Tag: philosophy

  • Democracy: On meetings and voting

    by Dan F

    There have been some differences of opinion in MADSA about decision making, meetings, and in general how we organize over the past few years. And contention has often arisen around bylaw changes. Here are some of my migraine-addled opinions on why this is happening.

    Two examples of contention

    First, in the 2025 convention there was a bylaw change proposed to make working groups accountable to a SMART goal-based structure. In the introduction, the intent was written as about “democracy, accountability, and transparency”, and about improving communication between working groups and the general membership. However, as written, the amendment would have invalidated the proposed charters of both of the active working groups, thus dissolving them until rewritten to include SMART goals.

    That was a substantive change that, in practice, was about more than communication and transparency. Is “abolition of police and prisons” a “particular goal or goals”? How do we measure it? This change applied a certain way of thinking to working groups, implying they could only be limited-term engagements… and the implication ended up feeling like an attack or attempted critique to some folks active in those working groups, by shutting down their charters. It was unclear to AWG members how exactly SMART-based goals would fit into abolitionist organizing, which works on short and long horizons. [It doesn’t help that bringing bylaw changes to a convention that also passes charters based on the bylaws we just changed is confusing at best.]

    Even though it likely wasn’t written with this intent (going by the introductory paragraphs), this amendment felt like an attempt to try to force some organizers to organize in a different fashion. This bylaw amendment did not pass. I think something quite similar could easily pass next year, and it’s definitely an open question of how to better link working groups with the wider body and each other, to avoid siloing. [Aside: I like the idea of sociocracy’s circles approach, where in large enough groups, for a connection between groups A and B there are two liasons: one that represents A to B and one that goes B to A.]

    A second recent example of disagreement was the proposal to remove an asynchronous voting requirement on decisions about endorsements, and also when dissolving our Community Accountability Committee. That change was intended to make it possible (but not required) for those decisions to happen synchronously, in meetings.

    This opened a divide, with a few heated and wide-ranging threads in Slack in advance. I’m arguing that the reason this went that way is that it felt like a coercive change to some people in the chapter, especially those who want to include all members in decisions, or those who can’t attend meetings all the time. I wonder what the chapter discussion around this would have looked like had the initial frame been more focused on “we don’t need to require these votes, we can still vote to take things asynchronously if we find that important”, but it became clear that the real discussion was about what the default mode should be. There was clearly a wide divide between people who wanted asynchronous votes and those who did not.

    So from these examples, it seems that our orientation to coercion and our personal take on meetings (as effective organizing and decision arenas) may be at the root of some of our disagreements. And writing this is my attempt to dive down into why that is, and why we should care about these differences if we want to build and maintain a “big tent” organization working toward liberation.

    I also want to make it clear that everything here is my personal take after talking with folks from various persuasions. I encourage people to write a different perspective. And I especially encourage that if any of this raises your hackles.

    Coercion

    Let me back up a step. What do I mean when I talk about coercion?

    Generally, when Marxists or anarchists analyze the modern state, we say that the state hierarchy has a monopoly on violence. That’s the purest form of coercion. But coercion can pop up anywhere there’s an asymmetry of power. Anarchists worry about this a lot.

    We should aim for the absence of coercion, where nobody feels they are doing something because of pressure from a “higher power” of any kind. But the dynamics of coercion do get strange in large groups. As the author of the voting change above noted, if the “paper members” of our chapter vote strongly yes on something that the hardcore meeting-attenders vote strongly no on, is that a kind of group coercion?

    I think we’re actually in a place where people on all sides of that decision were thinking a bit through the frame of coercion, but thinking about it differently because of their (obviously) different experiences trying to organize.

    You’re organizing wrong

    Now here’s where this gets tricky. I’m going to advocate for more pluralistic methods of organizing, and against a Single Path To Perfect Organizing. In a way, this is kind of parallel to the “paradox of tolerance” argument.

    I say that anyone who thinks they know the One True Way To Organize is wrong, and anyone who tries stuff and makes good things happen in the world, no matter how they do it, is correct. But it’s going to sound like I am saying “You’re organizing wrong!” and “Never tell someone they’re organizing wrong!” at the same time.

    How do we solve the paradox of tolerance? In social spaces, we’re tolerant of any way anyone wants to be, except anyone who tries to draw a hard line around what can and cannot be tolerated. [Intolerance.]

    How do we solve the paradox of how to organize? In organizing spaces, we organize any way that gets things done, except any way that tries to draw a hard line around how we do and do not organize. [Disorganization?]

    The end goal of both of these solutions is to have the most people left in the plural, and only leave bad actors on the outside. Bad actors who we can hopefully convince that our pluralism is actually great, and they should come in! The water’s fine! Stop trying to draw artificial lines on parts of the ocean, right?

    There are certainly harmful patterns we need to learn to avoid. But we also need to remember that this is always going to be volunteers opting in to making the world better, and not everybody is going to want to squeeze into the same box.

    What is the goal?

    So let’s get down in it. What are we trying to build as we organize?

    My take? We’re trying to build test labs of liberation and democracy that solve societal issues. Some of those issues are thanks to capitalism, but others are likely inherent to human societies of any persuasion. [See this Wesley Morgan piece on building dual power if you want to delve into the anarchist thought here.] We need to show people that cooperative organizations full of self-managed individuals can, and do, build a better world.

    “Democracy” is one of those words that gets tossed around, assuming we all agree at what we’re pointing at when we organize. But this concept is tricky. It implies that everyone has an equal say. But it can get used to refer to actually functioning cooperative or direct democracy, all the way over the spectrum to the supposedly “representative democracy” that we currently live inside in our Ye Olde Racist Crumbling Empire, which quite clearly does not give the dēmos any actual krátos.

    So for now, let’s define democracy in a kind of Erik Olin Wright-ish way, as the maximally effective sharing of power so that everyone has the highest likelihood of being involved in decisions that impact them.

    Meetings, meetings, meetings

    The trope about socialists is that they love meetings. Many of us assume that meetings are a way to maximize democracy. But that assumption can fail, based on group size, style, goals, or composition. We can all watch this happen, as groups grow and shrink and change. Requiring that decisions happen in synchronous meetings can certainly have advantages, but for questions that impact the whole body of the chapter, what is the best path?

    I believe we need to try many methods to make decisions. And try some new ways. Not everybody can take the time to sit in every meeting. And this insight needs to be woven through all organizing that pushes for liberation: DSA’s cultural focus on meetings may have something to do with why we aren’t reaching the working class with our socialist methods. It doesn’t make sense to have everyone in every meeting all the time. And also, it’s getting to the point where getting everyone in a single room is expensive and difficult.

    So how can we still effectively share power? Personally, as someone who looks through an anarchist lens, I believe that the fundamental problem we need to solve in the world is minimizing coercion. And if you think about it, minimal coercion looks a lot like maximal power sharing, right?

    The problems ensue when we get stuck in certain ways of thinking about power sharing. And I think synchronous meetings are often effective at sharing power, but they are certainly not the only way.

    Coercion and hierarchy

    I’m pretty allergic to hierarchy. Ironic that I say this while sitting on MADSA’s executive committee this year, right? Maybe I should rephrase. I’m allergic to coercive hierarchies. I get concerned about power, because most of the capitalist systems, and even some of the liberatory systems humans have tried to build to counter existing power (cough, unions) have crystallized into power hierarchies which do the exact fucking opposite of reducing coercion. And where we don’t have formal hierarchies, informal power hierarchies form, which are worse in some ways. (Less visible, and so on. That’s a whole separate thing.)

    So what I’m driving at (as I steer the car of this screed off the cliff of a bad metaphor) is that not everybody has the same opinions about how decisions should be made. Even if we limit ourselves to thinking about voting, as a possible solution for Maximum Power Sharing? Even then, no voting system can be perfect. It’s been mathematically proven.

    And there are people in the world who are allergic to meetings, allergic to Robert’s Rules, and fundamentally allergic to coercion. I actually believe most humans are allergic to coercion, but some of us have immune systems that really kick off, and some of us interpret the symptoms as just the way the world is.

    We’re never going to organize the better world we want, if we do it exclusively in ways that drive some of the plural away. Or if we organize in ways that turn us all [the working classes, the non-billionaires] into “us” and “them”. We need to organize in ways where we can actually imagine billions of people maximizing power sharing and minimizing coercion.

    We should allow for different styles of stumbling towards better democracy. Different mistakes.

    Meetings are a good way to get people on the same page. But they are not the only way.

    Voting is a good way to distribute power. But it is not the only way.

    On voting

    So let’s revisit the arguments bubbling underneath the recent bylaw amendment which aimed to remove the requirement for asynchronous online voting. Proponents of this change were acting in good faith to trim what they saw as extraneous, and bring more people to meetings, which they see as the highest decision-making body. But this caused quite a bit of friction.

    Hopefully, you might be able to see the shadowy shape behind why people pulled strongly against this change. I believe it felt exclusionary to them. It triggered some kind of immune responses, you might say.

    In the discussion on Slack before that vote, people talked about “paper members”, saying “I think disenfranchising 3-5 engaged second shift workers is a reasonable sacrifice to prevent 10-50 paper members who got told to vote a certain way by their friend from distorting our democratic process.” Is this an actual problem we think we have? If so, then I think our existing meetings are not solving it! The root of the issue is, in the fight toward true liberation, there are always going to be “paper members” of groups. Overlapping circles of people with different goals. Do we want to further exclude them? Tough calls all around, and neither option is perfect.

    There are always going to be times when we can’t make meetings, even if we do want to. (I say this with a full throat: fuck migraines. But sometimes, missing a socialist meeting because my head is exploding feels like a boon.) We need to figure out how to maximally include everyone in decision making, not force them to attend meetings because we assume that’s best.

    I don’t believe that a cadre-based system where a vanguard of “true believers” makes all the calls will ever end with actual socialism or real democracy. And I don’t think we’re ever going to build functioning socialism if our method of decision making is always meetings.

    I also think that some of the time, we make a big deal out of voting for things that really come down in the end to volunteer capacity and what our members have the drive to actually organize. Chapter endorsements or any other organizing target are never going to get members, paper or otherwise, out of the house to Do Stuff unless they’re excited about it.

    So voting ain’t perfect. We need to try out many methods. They all have benefits and failings. Proxy voting is likely going to be discussed at our December meeting; I’m excited to discuss that! But we need to consider using our groups (working groups, committees, whatever you call them) as intentional labs for more methods.

    We should be trying different types of voting, not just winner-take-all. Votes could tell us where membership is on a spectrum, and that spread could fuel different group choices, rather than a simple up-down binary.

    We could try out different consensus and consent models. I’m a fan of consent decision making, which gets people to actively think about their range of tolerance. I’m not sure it would work for large general membership meetings, but I think some of that mode of thinking might reduce some of the unneeded contention in our decision making; it might be a way to get us closer, faster, to the real objections we need to resolve. Because I do think there is something important and worth talking about in both of the amendments I used as examples here.

    Using the wacky digital tools we have, could we build some kind of decision making method that integrates with our asynchronous communication [currently mostly happening on Slack] and allows for a more fluid democracy?

    Conclusion

    No system is perfect. But what can we imagine?

    How can we brace the big tent large enough that we can all fight for liberation, together? Without dark patterns sneaking in from capitalism, patriarchy, and other bigotries that hoard power?

    How can we build decision-making systems that don’t alienate people who dislike long meetings? What does the world look like, once we’ve made some real progress on improving our methods?

    I’m not sure, but I’m hoping we can have some conversations about the various ways we can communicate effectively and spread power around all the people. Proxy voting is just one step in the experiment. What else can YOU think of? What can we try?

  • Reading Group Report Back: Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism

    From April 20th to May 11th, comrades in MADSA completed a reading and discussion of Vladimir Lenin’s Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Originally written in the first half of 1916 and published as a pamphlet in mid-1917, Lenin’s work analyzing how and why imperialism emerges under capitalism remains a vital resource in developing a stronger understanding of key Marxist concepts and analyses.

    For most members of the group, it was their first time ever reading any literature written by Lenin. Most members felt the language of Imperialism was easy to understand and the text was a decent length with a good amount of content to analyze. Imperialism is backed up by quotes from other scholars Lenin was familiar with at the time of writing, as well as tables of data and other evidence for his claims that imperialism is the final (inevitable) stage of capitalism. 

    After reading Imperialism, the reading group members felt it was helpful to see how capitalism evolves into imperialism in phases. For some, it was helpful to see with clarity how capitalism evolves into imperialism, and it was easy to make comparisons with how the world functions in 2025. 

    As for the logistics of running the reading group, members felt it was great to have a member lead the discussion with key questions or main thoughts to get conversation started. Meeting in person was nice for interacting with comrades, but having it remain hybrid is best for engaging more members in the discussion and allowing flexibility for members who could not join in person. The length of Imperialism was ideal and it was easily divided into 30-40 page readings every week, which was manageable by everyone. 

    As for the future of chapter reading groups, members floated the idea of doing more political theory and history discussion in the Slack, so members can ask clarifying questions about topics, answer each other’s questions, or engage in friendly debate about readings. Having discussion questions assigned ahead of time could potentially help structure readings as well.

    Overall, the reading group went well and members were excited to continue reading anything in general. Members also felt keeping the reading group casual would allow for other members to explore things to read that aren’t just Karl Marx. 

    An important takeaway from reading Imperialism is Lenin’s theory that imperialism is the final stage of capitalism, that it was the natural final stage that arises out of the formation of monopolies, and that capitalism is at that stage has reached a dead end. As socialists, we were able to map out Lenin’s ideas neatly along the problems of the United States, which left us with a burning question: if we are living under the final dead-end stage of capitalism, what happens next? This question inspired us to seek out another work by Lenin, State and Revolution, to hopefully gain more insight into what Lenin believed would occur next. 

    With the MADSA chapter steadily growing in membership over the past few months, there has been talk about developing more chapter education initiatives, whether that be more Socialism 101 events or events designed to help people understand specific areas of political theory. It is important that comrades who have the time and energy to read and discuss theory also take the time to educate others, either through book/discussion group reports, posts to Red Madison, or helping to organize educational events. 

    We commend our comrades in the chapter for achieving the gargantuan task of completing a reading of Karl Marx’s Capital, as this work serves as the most fundamental basis for our understanding of capitalism and frames our beliefs as socialists. Comrades in the Imperialism reading group have expressed an interest in continuing to read fundamental works from European socialists like Marx, Lenin, Luxembourg, and others. We also agree that we should be taking time to source important works from non-Western/non-European points of view. We would like to invite our comrades to engage more in the chapter reading groups, whether that be posting in Slack to ask questions about our readings and findings, or joining the readings whenever they can.

    We were able to access Imperialism for free using the Marxists Internet Archive. A free PDF of Imperialism can be found here.
    An annotated version of Imperialism edited by MADSA’s own chapter member Phil Gasper can be found here for purchase.

  • Reading Group Report Back: Karl Marx’s Capital

    …by a reading group member

    From November 2024 to March 2025, Madison Area DSA embarked on an ambitious political education project. A reading group formed to tackle Paul Reitter’s 2024 translation of Capital. The challenges of this book were clear and immense from the beginning. Marx’s words measure to a total of 710 pages with over 100 more pages of introductions and endnotes. It tackles a vast array of topics starting with a theoretical analysis of value, a mathematical assessment of the working day, and a historic review of the working class’s conditions across Great Britain. To call this work a magnum opus feels like an understatement. 

    How did MADSA respond to the challenge? There are different measures of success that should be considered. Over a dozen members signed up in December to attend the weekly meetings. Attendance dwindled rapidly to a core four members who finished the text earlier this year. We held a majority of meetings in-person at the Social Justice Center, though occasionally some were converted to Zoom due to scheduling conflicts. By the end, a transition from Thursday nights to Saturday mornings was made to facilitate reading group members taking on other active organizing projects on weekday nights. 

    The drop in attendance was likely multifactorial. For some members, the scheduled in-person weeknight meetings were inaccessible. For others, missed meetings due to other end-of-year holiday obligations made it difficult to catch up. Because each chapter of Capital references previously introduced concepts, falling behind often meant being left behind. In response, reading group members employed a combination of audiobooks, physical books, and digital ebooks to read the material. This allowed time-strapped members to maximize opportunities to read between sessions. Basically, whenever I had free time this winter, I needed to crack open Capital to stay ahead. 

    Sessions originally consisted of facilitated meetings with a self-nominated leader agreeing to summarize key concepts and key vocabulary each week. The decline in membership led to a decline in formal structure. At the conclusion, the four remaining members brought an equal share of questions and key passages to the table for others to review and discuss. This second model reduced scheduling anxiety and remained effective because as members grew to understand and build off of each other’s strengths. In general, a key source of success was having a member already familiar with the text, this member provided valuable context at the beginning of each session and prepared us with signposts to pay attention to when we read the into the next section.

    In summary, I believe MADSA should form a Capital reading group every two years to maintain institutional knowledge of the key socialist theories among chapter members. Future reading groups will benefit most from regularly scheduled meetings that do not interfere with the end-of-year holidays. They should also seek to have members who are already familiar with the text to help draw attention to key ideas for new readers. It is worth considering the use of supplemental material, such as David Harvey’s chapter by chapter lecture series, which could reduce entry barriers or help members stay up to date despite occasionally missing a section. However, I believe there is significant benefit to engaging in the written metaphors and analogies Marx uses to explain his concepts. Members relying only on summarized material will miss the humor and jokes very much needed in the socialist vernacular to call out the contradictory monstrosity of capitalism. 

    The question of in-person versus video meetings remains up in the air. I invite current MADSA attendees of Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism reading group to contribute a follow-up report to Red Madison to help direct the chapter’s burgeoning political education committee on the best practices for maximizing access to important member education. 

    Finally, what other key theory should enter the MADSA reading group roster? In addition to reading European socialists like Marx and Lenin, MADSA should make dedicated space for non-European theory exploring the mechanisms of capitalist oppression. Given we organize within occupied Ho-Chunk land in the shadow of a massive land grant university, members would benefit from critical theories of settler colonialism. Reading groups for Fayez Sayegh’s 1965 thesis, Zionist Colonialism in Palestine and La Paperson’s A Third University is Possible represent exciting ways to build the membership’s capacity for material analysis and historical critique.