California DSA is an unprecedented experiment. Like all experiments, its utility hinges on analyzing its results and drawing conclusions about the accuracy of its hypotheses and predictions. Without doing this work we risk replicating organizing structures and practices out of habit rather than meaningful analysis. This piece offers such an analysis, beginning with some background on how the state body came to be.
Brief History
CA DSA spun out of a 2020 cross-chapter effort to support California’s Proposition 15; after the electoral season ended, an exploratory committee was formed with the goal of creating a first-of-its-kind formation to advance DSA’s goals across the Golden State. The first statewide meetings began in 2022.
The body’s purpose and duty are outlined in its bylaws and further articulated in the body’s founding vision document, which states its goals relating to statewide democratic structure, cross-state communication, coalition campaign work, and chapter development.
CA DSA is made up of two basic parts: the State Council, representing delegates from all of its constituent chapter members, and the State Committee, a leadership body elected by the Council delegates. The State Committee mirrored many local chapters, with co-chairs, a secretary, a treasurer, and a series of working groups and committees centered around political and administrative issues like Ecosocialism, Housing, and Comms.
In 2023, one year after CA DSA’s inception, former CA DSA Secretary and current NPC member Sam Heft-Luthy reflected on the promises and pitfalls of the statewide experiment over its first year. I served as co-chair and treasurer the following years.
Assessing Our Progress
In order to analyze the success and pitfalls of CA DSA over the course of my tenure, I will draw on California DSA’s vision document to assess its ability to achieve its goals.
Democratic Structure
This section outlines several goals stipulating proportional representation for chapters, guidelines for electing representatives, thresholds for passing proposals, guidelines for managing the Political Action Committee (PAC), and expectations that work not be onerous for representatives. CA DSA was able to achieve most of these before I was elected. Chapters democratically determined their own selection structure and were proportionally represented at California DSA meetings, and representation on the State Council was not onerous.
These structures did not meaningfully translate to democratic input, however. They also demanded an outsized administrative lift to maintain in relation to our limited accomplishments. Running quarterly council meetings for a statewide org, updating delegate rolls, maintaining tech tools, all demanded labor that limited our ability to drive political work. In perhaps the most stark example, the PAC had racked up thousands of dollars in fines from noncompliance prior to my term and it took me nearly a year and over 100 email exchanges with national compliance staff to bring it into compliance. And yet the PAC was not used once during my term.
Coalitions and External Communications
Next, the vision document outlines how CA DSA will establish lasting infrastructure to build institutional memory, maintain relationships with unions and progressive orgs while collaborating on campaigns, establishing processes for endorsements and garnering support for statewide campaigns that connect us to broad sections of the working class, and develop clear internal and external-facing communications and messaging.
Our success in this area was mixed. One of the highlights of our work was the California DSA Newsletter, which serves as a way for comrades to keep in touch about what chapters across the state were doing and provide an outlet for diverse perspectives. We also kept abreast of local electoral conditions, established a process for taking positions on statewide legislation, offered informal advice to the National Electoral Commission, drafted a voter guide, boosted local labor and mutual aid efforts, and other modest activities.
Beyond that, however, most of these goals were either not met at all, or were technically but not meaningfully met. Our impact on external political organizations and terrains of struggle were minimal. For example, we were technically a member of the Healthy California Now coalition but lacked capacity to send anyone to get involved. For the first several months of my term we equally struggled to find someone to the Housing Now Coalition meetings so I attended myself, far from an ideal arrangement given how busy I was serving as co-chair. In effect, our relationship to that coalition served exclusively as a mechanism for report backs rather than a venue for organizing work.
Growing and Strengthening Chapters
Finally, the vision document outlines ambitious goals for how CA DSA will grow and strengthen chapters, including administering state trainings on list work, recruitment, and meeting facilitation, providing administrative support for national Growth and Development projects like mentorship, facilitating skill-shares across chapters, developing new chapters via collaborative campaigns, and liaising with YDSA and organizing committees.
I was most disappointed in our inability to address these goals. While we were able to technically address some of them, they clearly were not sufficiently met and many went unaddressed entirely. For example, over the course of the year we held zero trainings. We did hold a single California DSA 101 course session in conjunction with one CA DSA-sponsored Solidarity Dues phone bank with the National Growth and Development Committee. Both efforts were intended to activate members across California into CA DSA.
The result of that experiment was emblematic of fundamental contradictions. First, the few organizing efforts that manifested were largely developed and executed by State Committee officers on top of their existing administrative and leadership duties. Second, they largely failed to activate new members into the state body. For example, nobody outside of the phone bank organizers attended the phone bank. Specifically: five people attended, two were members of the State Committee and the others were national GDC members. Six people attended the California DSA 101 course.
We embarked on very few other efforts to grow and develop chapters and all of them faced similar challenges. Other goals, meanwhile, went entirely unaddressed; we did not meaningfully liaise with YDSA or organizing committees, nor were we able to develop new and growing chapters through collaborative campaigns.
In summary: we built much of the basic infrastructure of a state body, but struggled to achieve most of our organizational goals.
Reflection
In discussing the challenges above with other members of the State Committee I used an analogy: it felt like we were staffing a large ship that could not leave harbor. We worked tirelessly to keep it functioning and afloat by swabbing the deck, mending the sails, and pumping the bilges. We even managed to shove off a few times through sheer will. But we never truly set sail.
I believe this is a result of the following contradictions:
Prefiguration
We built a statewide body without an existing statewide campaign on the assumption that one would materialize, but none did in spite of efforts to identify some. This left us with a vessel but no concrete mission.
Missing Labor Pool
CA DSA’s pool of members necessarily overlapped with local chapters leading to competition for labor. As a result, chapters had little capacity to engage, leaving the State Committee to execute both the administrative and political functions of CA DSA. Efforts to activate at-large members likewise yielded little success due to low onboarding capacity, the long-distance nature of our organizing, and lack of clear campaigns to onboard them into.
Lack of Support
Neither national nor locals were equipped to invest a meaningful amount of money, staff, guidance or communications support to build organizational buy-in or connective tissue to locals. This limited our ability to drive resources towards more ambitious efforts.
Disconnect from the Organization
Although delegates came to quarterly meetings, and a National field organizer regularly attended statewide meetings, CA DSA often felt like it floated between the two layers rather than connecting them and its efforts to create connective tissue were fruitless. For example, the body executed a listening session prior to my term, but with no labor pool or guiding campaign it felt largely prohibitive and futile to replicate.
This disconnect diminished our democratic mandate by separating us from our constituents and occasionally manifested in conflict like when our statewide voter guide recommendations conflicted with those of local chapters. It also resulted in chapters like San Francisco failing to send a full slate of delegates to the state council in the first place.
Duplication of Work
Much of the work CA DSA did was already happening at the national or local level. The phone banks we sponsored were already being run by the National GDC and efforts to sponsor those phone banks to activate California members mostly resulted in the State Committee serving as a labor pool for national GDC, which often left me to wonder whether my labor would be better spent directly in GDC.
Moving Forward
In early 2024, when I felt like our experiment had largely stalled out, I put forward plans to drastically scale back, focus on a central priority, and even consider dissolving. While the State Committee largely agreed with the contradictions outlined above, we disagreed on the severity of the problem and their implications. Nevertheless, we compromised on dissolving most of the body’s working groups and committees and focusing largely on a single statewide effort, The Affordable Rent-Controlled Housing (ARCH) Campaign, to support a slate of ballot measures coordinated across chapters. The idea was to mitigate some of the burdensome administrative and political work of the State Committee, provide one clear campaign around which to center our vision, and create concrete ways for statewide members to plug in.
As a result, involvement in CA DSA has largely increased, with some larger chapters like SF and LA folding ARCH campaign work into their existing electoral efforts, and smaller and medium chapters like San Diego, Long Beach, & North Central Valley with no existing campaigns stepping up to do campaign work. It’s unclear the extent to which this campaign developed organizers and chapters, but it certainly gave the ship more direction.
Now that the campaign is over, we should assess CA DSA once again and consider whether this pivot has addressed the contradictions and challenges above. This assessment should be based on a concrete set of criteria. Did we achieve material wins and have a significant impact on external political organizations and terrains of struggle? Did we grow and strengthen chapters? Were the contradictions of labor pool, funding, and connection to locals and National addressed?
If the answer to these questions is largely yes, our task should be to build on this priority structure while we move forward, doubling down on what worked and letting go of what didn’t.
If the answer is largely no, we should not repeat our mistakes or muddle along. The cost to DSA as a whole is too great, in terms of labor, money, and opportunity. It may be better to let other seeds take root.
For other states looking to follow California’s lead, I urge them to ask more fundamental questions rather than copy and paste the California DSA model. Why do we want to build out a state body? Is the goal to build out a meaningful democratic middle layer that emulates a local chapter? Is it to simply run statewide campaigns? Which of the challenges outlined above could impact your efforts and how can you avoid them? How will local statewide conditions inform your approach?
To help organizers think through how to approach statewide work I have developed a rubric informed by my experience in California DSA. Organizers can find it here.
California DSA’s modest successes, fundamental contradictions, and experience with restructuring offer lessons for organizers across the country interested in exploring statewide formations. By experimenting and adapting with our eyes on a socialist horizon I feel confident we will continue to become an organization that is more than the sum of its parts.