Democratic Culture and Democratic Struggle — NC Triangle DSA

Our New Strategy centers the fight for democracy in socialist struggle here in North Carolina. There’s a good reason for that: North Carolina is uniquely undemocratic. The Jim Crow structure was less dismantled here than even much of the South. The state’s electoral map is torn to shreds by the gerrymandering knives of the ruling class while city councils are preempted from legislating reforms to benefit workers or tenants. The government calls itself “democratic” while there’s no democracy in sight.

We are denied democracy in the workplace and the home, too. Decisions over both are made by elites without even paying lip-service to democracy. Collective bargaining in the public sector is banned and only 3% of the workforce is unionized. The bosses run most workplaces as dictatorships while landlords – often the same bosses with real estate portfolios – control the home. The home includes our housing, but also our community and the land itself. Landlords let parasitic institutions like anti-abortion centers prey on student tenants as long as those parasites pay up, then destroy the land they stole with development for the rich, then set our rent hundreds of dollars higher than even their beloved Invisible Hand. Thanks to landlords, there’s no democratic decision-making over our home: our housing, our community, our land.

We need both internal and external democracy. Fortunately, both are deeply linked. Growing a democratic culture requires our chapter to test our ideas, to decide on action through discussion and debate, but also to increase participation by caring for each other better and incorporating more and more members – particularly those of color – into active protagonist roles as organizers in the organization participating in decision-making. A democratic culture strengthens us all and gives us more power to fight for democracy at three sites of struggle.

Three Sites of Struggle

Government, workplace, and home are all controlled undemocratically in North Carolina – and those are the arenas where we have to fight. These are not random. They are concrete sites of struggle. We draw a distinction between issues and sites of struggle. Issues bring in and activate people politically while sites of struggle are the arenas in which issues are fought. We contest the state government’s lack of democracy from the ballot and city council by running on issues; workers are galvanized to organize by issues, not only wages but racial inequities and sexual harassment and the other forms of oppression enabled by authoritarian power dynamics; we are currently campaigning against landlords by fighting them at the home in our housing (through tenants organizing against their displacement with one another in the Triangle Tenant Union, a housing issue), in the community (to target anti-abortion centers, a socialist feminist issue), and over the land (by defending both DSA-endorsed city councillor Mary Black from their real estate lobby and public land from private corporations like Wake Stone, an ecosocialist issue). DSA is both at its best and uniquely equipped as the largest socialist organization to cross-pollinate across the movement ecosystem, synthesizing and strategizing in all arenas at once, democratically deciding what to do as a party in formation and motion. 

Sites of struggle are arenas in time as well as space. The reason for that is best summarized in the best quote I’ve ever read about organizing: “you have one body and twenty-four hours in a day. An organizer asks what you’ll do with them, concretely, now.” That’s why they try so hard to control our bodies by doing things like incarcerating us, by evicting us, by forcing us to work to survive, by attacking gender-affirming healthcare. It’s not just about our bodies; in the vestiges of the 8-hour workday, we move from the home (housing) to the workplace and back to the home (community). Unless we’re part of a democratic organization like a union or a cooperative or a mass organization, we are denied democracy at every hour of our daily lives. Both bosses and landlords extract profit not only from us in spaces like the workplace and the home; they suck the marrow out from our minutes and hours, too. And they always seek to find more ways to transform our time into profits for themselves. As the ruling class attacked the 8-hour workday, they forced us into contract work and side hustles and double jobs that literally steal more and more of our space and time. We have less time to socialize with one another, to create new worlds through art and love and community. We have less time to organize.

We have to fight everywhere we’re being attacked by the ruling class. We need to build working class organization in all sites of struggle: government, workplace, and home. That means building DSA, as a mass organization in our local chapter, and challenging the legitimacy of the undemocratic state legislature as per our New Strategy. But we can’t stop there. We have to fight for democracy in our workplace and in our home. We have to be socialists everywhere, which means we have to fight for democracy everywhere.

Growing a Democratic Culture

Socialist struggle requires growing a democratic culture. Democratic culture means sharpening our analysis together by debating ideas. Democratic culture means competing for positions, as we test out those ideas and trade the baton of leadership in the beginning of decades-long relationships. Democratic culture means expanding ways for members to participate in decision-making over the chapter through integrating debate and discussion at every level of meeting and chapter business. Democratic culture means supporting formations of sections and associations that create new points of entry for working people into the chapter. One example is the Caregivers Section, which meets at a more accessible time for caregivers and creates a space for workers our chapter would otherwise not accommodate, through decisions made for and by socialist caregivers directly. These are all needed to grow.

Democratic culture also means being laser-eyed on expanding participation in decision-making to more and more people. This is crucial. A room of five people may be able to vote on something, but a room of five people has less democratic legitimacy than a room of fifteen. The weight of a decision made democratically is directly translatable to how many people commit to that decision – and how many people it touches that are embedded in their homes, in their workplaces, in their communities. That’s why we have to direct ask for direct asks’ sake.

One way we grow democratic culture is through creating better systems of care to support ourselves and each other. People tend to participate more when they feel heard, welcomed, seen. People participate when they feel comfortable. Comfort isn’t just the product of materially meeting the needs of people, but also sitting with discomfort when generative conflict appears in the life of mass organization. We need to understand our movement as a continuum across decades into the future. We must and will be with one another, literally, for much of our lifetimes. We need to find generative ways to resolve inevitable conflict and methods to address each other’s emotional and social needs. Right now, we have a tradition of mutual aid not shared by all other chapters and the queer and trans solidarity working group is actively discussing how unfilled needs for mutual aid in the queer community presents a need that we should organize around. We also have moved towards more of a culture of restorative repair. These are good starting points to build from, which we must, since multiple core members of our chapter have suffered acute depression in the past year that has nearly stolen their lives. We can’t take accountability for holistic mental health for comrades struggling in their own minds, but we can provide care and support in more active and intentional ways that treats our comrades suffering through mental health crises as wounded comrades – injured on the frontlines of struggle. We need to find ways to be able to better practice care for each other if we want to grow a democratic culture and participation through the decades ahead. 

Our chapter has two separate conversations currently happening that actually belong in the same conversation: how we increase democracy and how we become a more diverse organization. If we want to increase the power of our own internal democracy, and the weight of democratic decisions, we need to increase the participation of diverse groups that experience the most oppressive exploitation within the shackles of racial capitalism. DSA self-organized from a relatively specific and disproportionately white chunk of the working class: downwardly-mobile, young white-collar workers. Expanding beyond that segment is in the material interest of the people united. The decisions made by a handful of people – especially from the same sliver of the working class, especially receiving the wages of whiteness – in a room is a lot less representative and powerful than a movement of the masses can organize. We do have to address internal biases that, as Angela Davis analyzes in “Women, Race, and Class” that we recently read, divide the people by design and benefit the white supremacist ruling class we haven’t dislodged since Reconstruction. We do have to learn from socialists of color, particularly Black socialists, who have experimented with organization and theory informed by lived experience white socialists don’t share. We can and will become more representative as we create spaces organized with socialists of color (like No Appetite for Apartheid), intentional recruitment through direct asks to join our organization, and by rooting ourselves in democratic struggle with and alongside the Black working class that has fought the struggle for democracy since Black workers organized the general strike that destroyed slavery. 

The Struggle for Democracy 

Growing a democratic culture lets us concretely expand our capacity because it allows us to bring more and more people into decision-making. That’s more and more people shaping and participating in struggle, if decision-making translates to action, which is the responsibility of member leadership to mobilize people into doing through both meetings and active one-on-ones with active members who take on more and more decision-making. A democratic culture gives us more power to fight for democracy; internal democracy allows us to fight more for democracy. 

Rather than focus on the fight for democracy in government, which we discussed as a chapter at length in formulating the New Strategy, I’ll focus on democratic struggle in the workplace and the home. We have made significant strides over the years in integrating with the militant layer of the local labor movement through becoming rank-and-file activists in our workplaces, targeting strategic jobs as salts, and forming relationships with other rank-and-file workers through struggle and social life. But that’s been with untapped potential, turbulent participation in the labor working group, a capacity drain without rising leadership, and a local Emergency Workplace Organizing Committee (EWOC) in need of support. We need to commit our space and time to that work as a collective while also taking seriously the need to experiment as socialist individuals in our workplaces, with our bodies and our eight hours. Every workplace is different and every workplace presents challenges. That means confronting contradiction head-on and persevering in organizing through those challenges. If there’s no social fabric, we knit one by inviting coworkers to bars or remote hang-outs; if there’s no militancy, we build it slowly, block by block, relationship by relationship. We become an organization of organizers, doing mass work ourselves, organizing at our own workplaces even if it means starting slow in our own workplaces or taking strategic jobs to further the movement particularly during moments of unemployment. This is how we fight for democracy in the workplace on all fronts at the rank-and-file level in which we must embed. We build the militant layer in the labor movement even as we organize the labor movement to expand in North Carolina. That is how we struggle for democracy in the workplace because that’s how we increase the number of workers with direct democratic decision-making in their own workplaces.

We fight for democracy in the home through different methods that suit different parts of the home. In our housing, landlords control the supply with the same absolute power that they control the rent. They lump both together as the “market.” That means the landlords determine which tenants are housed or unhoused, which, given the necessity of a Housing First framework for wellness, means the landlords largely decide the position of the tenant in relation to other systems of oppression and cycles of trauma. They also determine the rent and the conditions and who gets displaced. Building democratic control over our homes happens through organizing with our neighbors. Sometimes, we share a landlord. Sometimes, we don’t. But in the Triangle, where land trusts tend to be governed with far less tenant control than democracy requires and neighborhoods are fragmented between different parts of the Landlord Cartel, organizing tenant councils only under the same landlords is simply insufficient. We have to find ways to build collective power, and thus leverage, with tenants from a far larger diversity of tenant experiences and incorporate that diversity into democratic decision-making within our tenant unions. We bring more people into movement by winning concessions from landlords together, whether that be rent reductions or defenses from eviction, even as we keep our eyes on the prize that tenant power can build towards: the total decommodification of housing. The removal of housing from the profit motive itself entails land where there are no lords, where people democratically control the housing supply to meet the needs of everyone.

One important cleavage in the landlord class that we can exploit to build democratic power is the NIMBY-YIMBY binary. The binary does not serve tenants whatsoever. The poor excuse for a redbaiting letter targeting DSA member Mary Black sent to the Wake County Democratic Party by Zionists reveals the two issues the Democratic Party finds most controversial: Palestine and “housing issues.” That’s because the Democrats aren’t rooted in the working class. They have more consensus on social issues, the terms of which are set by social movements, than they do on more fundamental questions of who controls the home. Prominent local Democrats can be found all over the place on the spectrum between Not In My Back Yard (NIMBY) and Yes In My Backyard (YIMBY). This spectrum is a completely false dichotomy, since both NIMBY and YIMBY politics are landlord politics. They split the landlord class itself, as some landlords seek to build developments (cheered on by YIMBYs) and other landlords seek to entrench the value of their housing to the exclusion of others (supported by NIMBYs). But the fact that the landlord class is split means the Democrats are structurally incapable of mobilizing around tenant issues, even when questions like how high the rent will be and whether someone will be evicted impact people at the most visceral of levels. The cleavage presents an opening for a socialist path to be tread by the tenant as protagonist. The democratic road in the home is paved with the cobblestones of tenant organization that already has significant momentum in North Carolina. 

As socialist individuals, we must become organizers of our apartment complexes and neighborhoods. This is in some ways the original, bread and butter politics that the bourgeoisie distracted us from by channeling politics into elections every few years at the expense of everything else. That means practicing mass work where we’re living or moving to where we’re needed, same as in the workplace. Organizing under the conditions of complete landlord control also means embracing experimentation. That includes not only organizing tenants in different ways, but also finding new ways to practice socialist politics around housing. One way would be for cadre elected officials to build relationships with tenants facing eviction and then mobilize community members en masse to block an eviction – especially if the elected official ends up arrested. This helps us to stigmatize evictions through press and propaganda, increasing the costs of evicting tenants on landlords, while also defending tenants that are disproportionately Black women materially and building our credibility as DSA with tenants directly. Socialists are uniquely equipped to take advantage of the landlord class’s own cleavage on housing.

Fighting for democracy in the parts of the home that are the community and the land requires tightly-organized, escalating pressure campaigns that target identified antagonists. Civil rights organizing presents solid models for effective campaigns of this nature that led to dramatic change in democratic struggle. In our own chapter, our socialist feminist working group recently escalated from pickets to pressure on the landlord that leases space to our target. In other words, the landlord became our secondary target. Continuing to apply strategic pressure on this base-level secondary target, if we see the tactic to success, will present a model for us to follow in our local conditions. 

The same applies in larger fights with the landlord class as well: the Stop RDU campaign and Duke Respect Durham campaigns. Stop RDU is a campaign to keep the land public – subject to democratic control – and protect its treasures from a trade between corporations, from a landlord to a boss, from RDU to Wake Stone. Winning requires building a base and then escalating actions on our target, incorporating more people into decision-making at all steps of that process, extending democratic control where right now there is only landlord control. 

Similarly, our campaign alongside Duke Respect Durham coalition partners to make Duke University pay up to the community is a fight against Duke University, a landlord that happens to own 11% of the land in Durham. Popular pressure to force Duke to pay will require a momentous level of tight organization across the coalition, which calls for more people to be assigned as bottom-liners from DSA as well as one-on-one organizing conversations with coalition partners to identify bottom-liners across their organizational ranks as well. That’s the immediate need. Long-term, however, Duke Respect Durham is a beacon for the potential to unite a community against its chief landlord and extract concessions collectively from that landlord. A tall order, possible only through shared capacity with dozens of other organizations with which we’ve built relationships, and also one with explosive potential.

Socialists Everywhere Always

As you’ve probably noticed, the three sites of struggle bleed into one another just like movement ideas flow together. We are tenants at home, workers when we go to work, and community participants and caretakers of land all at oscillating and different points of our lives – both broadly and daily. We have to fight for democracy at all three sites of struggle, which means we have to think as socialists throughout all parts of our lives in which we are already embedded. This is how we maximize our potential as an organization of organizers, but also as a collective, the most promising foundation for a working class party that the state has seen in decades.

Democratic struggle means fighting for democracy in government through the New Strategy, challenging the undemocratic nature of the state, even as we organize for democracy in the workplace and the home. The bosses control the workplace; the landlords control the home, including housing, community, and land. We have to adapt our strategy in democratic struggle to the conditions of all of these sites of struggle in which we fight. In the workplace, we can organize unions with our coworkers and neighbors. Our housing is the same, even if tactics may change. But the landlords are also the opponent in the community and the land. On those turfs, we need different tactics – specifically, campaigns based on escalation that lead to more and more people in the community and caring for the land participating in democratic decision-making over their home. This is how we carry out democratic struggle in all parts of the home, not just our housing. 

Growing a democratic culture creates the conditions for us to fight for democracy better. A democratic culture creates more ownership over our collective project and incorporates more people into decision-making, while also holding space with and for one another as comrades through better systems of care. Finally, we can foster a more democratic culture by doing the work we need to do to make DSA a more diverse organization that more closely represents the entire working class to which we belong and that we aim to emancipate.