Response to Hazel W’s “Critique is Not Dismissal”

Let us be clear at the outset that we feel the time spent on responding, once more, to Hazel’s polemic on the shortcomings of California DSA would be better spent on doing some actual work against the actual problems that beset the working class and the socialist movement in California. Nitpicking infighting of this nature has not often served to advance socialist goals and this case is no exception. The world is burning, fascism is rising, and a contrived controversy doesn’t help with addressing either.

Hazel, without talking to anyone in CA DSA leadership, published a critical piece about our experiment in state structure in Democratic Left. When we responded in California Red to address what we saw as incorrect information in that piece, it meant that as far as we were concerned, she got her say, we got ours, and that should have ended matters. But apparently not. We are now publishing her response to our response. Unfortunately, she did not in her new critique actually address our main points, choosing instead to launch a debate over what she considered her conclusion versus what we understood it to be.

She claims that thanks to her intervention while serving as co-chair for a year the organization has improved: “I authored the resolution that scaled back CA DSA’s ambitions and successfully agitated for it to pass because I expected it to help in exactly the ways it did.”

One of us (Fred) was on the state committee at the time Hazel proposed her resolution, which in its first iteration simply attempted to shut down the state org entirely. Why did she try to do this? It may have had something to do with the fact that she found herself on the short end of eight-to-one and seven-to-two decisions time after time.

When that failed she amended it to reduce the number of positions on the state committee from nine to five, which would have had the effect of crippling what little volunteer capacity the leadership body possessed. The majority voted to replace that amendment with another that reduced the body from nine to seven—not because we felt it would have improved our ability to work, but in recognition of the reality that not enough people wanted to do this pretty thankless, under-resourced work, and we needed to have a quorum at our state committee meetings.

Her resolution had exactly nothing to do with the improvement of California DSA’s work. The ARCH campaign in 2024, which she claims as an example of her leadership, was already clearly viewed by our chapters as an important priority, and the state council’s vote to make that official for the state body occurred on the basis of that understanding, not due to her resolution.

Similarly, her claim that “as a result, involvement in CA DSA has largely increased” has no basis in reality. Renewed involvement came not from her effort to reduce the footprint of CA DSA but from a quite different source, months after she had left CA DSA leadership—Trump’s election, which lit a fire beneath members looking for a place to stand and fight. California DSA 101 statewide zoom presentations went from a dozen or two people in attendance before November 2024 to 60-75 attendees in each of the next several meetings after the election.

She refers us to the Red Star caucus document claiming the national DSA more closely resembles an NGO than a fighting socialist organization, and states her belief that staffing is less important than a member-driven organization. This is a sleight of hand argument, since California DSA is not the national, has no staff, doesn’t function like an NGO, and is (unfortunately) probably in no danger of finding the resources to staff up any time soon. Further, we agree with her that if we could muster sufficient activism from our membership to do without staff we’d go that way. Who wouldn’t? The more important questions to consider here are, “what are the factors that impede such enthusiasm for socialism in the masses”, and “how do we turn that around?”

She wants us to reflect on how we failed to measure up to the “vision document” she cites that supposedly was guiding CA DSA. That document, a two-page provisional sketch of the organization’s goals, was drafted by the exploratory committee for a California DSA in January 2021, more than a year before the organization officially existed. It was superseded by subsequent documents developed by the first state committee, much more ambitious in scope, which as we stated in our critique of Hazel’s DL article, were produced before fully understanding the obstacles in our path. This is reminiscent of Hazel’s omission in her DL piece, when in criticizing the lack of use of our political action committee (PAC) account, she left out the context that it wasn’t created by CA DSA but a prior ad hoc chapter-led campaign in 2018, which we inherited as CA DSA without institutional memory of what needed to be done to maintain it properly. And true, it wasn’t used while she was on the state committee. Why? Because 2023 wasn’t an election year. She didn’t respond to these corrections in her new piece.

California DSA is not some bureaucratic monolith needing to be deeply critiqued. It is an experiment in socialist democracy, the first state level DSA structure, put together in a moment of peak activism (post Bernie campaigns, during the pandemic and support for the BLM movement, and a very active tax the rich ballot measure, Prop 15, in 2020, which led to ad hoc coordination of our chapters statewide) with the high hopes that such enthusiasm for action from its membership might serve as the basis for a permanently active statewide presence.

That hopeful moment passed, and peak activism receded—not just in DSA, but in all organizations of the left and the broader progressive sphere. This is always a danger for the left when the Democrats are in office: Too many people think, “Oh, we elected these people; now they will take care of things.” This was the mistake activists made in demobilizing after Obama’s election, and the same thing, compounded by the pandemic, that happened in Biden’s term of office.

California DSA was created to say the opposite: no matter who’s in office we need to continually push them from below to do the right thing, which takes a mass socialist movement beyond the electoral moment. We had hoped the state organization might make a contribution to that perspective and that effort. If that hope has not yet been fulfilled, let’s recall that this is the first attempt in the country at a state DSA structure; it is just three years old; and we are not just trying to push California politics to the left; now we’re fighting fascism. Let’s get on with that task.