I made a post in tactics (maybe the wrong community) about how I have been agitating members of the Sunrise movement and building an ecosocialist caucus to challenge the national leadership. I've been thinking about how such a structure would work, and how to make it more efficient and while reading Moa's "Rectify the Party's Style of Work" I learned about democratic centralism. It seems like a good place to start but I'm having trouble finding good resources to draw from. Can anyone help point me in the right direction?
hell yeah! I read "what is to be done" but feel like I want to read it again cuz a lot of it went over my head
WITBD has some very context specific things going on with it, check out What Is To Be Done: In context by Lars Lih.
So you can't just turn a non dem cent org into a dem cent org without basically overtaking the whole thing. IMO doing this is almost certainly a bad idea, as the way dem cent orgs have played out in the US is they fracture and split, and there's no way to actually enforce it. If there is a concerted effort in sunrise to do this, you will lose chapters and imo gain nothing. DSA's lack of democratic centralism is one of the things that's helped it grow so much (and the criticisms made of DSA for lacking it imo are overblown), and despite democratic centralism's best intentions of just being some things the whole party agrees on by forcing consensus and having mechanisms for removing people wrecking/going against the org (which I do support such measures), officially practicing it imo sets one down a path to inevitable fracture at least in the US.
If you want an internal faction of ecosocialists in sunrise, I also think that already exists at least informally as most of the ecosocialist groups in DSA are also in sunrise.
For me what could be gained from agitating within sunrise and forming a faction is that it could potentially reach a lot of people who are ready to be radicalized. I'd be happy even if it just causes a break because by that time a large(ish) number of people will be onboard, and then maybe we could start our own thing?? I'm not going to keep with it for too long if it's not going anywhere, I don't want to waste too much of my time, but I am ever an optimist and think that if there is a possibility of shifting this org I might as well try!
I don't know much about democratic centralism, but I wanted to explore it as an alternative to the top down structure that Sunrise takes at a national level. I was thinking of using it as a proposed structure for the ecosocialist caucus. I would love to learn more about how the DSA ecosocialist groups intersect with sunrise. From what I can tell they were not organized in any capacity because no one was having conversations about socialism on the national forum before I joined it!
I guess I just don't want to start from scratch and other organizations at this scale seem to have similar criticisms leveled at them. I figure I'll work where I potentially have the most influence for now.