NPC Vacancy Appointment Vote February 2025
DSA's National Political Committee voted this month to fill the vacancy left by the resignation of comrade Rose D. Marxist Unity Group's NPC members voted for comrade Kareem E. to serve the rest of the term.
Who gets to determine the composition of our leadership bodies? Members of previous NPC terms have had different answers. In the 2021-2023 term, the resignation of three members was used as an opportunity to change the political composition of the NPC. The already distorted NPC left a later vacancy open, which is also a choice about the composition of the NPC. The resulting body struggled to lead the organization for the rest of its term. Using vacancies to add additional seats for your own ideological tendency leads to an NPC which no longer represents the general membership. This replicates the problems with the bureaucratic centralist “slate system” method that MUG rejects by giving factions the ability to undemocratically entrench themselves in leadership. It also encourages politics-through-bullying, with a clear incentive for social media battles or dogpiling to win seats by attrition. The answer to this question must be clear: only the membership of DSA can decide the composition of our leadership, and if we want to change the politics of our leadership bodies the venue for that is arguments made at convention.
While Rose and Kareem are both members of Groundwork, we are not seeking to enshrine caucus replacements as a hard rule. In the case of a vacancy election where the only qualified candidates have different politics we would not vote simply based on caucus membership. There are many other imaginable situations that could make replacement choices more complicated, but nothing about this particular case would change this principle. Unless DSA has agreed to some sort of party list proportional representation system for NPC and has a vacancy process that reflects that, the NPC should strive to carry out the will of convention while taking into account the context of a situation. This is the role that we elect the NPC for as our representative leadership in between national conventions.