It has been an honor to have been able to serve this past year on the 2023-2024 Steering Committee of our chapter. It was a successful convention season, with a new chapter priorities process bearing a renewed focus for our chapter and elected leadership containing both incumbents and a slate of new chapter leadership. Furthermore, it is a sign of a healthy chapter to see many of our departing Steering Committee members return to the ranks of active membership, rather than exit the chapter entirely due to burnout. I congratulate the newly elected At Large members Charlise, Aidan, and Sam, and I look forward to returning to the important work our chapter is undertaking this year as a general member. Before I exit leadership I thought I would write up some brief reflections regarding accomplishments, areas to improve, and the political direction of our chapter.
This year saw many developments that I was proud to take part in. The first and foremost has been the further development of our new member outreach capacities and strategies. I worked to ensure that each of our new members to the best of my ability received a message from me and an invitation to a 1:1 once they joined our Slack. I’ve worked as well to turn our office into our chapter home, staying involved with our Office Committee and trialing our Sunday Open Hours program. From our office we have been able to successfully expand our houseless and community outreach efforts and rethink our mutual aid and outreach strategies, providing a central anchor for community members to interact with us regularly and visibly witness our presence. Each of these I hope to continue working on now as a rank and file member.
Even though we have made much progress on these fronts there are still a number of areas of improvement that still need to be addressed as a chapter. The first and foremost is plugging the holes in our onboarding process. When members sign up on our sign up sheets they are not always followed up with and that data often does not make its way into our EveryAction database. When members do join they do not always make it to our TCDSA 101 meeting and are often left with many questions of how to get involved. Lastly, when members do join and wish to get involved, they are not plugged in effectively when they attend an organizing meeting, and are left feeling like outsiders who do not know what is going on or are unsure if they have the skills to be involved effectively. Each of these are things the “Taking the Cap Off Capacity” Priority Resolution will seek to address this year. It is essential however, that every organizing group and member reflect on how they can do this better. If this issue is left solely to the Steering Committee and the Internal Organizing Committee, it is an issue that will not be solved.
In addition to our onboarding process, we as a chapter must take a serious look at our structures and processes. Our chapter has seemingly outgrown these, which have not caught up effectively with our massive membership growth and level of work since 2016. Much of our work and means of facilitating it are done in an ad hoc fashion, duplicating efforts, and do not take advantage of the tools and resources our chapter Tech Ops team has set up for us. We need to ensure that we are improving our project tracking and communication capacities, improving member data collection and usage, and ensuring that our tools are effective but also accessible to use by a mass movement of regular working class people. I have full faith in our elected leadership to take on this issue and it’s essential that all chapter members and groups reflect on these questions as well.
Lastly, I would like to cap off my reflection with my thoughts on the upcoming year and its political direction. Politically I believe our chapter must make a proactive and pragmatic break with the Democratic party. I furthermore believe that while electoralism and labor are important, they represent a high risk of subsuming our chapters political leadership of a mass movement and our long term interests in favor of short term reformist gains and the liquidation of our radical goals. Steering this past year was relatively aligned politically and largely did not face contentious decisions regarding overall strategy, as seen by many votes being unanimous. With the newly elected Steering I sense there will be more acute differences present on the key questions regarding our path to building independent power, whether that is an electoral focus intertwined with chapter participation in the Democratic Party, an emphasis on labor unions as our foundation, or a break with either electoral or labor in favor of strengthening and building new community connections and bases of power. In addition to navigating these differences in political or strategic perspective will be the task set forth to Steering Committee to now carry forward our democratically selected chapter priorities around Environmental Justice, Palestinian Liberation, and Internal Organizing, and safeguarding the focus on these priorities while navigating the other inevitable crises and organizing opportunities that will appear this next tumultuous year.
It is my hope that Steering will hold a course that works to put our chapter in the lead politically. We cannot allow ourselves to tail union leadership and short term contract fights nor can we tail the interests of Democratic politicians, whose political loyalty is not to the Socialist movement but to their own re-election and who see us as nothing more than being another lobbyist interest group. We are in a precarious position where we have the ears of many in power yet no genuine power over them and who have not demonstrated a willingness to stand with us as open allies in the face of strong political opposition. Meanwhile Mayor Frey and his political allies have had us in their crosshairs and over-represent our level of power as part of an attempt to isolate us and crush us.
We must recognize that power comes from the masses and the loyalty of the community at large to us and our cause. We must work to have the community look to us as their primary vehicle for power, not the Democratic Party, not the non-profits, and not their individual unions. We must go to the masses themselves and provide clear levers of power through participation in our chapter itself and its structures. Power will not come from wheeling and dealing with those in power behind closed doors nor will it passively flow to us from electoral wins or successful contract fights. It comes from directly and intentionally going out and organizing the masses and the rank and file under our own banners and making our chapter their political home. I believe if Steering keeps this in mind as we undertake a new year of organizing we will achieve great success.
With that, it has been a pleasure to serve our chapter as a Steering Representative this past year, and I look forward to another year of organizing within this amazing chapter.
Solidarity,
Shane M