Member Statements on Resolution 26-40: Principles for Party-Building and Candidate Accountability.
Submit member statements here.
IN FAVOR by Noah T
As our movement grows and our org becomes more popular, it will be more common for opportunists to attempt to associate with us for clout or popularity without being true socialist, accountable to us, or actually engaging with the movement in any meaningful way.
I think this resolution goes along with the spirit of the cadre candidate resolution. Any DSA candidate should be accountable to our org and the membership. And we need to protect our image from opportunists that could water it down or take advantage of us.
IN FAVOR by Logan M
I’ll be supporting this one, but I encourage comrades to expand their imagination for what a party can be. This passage from Rosa Luxemburg nicely illustrates the limitations of debates over “electoral discipline”. In 1909/1910 a series of proto-mass strikes breakout in Germany, linking together economic concerns with broader political demands for suffrage. Luxemburg has been campaigning and going on the offensive in adopting a new mass struggle and mass strike orientation for the SPD. Kautsky tells her that this advocacy for the mass strike tactic and strategic approach is a distraction from the real work at end: another round of recriminations for the absence of electoral and party discipline of the ‘revisionist’ aka theoretically reformist tendencies within the movement, who continue to vote with liberals for local provincial budgets and don’t take an abstentionist take with respect to non - socialist forces within government.
Luxemburg says: “hen does the party bother with what happens in the south? When a world-shaking scandal takes place in the matter of the budget–but the party as a whole never bothers with the daily activities of the party leadership, of the caucus in the provincial parliament, of the press in the south. . . . For twelve years already the party has been on the defensive against all revisionist tendencies and merely plays the role of the night watchman, who only appears and sounds the alarm when there is a disturbance in the street. The results show that by these means the evil cannot be removed. . . . Not through formal prohibitions or through discipline, but only by the maximum development of mass action whenever and wherever the situation permits, a mass action which brings into play the broadest masses of the proletariat . . . only in this way can the clinging mists of parliamentary cretinism, of alliances with the middle classes, and the [rest of such] petit-bourgeois localism be got rid of.”
ABSTAIN by Josh T
For clarification, I am in favor of this resolution, but would like to see details on how to enforce it included in the resolution. The resolution itself lacks purpose without these details.
I have always believed in stricter guidelines for our candidates, dating all the way back to when we first voted to ensure that candidates must describe themselves as “socialists” to receive our endorsement, and as we continue to grow in popularity, I believe we need stricter guidelines as laid out in this resolution. I would love to see this passed once it includes ways to execute it.