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?

Date: Thursday, January 15, 2026 at 6pm PST

Online Only. RSVP for Zoom Link.

Monthly Steering Committee Meetings are open to members to observe but, generally, only Steering Committee members may vote and participate.

By: Jo Coutts

It is hard to imagine the future. When I was a young hip hop head in Washington DC in the early 1990s it was inconceivable that icons Ice Cube, LL Cool J, and Ice T would join the police propaganda machine playing cops in mainstream movies and TV shows. What would Biggie think?

S. Trotter seems to ask this question in their piece Rappers Die Every Day B in Swords into Plowshares’ current exhibit Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires. Like Trotter, most of the artists in the show focus on the present and the past rather than that oh so hard to imagine future.

In the present, Mike Williams looks at billionaires’ appropriation of our neighborhoods, children, and very lives from the perspective of Greek and Roman sacrifice. His painting, One Hundred White Bulls, depicts “a symbolic herd of sacrifice” to remind us that we are the resources sacrificed to capitalist greed.

Next to Williams’ piece, Andrea Cardinal’s 26 Billion Dollars visualizes that greed by screen-printing Dan Gilbert’s estimated $26 billion net worth. The billion-dollar notes are a stark reminder that our sacrifices lead to unimaginable amounts of money for the rich.

Looking back to the past, Melanie Bruton’s When Memories Fade depicts a rain-swept fresh produce stand and asks us to consider what it feels like to lose your community. How does it feel when places that brought life feel ghostly? The piece brings to my mind the iconic drawing of “the shooter” by an unknown to me artist on Dequindre Cut. Created when the Cut was a hub of community creativity, today, The Shooter lives in a ghostly emptiness of iron railings, shipping container pop-ups, and surveillance cameras. If you close your eyes on the Cut, you can just about imagine the community of artists with spray cans, people hanging out drinking beer out of brown paper bags, music, relationships growing and failing, and conversations that never end. But the memories are fading as the denizens of the Cut have been moved out to make way for developers building condos funded by our tax dollars through tax increment financing (TIF).

Tax Increment Financing is a way that government “economic development” departments like the Downtown Development Authority and the Detroit Economic Growth Corporation “capture” our taxes and redirect them to private businesses without our knowledge or oversight. TIF is not the same as tax abatements. Tax abatements, which developers also receive, are a direct reduction in taxes for a certain period. Tax captures actually take our property taxes and give them to developers to use to pay for their projects.

Dan Gilbert has received more than $618 million through TIF. Ian Matchett’s portrait of Gilbert as an empty suit ready to dump all we hold dear into a trash can counters the prevailing official narrative of Gilbert as a philanthropic billionaire who has brought Detroit back from the trash heap.

And it is so hard to counter this narrative. In the face of the overwhelming propaganda by the City, the media, and even in some cases Detroiters like ourselves, we have to remember that none of the so-called Detroit revival is for our benefit. Gilbert’s theft of the taxes we pay to the City has gone to develop Library Street — when we approved the millage to fund libraries. It has gone to build a glass skyscraper where the Hudson’s building used to be — when we continually ask the City Council to increase the funds for home repairs. It has been used to develop $1,755 a month studio apartments in the Book Tower while we plead for water affordability.

A Future Beyond Billionaires is more than libraries, home repairs, and water affordability. Arthur Rushin III asks us to look for What Lies Yonder? to contemplate whether freedom is in the stars. Not just the stars in the heavens but also the stars in our hearts, our minds, and our souls.

Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires is at Swords Into Plowshares Peace Center and Art Gallery, 33 E. Adams Street until December 20, 2025.

Gallery hours Fridays and Saturdays 1 to 6 p.m.

Political Discussion Thursday, December 11 at 6 p.m.

Artist Talk Friday, December 19 at 6 p.m.

Free Parking in the lot behind the gallery. Let the parking attendant know you are visiting the Gallery.

Jo Coutts is a member of Metro Detroit DSA.

Detroit 2050: A Future Beyond Billionaires was originally published in The Detroit Socialist on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Date: Saturday, December 20, 2025 from 9:30 am til 11:30 am

Location: Ragamuffin Coffee Roasters• 111 N Reino Rd, Newbury Park, CA 91320 US

Come join like-minded comrades for a cup of your favorite morning beverage. These gatherings offer a relaxed space to meet members and find out how to get involved, decompress, talk about the issues we face, and stay connected as we close out the year.

No RSVP needed! But if you want to, head over here.

Friday, December 19 – 8:00 PM PST (Online)

Thursday, December 18 – 6:00 PM PST (Online)

Join DSA Ventura County’s Labor Working Group on zoom to discuss the ongoing labor struggles in our communities, from Starbucks Workers United’s indefinite strike, to the tentative agreement our County employees will be voting on in the coming weeks, to the movement for an arms embargo by Labor for Palestine, and the calls for a general strike by May Day 2028.

Please, bring other ideas, campaigns, and your own workplace experiences. An agenda will be posted on slack soon. You will receive the zoom link after you RSVP.

Wednesday, December 17 · 6:00 – 7:00pm (Online)

Wednesday, December 10 at 5pm PST (Online)

Monday, December 10 at 6:30pm PST (Online)

Join DSA Ventura County’s Mutual Aid Working Group for a planning meeting focused on addressing unmet needs in Ventura County. Bring your big ideas, suggestions for coalition partners, and a desire to stand in solidarity with others. We are cookin’ up some ideas, and will post an agenda on our slack.

Sponsored by

by Gregory Lebens-Higgins

“The story of America is a story of progress.” – Barack Obama

Throughout much of my education, American history was taught as an inevitable march toward progress. Sure, there were missteps and challenges, but they were overcome through American grit and the unique democratic commitments of our founders. The ending of slavery and rise in the standard of living, for example, were just fruits of the seeds planted in the Constitution and Declaration of Independence. 

Even the rise of Donald Trump and America’s rightward slide are only a blip in this overall trajectory. The “Soul of America,” imagines liberal historian Jon Meacham, contains “a perennial conflict between our worst instincts and our best ones.” Despite occasionally giving into our “darker impulses,” there is an eventual course correction toward a more just society. These battles are the engine of history, ending with the victory of good over evil, thanks to the intelligent design of American exceptionalism. 

While the experience of recent events has significantly deflated this narrative, there remains a belief among social democrats and progressives that we must bide our time while the culture catches up to us. Then, we can frictionlessly lay hold of the ready-made state machinery and wield it for our own purposes. Improvements in the material conditions of the working class, however, did not come about from a slow progression through a series of stages, but by convulsive breakthroughs of the organized masses.

While the line has gone up for America’s elite, most of us have been cut out of our share. Despite massive increases in productivity, wages have remained stagnant and America’s wealth gap is astronomical and growing. Food, housing, and other rising costs are causing an “affordability crisis,” and household debt is at an all time high. 

The forced extraction of Native American land and Black labor for the primitive accumulation of American capital set the pattern for racialized exclusion from progress that continues its expression in rates of poverty, incarceration, and health outcomes today. Segregation remains prevalent, including in schools and neighborhoods here in Rochester.

The gains of the American working class have not been awarded by our leaders but won through struggle. The end of slavery came about only as the result of war; and while Lincoln’s “paramount object in th[e] struggle [wa]s to save the Union, and [wa]s not either to save or destroy Slavery,” it took the mass self-emancipation of formerly enslaved Black people to make emancipation a cause of the Union troops. Of course, even the promise of freedom – protected during the Era of Reconstruction – was corrupted by the reaction of Southern Redeemers and liberal complicity. The struggle for Black civil rights was continued not through America’s institutions, but in opposition to them, including by organizers from the Communist Party.

In the workplace, the 8-hour workday and the weekend are now seen as a sacred pact between employer and employee. These standards only gained ground from the determined efforts of generations of union members who faced arrest and violent repression on their road to victory. Decades of reduced militancy and targeted disruption have rolled back these wins, violating the pact with part-time work and unpredictable schedules.

These histories are absorbed into the fabric of capitalist realism – deprived of their radical nature and retold as a deterministic unfolding of events. Their advances are only ratified by American institutions to the extent they do not challenge class relations. The capitalist class will always seek opportunities to weaken regulations, slip through legal loopholes, or violate unwritten norms in pursuit of shareholder value. Until the profit motive is overturned in its entirety, we are left endlessly playing defense against the encroachment of capital on our liberties. 

The most egregious measure of stunted working class progress is the gap between the capacity and realization of modern industrial society’s ability to feed, house, and provide means for a dignified life to all. Instead, capitalism funnels surplus value to those at the top, who secure their position with ever more immiseration and endless expansioneven at the cost of planetary sustainability. The choice for our future, then, is between socialism or oblivion. To quote Engels, “if the whole of modern society is not to perish, a revolution in the mode of production and distribution must take place.” 

Writing from a Birmingham, Alabama jail, Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. responded to white clergymen who criticized his “unwise and untimely” activities. “Freedom is never voluntarily given by the oppressor; it must be demanded by the oppressed,” says King. Rather than delivering justice, law and order frequently exist to “block the flow of social progress.” 

How long must the working class tolerate its present conditions while waiting for progress to trickle down? As King asserts, “the time is always ripe to do right.” Rather than wait on the indefinite timeline of the elite, the socialist movement must unify the masses and collectively define the terms of our liberation. Progress will not happen unless we are willing to fight for it.

The post Against Progress Narratives: Toward a Radical Push for Change first appeared on Rochester Red Star.