Notes on the 2021 DSA National Convention

 I've been a DSA member for a few years now, but this is the first national convention I've attended. My attendance, like everyone else's this year, was virtual, due to the pandemic, but that was fine by me. I also was not a full delegate, but an alternate for the Houston delegation. Any fears I had before the convention began that I wouldn't get to participate—i.e., vote—were quickly laid to rest, as I ended up subbing in for my comrades on several occasions. Alas, my alternate status precluded me from voting on NPC candidates, though the final lineup contains most of the people I would've voted for.

The convention was run across a number of platforms, which made things clunky at best and a total mess at worst. The pace was slowed by an endless variety of procedural fuckery, with people making motions that did nothing but cause headaches, technical issues that led to (temporarily) missing votes, and what seemed to be last-minute rule changes and different rulings by different chairs—things that couldn't always be fixed by the support staff, who must have been swamped from the get-go. (Thanks for all your hard work to keep things running, comrades.) If you want to get a sense of how things moved, Tempest Magazine has an incomplete report of the convention, complete with blow-by-blow notes on motions and such.

Since I don't really use Twitter, I missed a lot of acrimonious shit-slinging regarding some of the convention's controversial occurrences, namely the credentialing of some delegates and the removal or withdrawal of several NPC candidates. There was also a lot of heated debate about some of the resolutions under consideration, but from what I saw—within the confines of the convention framework, not on Twitter or whatever—it stayed pretty civil.

The issue of internationalism, which revolved around one resolution in particular, was a real sticking point. I don't doubt that the folks who argued in favor of the resolution (and who won the vote to pass it) did so in good faith, and I don't totally disagree with them or the resolution, but I'm a little wary of the potential for the DSA to hitch itself to movements and mass parties overseas that may not share the same values, and/or are little more than state-aligned or ineffective organizations. Thankfully, there's nothing binding in the resolution with regard to action, so I'm happy to wait and see what happens.

As a result of the convention, DSA has a national platform for the first time. It's not perfect, but it's a start. There was also overwhelming support for the Green New Deal and eco-socialism, which to me was the most important thing that came out of the convention. While there's obviously no disentangling politics from the climate crisis, the almost unimaginable weight of the latter exerts such gravitational pull that it takes precedence in a way nothing else under discussion can, and everything ends up being seen through the lens of climate collapse. There's no world to win if there's no world at all.

What else? I had the distinct pleasure of chatting with Nathan Robinson, editor of the superb Current Affairs, via the convention's virtual tabling feature. I wish there had been a better, more permanent way of keeping in touch with people from DSA chapters around the country, but so it goes. I also wish I'd joined my Houston comrades at the firefighters' union hall to attend virtually together, but the current state of COVID-19 infections around here has made me reluctant to spend more time indoors than is necessary.

All in all, despite the issues discussed above, I'm very glad I attended the 2021 DSA National Convention, and that I got to represent my chapter. Will I do it again in 2023, when the high decision-making body of DSA meets again, presumably in person? Maybe. Reading and hearing comrades debate, I got the feeling that DSA is on the cusp of something, but I don't know what, exactly. We're close to 100,000 members, but what does that actually mean for socialist politics in the US? As I mentioned, the climate crisis demands a full-scale revolution in human behavior in the vein of Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry for the Future, and I think that extends into how we act politically. Building the DSA into an old-style party won't cut it, and I think a lot of us know it. What we do with that knowledge remains to be seen, and unless there are a lot of stupid mistakes made in the next couple years, I intend on sticking around to find out.