a good German philosopher. In Germany, he has the right to be a bad philosopher, because he is reputed to be one of the ablest French economists."

The GDC report enjoys a similar double credit. Its findings are taken seriously because its recommendations sound like organizing wisdom. Its recommendations are taken seriously because its findings look like data science. But the findings show that the recommended practices produce no measurable effect, and the recommendations are prescribed in defiance of the findings.

Strip away this mutual guarantee and there is nothing left: data that refutes the hypothesis, and a hypothesis that ignores the data. Our scientists, having found no evidence to support their prescriptions, abandon scientific method and resort to mysticism, faithful incantation of old, inherited ideas. This model of growth and development is in crisis.

D. External Events and Internal Crisis

Why does the committee misread its own data? Certainly not because the authors are stupid, nor because they are dishonest. The quality of the report foreclosed this possibility. The committee misreads its data because the analytical framework structurally excludes the answer. Just as the bourgeois economist is not lying or stupid when he tells you that profit is the natural reward of the capitalist's risk—they are trapped in categories that make the truth invisible. The GDC is trapped in the same way.

The report identifies the moments of explosive membership growth: "Bernie's campaign and Trump's election" in 2016; "the victory of AOC and other oppositional left-progressive congressional candidates" in 2018; "Bernie's campaign, the COVID pandemic lockdowns, George Floyd uprisings, and DSA's 100k membership campaign" in 2020; "Roe v. Wade overturned" in 2022; and "Trump's second election, resurgent resistance movement, and NYC DSA endorsed mayoral candidate Zohran Mamdani" in 2024-25. [12]

What the report calls "external events" are, in fact, the political expressions of class struggle in the United States. The Bernie Sanders campaigns were mass working-class mobilizations against the Democratic Party establishment, against austerity, against a political system that serves the “1%”. The George Floyd uprisings were the largest mass movement in American history, a spontaneous eruption of working-class and oppressed peoples' anger at police violence and racial capitalism. The victory of AOC was not an accident; it was the product of years of organizing by DSA and other left forces, channeling the energy of a working class desperate for representation that actually fights for them.

Ocasio-Cortez was a DSA member who won her primary on the strength of DSA's politics and organizing. Bernie's campaigns were staffed and canvassed by DSA members who constituted a significant fraction of his grassroots infrastructure. The George Floyd uprisings saw DSA chapters organizing bail funds, direct actions, demands to end police murder, and mutual aid across the country. Zohran Mamdani ran as an open DSA socialist on a DSA-endorsed platform with DSA volunteers knocking doors defending DSA’s position on Palestine, Affordability, and countless other key Democratic Socialist ideas. These are not things that happened to DSA. They are things DSA did.

The committee defines “active recruitment” as processes internal to the organizational apparatus. Everything else is “passive” or “externally driven.” The report states this plainly: "Chapters have not yet cracked the code on consistent organizing-driven recruitment: ebbs and flows in new members are often driven by external events and follow national trends." [13]

The phrase "organizing-driven recruitment" does extraordinary ideological work. It defines "organizing" as what the chapter apparatus does internally—orientations, one-on-ones, digital pipelines—and excludes everything else. Hundreds of volunteers knocking thousands of doors in an electoral campaign is not "organizing-driven"—while a monthly orientation that produces no new members is.

E. Producing History

"Men make their own history," Marx wrote in the Eighteenth Brumaire, "but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past." The committee has grasped only the second half of this sentence. It sees the circumstances and calls them "external events." It does not see that DSA made its own history within those circumstances.

What happens in a period where there are no external campaigns? Here again the Committee provides us with quantitative data. “in the doldrums of the Biden presidency, DSA slowly declined to about 51,000 members in October 2024.”[13] No campaigns, no growth. The committee records this fact, but does not analyze it.

The committee's qualitative listening sessions make the case even more explicitly: "Chapters that saw sustained membership growth tended to engage in... public campaigns, whether by seeking to elect a new Socialist in Office or by supporting a particular ballot initiative or other issue-based campaign." These campaigns "drove membership growth" and "tended to be clear, victory-focused campaigns oriented toward achieving a particular goal in a set period of time."[14]

Chapters that lacked campaigns "saw little-to-no recruitment outside of such periods." Some "reported that they did not mount public campaigns" and instead found themselves "in competition for new members with single-issue groups, such as environmental organizations, who absorbed potential DSA recruits."[14] The committee records these reports as challenges to be overcome through better internal processes. It does not draw the obvious conclusion: chapters without campaigns do not recruit because campaigns are what produce recruitment. If DSA produces no campaigns—its potential recruits are absorbed by organizations with campaigns! This last point is devastating and the committee does not grasp its significance whatsoever. When DSA offers no campaign, its potential recruits go to organizations that do offer campaigns. The absence of a campaign is not a "challenge" that can be addressed by a better orientation pipeline. It is the absence of the organization's reason to exist, and who can be surprised if an organization with no reason to exist begins to die?

The committee has documented, in its own qualitative findings, that campaigns produce growth. It has then classified this growth as "external" in its framework and incorrectly declares that "DSA has not been able to actively create the conditions for attracting new members." [15] and relegated the fundamental question—"What external tactics most effectively recruit and politicize members?"—to a "Future Work" section, as though it were a minor addendum.

E. Its the Political, Stupid

In 2015, DSA had roughly 6,500 members - a notable but marginal organization by any measure. Then, Bernie Sanders ran for president. Sanders did not run an orientation pipeline. He did not run a reading group. He ran a political campaign that named an enemy, proposed a program, and asked millions of people to fight for it. DSA's membership surged. By the time of Trump's election, it had roughly tripled.

In 2018, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez—a DSA member, running on DSA's endorsement, with DSA volunteers on the doors - defeated a ten-term incumbent in a congressional primary. DSA's membership roughly doubled again, to nearly 60,000. No internal development program in the history of the organization has produced anything within an order of magnitude of that single campaign's effect on membership.

In 2020, Bernie's second run generated another wave. Then George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police, and the largest protest movement in American history erupted across every major city in the country. Chapters across the country mobilized members into the streets, organized mutual aid, and joined coalitions with police accountability demands ranging from abolition, and community control. This was not an "external event" that happened to DSA. It was a political crisis in which DSA members acted and the organization's membership surged past 90,000. The internal facing 100k membership drive, launched in the same period, rode the momentum of a membership already activated by struggle but failed to realize its objective.

From 2020-2024, During the Biden presidency, DSA ran few major campaigns and no galvanizing national fights were underway, so DSA slowly declined to about 51,000 members in October 2024. The overturn of Roe v. Wade in 2022 generated a brief surge of activity, but not enough to reverse the general decline. The internal apparatus—the orientations, the one-on-ones, the reading groups, the social events, the onboarding pipelines—was running the entire time. Chapters did not stop holding meetings. Steering committees did not stop meeting. Political education did not cease. The apparatus was fully operational and membership nearly halved.

From 2024-25, Trump's second election and Zohran Mamdani's historic mayoral campaign—a DSA campaign from beginning to end—ceased the decline and rapidly pushed DSA past 100,000 members for the first time.

Every major spike in DSA's membership corresponds to a political development and in all cases, a development that DSA itself participated in or created. Every period of decline corresponds to the absence of such developments. The internal apparatus is constant. Politics is variable, and what the GDC’s data shows is that only the variable can explain the outcomes.

Politics drives DSA's growth, not logistics, not internal development, not consciousness-raising. Campaigns that contest for power, fights that have stakes, victories that change material conditions. These are what have built DSA from 6,500 members to 100,000. The orientation pipeline did not do this. The onboarding sequence did not do this. The reading group did not do this. The one-on-one did not do this. The politics did this.

F. Consciousness and Being

"It is not the consciousness of men that determines their being," Marx wrote in the Preface to A Contribution to the Critique of Political Economy, "but, on the contrary, their social being that determines their consciousness."

The GDC prescribes consciousness-first interventions: political education, mentoring, development—interventions that aim to transform the member's consciousness as a precondition of her political engagement. The data shows that being-first interventions -campaigns, fights, shared struggle—are what produce both growth and political consciousness. Consciousness does not precede action. Action produces consciousness.

The working class does not first develop revolutionary consciousness and then act. It acts—in strikes, in campaigns, in moments of crisis—and through that action develops the consciousness that makes further action possible.

If Ocasio-Cortez's victory generated twenty thousand new members, the question is not "how do we onboard twenty thousand people through our existing apparatus?" The question is: how do we run fifty more campaigns like that? If the committee's own data shows that "members brought into a chapter by a particular campaign often lapsed into inactivity when that campaign ended and was not replaced by another such campaign," the question is not "how do we retain members between campaigns?"[16] The question is: why is there a gap between campaigns at all?

G. Correct Conclusions from Correct Data

Marx describes a pattern that illuminates DSA's present crisis:

The first phase of the proletariat's struggle against the bourgeoisie is marked by a sectarian movement. That is logical at a time when the proletariat has not yet developed sufficiently to act as a class. [...] So long as the sects are justified (historically), the working class is not yet ripe for an independent historical movement. As soon as it has attained this maturity all sects are essentially reactionary.

The sect turns inward because it has nowhere else to turn. It develops its doctrine, cultivates its membership, refines its processes, and relates to the outside world primarily through interpersonal recruitment into itself. This is historically justified—even progressive—when there is no mass movement to participate in, no campaign to wage, no election to contest. But when the conditions for mass political action exist, the sect's inwardness becomes a fetter. The committee's own data shows that DSA's growth derives not from its sect-like internal processes but from its moments of class-like political action. The organization grows when it acts as a political force in the world, and withers when it retreats into self-administration.

The GDC report, for all its empirical rigor, is evidence that condemns the sectarian phase into history: it studies the organization's relationship to itself and finds, correctly, that this relationship no longer produces growth.

The report ends with a call: "Finally, we encourage everyone to take a scientific approach to organizing. We are all working together on a historic, global group project. Do your part by reflecting critically on your own organizing experiences and collectively applying those lessons when planning for the future."[17]

There is no doubt this is true. Let us take a scientific approach.

The hypothesis was that improving internal chapter tactics can drive recruitment and retention. The data refuted the hypothesis. A scientific approach requires that we revise the hypothesis—not merely refine the experiment and hope for different results, as the GDC suggests. DSA has 100,000 members. It has elected socialists to office across the country. It has played a leading role in the resurgent labor movement, in tenant organizing, in the fight for Palestine. Every one of these achievements, the very achievements that produced the growth the committee now seeks to explain was an act of external power. The committee's own data proves that DSA already knows how to grow. It grows when it fights.

Internal development is not unimportant. But it is derivative. It derives its significance from engagement with the class struggle, and from nothing else. The internal apparatus can only exist to make the class struggle possible and for no other reason.

The committee has given us the data, and the data speaks clearly. The only question is whether we have the courage to follow where it leads, or whether we will retreat once more into marginality.

Footnotes

Note: “State of DSA 2024-2025” is not publicly available, but it is available to DSA members on the DSA forum.

[1] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Methodology, pp. 5-10.
[2] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Listening Sessions, pp. 8-9
[3] - GDC, "State of DSA Part Two: Lessons Learned”
[4] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Conceptual Framework, pp. 6-7.
[5] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Limitations of Qualitative Methods, p. 10.
[6] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Future Work, p. 41.
[7] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Membership Recruitment, p. 17.
[8] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Discussion, p. 38.
[9] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Case Study: Chapter A, pp. 32-34.
[10] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Case Study: Chapter B, pp. 34-35.
[11] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Case Study: Chapter C, pp. 35-36.
[12] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Limitations of Qualitative Methods, pp. 10-11.
[13] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Conclusion, p. 41.
[14] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Challenges and Best Practices in Member Recruitment, pp. 24–25.
[15] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Discussion, p. 37.
[16] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Challenges and Best Practices in Member Retention, p. 25.
[17] - GDC, "State of DSA 2024-25," Conclusion, p. 42.
https://democraticleft.dsausa.org/2025/02/27/state-of-dsa-part-one-welcome-to-dsa/