In September of 2024, I brought a resolution to a Chicago Democratic Socialists of America general chapter meeting to continue our “Crash the DNC” campaign, which had reached its natural conclusion after the Democratic National Convention in Chicago a month earlier. I’d proposed that we continue the campaign for a few more months to focus on engaging the wider public in DSA’s Workers Deserve More program ahead of the general election in November. The proposal passed unanimously, without anyone motivating against it. But at our committee meeting the next week, only one other person showed up. It was humiliating. Members had voted “yes” with their hands at the meeting, but voted “no” with their feet once it was time to take action. 

One of the challenges of democracy in a membership organization is that without member discipline, democratic decisions can become meaningless. Some organizations attempt to address this problem by imposing discipline from above; if you fail to carry out a decision, or worse yet, work to oppose it, you are stripped of your membership rights. This rigid centralism solves the initial problem, but creates many more in the process, and often degenerates into exclusively top-down decision-making. What’s more, following this path means excluding the vast majority of people who aren’t ready to accept this level of direction, at least not on day one. The demands of this type of centralism are tenable for a sect, but not for a mass organization. 

So, what to do? Organizations like ours need to cultivate a kind of voluntary discipline among our members: the will to carry out democratic decisions not because you fear some form of punishment, but because you voluntarily hold yourself accountable to enacting them, regardless of what side of the debate you were on.

But as much as we need to cultivate discipline of action among our members, we also need them to exercise discipline as voters at meetings, such as General Chapter Meetings and Conventions. That is, you have to vote with your hands in a way that reflects how you are likely to vote with your feet afterwards. To exercise this discipline, we must each ask ourselves: 

1. Am I willing and able to contribute to making this thing happen? 

2. Are enough other people likely to contribute to making this thing happen, even if I don’t? 

If the answer to both those questions is “no”, you should have some serious concerns about voting “yes” — even if the proposal is a great idea in theory. 

This kind of voting discipline is difficult to maintain, and for good reason. It can be very uncomfortable to shoot down your comrades’ ideas, especially when the ideas may be good — even if the likelihood of successful execution is low. A voluntary organization like DSA can’t operate in the same way as a state with powers of taxation and coercion at its disposal, or as a non-profit organization with many paid staffers and a top-down, unelected leadership. We need members to voluntarily choose to carry out our work. Without this kind of discipline we get situations like the zombie post-DNC campaign, where everyone in the room was willing to say “yes”, but no one had the capacity to actually do the work to execute the proposal. Just because we should doesn’t mean we can.

When you vote “yes” on a proposal that seems doomed to stall out due to a lack of member involvement or organizational capacity, you avoid disappointing your comrades in the room during the meeting, especially the ones who brought it forward in the first place. But those comrades still experience disappointment afterward. Not for the span of a single vote, but gradually over time, in rooms and Zooms with fewer and fewer people each week after the project is out of sight and out of mind. 

But what’s the harm in letting people try anyway? The chief risks are that everyone becomes demoralized, and that resentments bubble up as organizers fail at a project that has become siloed. They feel isolated from their comrades and can think the membership has done little to help them succeed, which can lead to burnout and disillusionment with the greater work.

Comrades sometimes look to technical and procedural solutions at this juncture. Perhaps you simply restrict the amount of projects any one member can vote for, imposing a hard limit on members’ tendency to overcommit the organization with their votes. But these solutions don’t address the larger cultural problem at play. Members’ tendency to sign the organization up for more work than it can collectively accomplish can only be changed through action from below — from the conscious effort of moving with discipline both in carrying out decisions and in making them. This kind of transformation is not just necessary for the success of a socialist party like DSA, but is also reflective of the larger transformation needed for the entire working class to transition to workers’ democracy and socialist production. 

So when you’re at your next DSA meeting, think about how you’re going to vote with your feet before you vote with your hands. If you’re going to vote “no” with your feet, I think the most honest thing you can do is vote “no” with your hands, too. We can’t do everything. We can only succeed in the things we set out to do if we do them together, moving in the same direction as a collective.