The Absent Partner Strategy: Part 1
SMC Editorial Board Note: This piece is not an official caucus statement, but the opinion of the author.
Part I: Situation vs. Strategy
Introduction
Some elements of DSA’s national leadership are increasingly signaling their intention to move the organization towards a third-party strategy. A Bread and Roses NPC member recently joked publicly that her caucus was beginning its “clean break era,” while Marxist Unity Group has long been committed to ending DSA’s Democratic-ballot-line efforts in short order, “even if this causes a temporary decrease in our number of electoral victories.”
This shift is surprising, given that DSA has been very successful in building electoral power across the country through Democratic primaries. In fact, that strategy is perhaps the single most significant reason DSA has grown into the largest US socialist organization since the decline of the Communist Party. While we have grown, other socialist organizations have stagnated or dissolved. Why turn back to the third-party strategy that has so obviously failed when attempted by organizations like the Green Party, Party for Socialism and Liberation, and Socialist Alternative?
A new piece by Bread and Roses member Neal Meyer suggests an explanation. Meyer argues that DSA has been pursuing a “junior partner” strategy with respect to the Democratic Party. DSA members, after being elected on the Democratic ballot line, seek to advance working-class interests by pushing for reforms as junior partners to the mainstream Democratic Party. He makes the case that this junior partner status puts the left in a weak position:
[T]he key is that the left enters the game very much as a junior partner — the smaller, weaker force seeking consent from the stronger senior for its plans. The temptation to sweeten the deal and offer more to the senior partner in return for supporting whatever the priority of the moment is is strong.
I think that this makes a key error—confusing the position that we are in as an electoral left for our goals. In the first part of this two-part essay I will outline why this confusion is a mistake and why persisting in this mistake will make DSA less like a “junior” partner and more an “absent” one. In the second part, I will lay out why the Democratic ballot line is essential for the left to transcend its junior partner status.
“Junior Partner” is a Situation, Not a Strategy
“Junior partner” is a great way to describe the situation the left is in. The Squad are eight (soon to be seven without further gains—AOC, Omar, Casar, Pressley, Ramirez, Lee, and Tlaib) members in a body of 435. DSA’s New York state legislators are in a similar boat; they are eight members of a 213-member legislature. DSA elected officials advocate vigorously and sometimes successfully for laws to expand tenants’ rights, support workers, stop climate change, etc., but to do that they are (1) dependent on Democratic legislative majorities consisting mainly of centrist Democrats (since no Republican-led legislature would have any interest at all in such reforms) and (2) forced to fight on the terms set by those centrist Democrats. While DSA members in the legislature can draw on “inside-outside” tactics to draw attention to centrist Democrats’ hypocrisy and generate public pressure for their goals, few would disagree that they start from a position of weakness and that the reforms they enact are never as radical as we might wish.
“Our legislators aren’t choosing to work with Democrats: Democrats are simply the only elected officials with whom our legislators can work to do their jobs.”
But a situation is not a strategy. No one in DSA is pursuing the strategy of being “junior partners.” After all, no one in DSA is pursuing a strategy of having only a tiny number of socialist elected officials in the US and therefore being in a weak position in all US legislative bodies. In fact, we are working hard to remedy that situation by electing more socialists.
Nor are DSA members making a strategic choice to attempt to enact reforms with centrist Democratic votes, rather than, for instance, holding the balance of power between the two parties and partnering with Republicans at some times and Democrats at others. One can certainly imagine historical situations where this would be appropriate (and indeed, this strategy was pursued to some extent by the US labor movement before the New Deal and by the civil rights movement in the first half of the twentieth century). But that situation doesn’t exist today. There are no reforms to be won in coalition with the contemporary Republican Party. Reforms, by default, need to be won with Democratic votes. So our legislators aren’t choosing to work with Democrats: Democrats are simply the only elected officials with whom our legislators can work to do their jobs.
While it’s an exaggeration to describe the relationship we have with Democrats as a “partnership,” the fact remains that we need the votes of Democratic politicians to advance working-class interests. That reality doesn’t mean we need to enter into a formal pact with the Democratic Party, or avoid denouncing them, or vote with them on every issue—clearly DSA elected officials elected on the Democratic ballot line do in fact frequently criticize, attack, vote against, endorse against, and run against centrist Democrats, and they should.
But to the extent that what Meyer means by “junior partnership” is that (1) DSA elected officials, to advance reforms, must somehow win the support of some mainstream Democrats, and (2) DSA elected officials, being fewer in number than mainstream Democrats, in general are in a weak position relative to them, he is describing a fact rather than a strategy.
The “Junior Partner Situation” Would Still Exist Even if DSA Pursued a “Clean Break”
What Meyer describes as a “strategy” advocated by some in DSA is not a strategy, but rather an objective situation that DSA must reckon with, regardless of what strategy the organization might choose to pursue. To appreciate this, it is helpful to consider the degree to which this situation would still exist even if DSA were to radically shift its approach.
For instance, suppose DSA pursued a “clean break” from the Democratic ballot line, as Meyer seems inclined to argue we should. And imagine that that clean break was astonishingly successful, and DSA managed against all odds to elect five DSA-ballot-line members of Congress by 2030—a sort of “second Squad.” What would those 5 members actually do when they got to Congress?
If they wanted to be able to perform the basic work of legislating, they’d need to do what left third parties do in parliamentary systems all over the world: make a deal with the largest sympathetic party around. In our case, that would be the Democrats. They would receive policy concessions and committee appointments in exchange for supporting Democratic leadership in the House. If they held the balance of power in the House and Democrats needed their votes to elect a speaker, they’d be essentially bound to do so or face a huge backlash from their base; if they did not hold the balance of power and the Democrats did not need their votes, they would attempt to come to an arrangement anyway in order to advance the agenda they had run on.
“Caring about legislative outcomes, being accountable to a working-class base for the improvement of all of our lives, is what drives our adherence to dealing with the systems of governance as they are.”
In fact, this is exactly what Bernie Sanders does already. He quite famously rejects the Democratic ballot line each time he runs, but nevertheless must caucus with them in the legislature in order to sit on committees and pass legislation. Running on a different ballot line would not in any way solve the “junior partner situation,” where there are too few socialists to govern independently and their only plausible partner is the Democrats.
But we can go farther. Suppose DSA made the decision to abstain from elections entirely, since elections inevitably lead to discreditable association with the Democrats. In that case, DSA might commit to “base-building”: building working-class power outside the state, through unions and community organizations, and fighting for the working class that way. Even then, DSA would still be reliant on Democratic majorities even to maintain status quo conditions on issues like workers’ rights and reproductive rights, much less to win new reforms. DSA might choose to say otherwise publicly—it might loudly denounce the Democratic Party, say all politicians were equally crooks and liars and class enemies, etc.—but this would not change the fact that DSA-backed efforts at reform or defense of working-class interests would succeed with Democratic votes or not at all.
This situation characterized much of the pre-2016 US left: Leftists often found themselves attempting to wield power through street protest, but such protest was often necessarily aimed at influencing and pressuring elected officials (since only through these elected officials could protesters hope to succeed on particular issues), and more specifically Democratic elected officials (since Republicans are not sensitive to attacks from the left). Subjectively, leftists employing these kinds of tactics might strongly reject the assertion that they are in a partnership of any kind with the Democratic Party—after all, they spend all their time attacking Democratic elected officials. But objectively, their very orientation towards pressuring Democrats is an admission of codependence. And in that codependent relationship, the inability to successfully primary any Democratic politicians is a sign of weakness rather than a mark of independence.
The conditions that drive this dynamic are not related to our orientation towards the Democratic Party. Rather, they are driven by our orientation to the state and to reforms. Caring about legislative outcomes, being accountable to a working-class base for the improvement of all of our lives, is what drives our adherence to dealing with the systems of governance as they are. That is true under a blue or red banner, on a Socialist or Democratic ballot line.
The “Absent Partner” Strategy
Is there any way out of this situation? Are we doomed to forever be in coalition with non-socialist Democrats and to forever be forced to compromise our reforms and triangulate our strategies with respect to them?
The clearest way out is pretty simple: organize. If we persuade many more people to be socialists, build a stronger socialist movement, and elect more socialists, we can be large enough to be independent. In a way, I think it is laughable to discuss how DSA elected officials might shape reforms when the largest bloc of DSA legislators in any legislative body in the country (DSA members in the New York State Assembly) controls just 5 (soon to be 6) out of 150 seats in that body, less than 4% of all seats, and the largest socialist organization in the country has fewer than 100,000 members. We’re weak because there are too few of us, and if we want DSA elected officials to take a more aggressive stance and win more, we need more of them.
“We’re weak because there are too few of us, and if we want DSA elected officials to take a more aggressive stance and win more, we need more of them.”
Achieving the level of organization we need will not be easy, of course, but in attempting it we have one key advantage: Centrist Democratic politicians rely on the support of millions of working-class voters, but they can’t and won’t deliver the reforms these voters want and need. Centrist Democrats find themselves in a contradictory position, where they need to simultaneously offer real gains for working-class voters (universal healthcare, affordable housing, better jobs, racial justice) while also satisfying their donors and lobbyists by not actually delivering these gains. This gap between what working-class voters need and what centrist Democrats can deliver is our opportunity to organize.
Meyer and others in Bread and Roses, however, seem increasingly dissatisfied with that strategy, concerned that the need for coalition with centrist Democrats leaves us vulnerable to being tarred with their sins and perhaps also that it will lead us to drift rightward. Bread and Roses has increasingly argued that DSA should firmly reject all forms of partnership with the Democrats—refusing to attempt to negotiate reforms in office, firmly announcing our neutrality on the presidential election, and even reprimanding any elected official who endorses the Democratic candidate for President against Trump.
What would this new direction mean for DSA as an organization?
I suggested above that even under the conditions of a “clean break” from the Democratic ballot line, DSA elected officials would still face the task of navigating a conditional alliance with centrist Democrats in pursuit of working-class reforms. But of course nothing requires that DSA in fact pursue working-class reforms in the short term. We might instead choose simply to denounce both parties equally, announce our support for reforms, and await our moment in the sun. In the hypothetical I sketched above—where DSA Party elected officials hold the balance of power in the House—we might choose to refuse to do a deal with the Democratic congressional caucuses and allow Republicans to take the majority. If Democrats are in the majority, we might refuse to play “inside baseball” by negotiating with them, and let Democrats and Republicans hash it out among themselves.
Likewise, when Trump and other Republicans run for office on a platform that attacks workers’ rights, reproductive rights, environmental regulation, and so forth, we can make very clear that the fight against them is not our fight—that we want nothing to do with this battle between two parties committed to neoliberalism and genocide, that we represent a third way. We can follow Bread and Roses’ 2023 convention proposal and not only separate ourselves from this fight but distance ourselves from any elected official who engages in this fight.
We might describe this as the “absent partner strategy.” Under this strategy, when activists ask for our opinion on legislation to end climate change, or for expanded worker rights, DSA will say loudly and clearly that it supports these things and more. But when activists are campaigning to enact these reforms through legislation, DSA won’t be there. When activists are fighting to stop a future Republican administration’s assault on reproductive rights, or its efforts to cut Medicaid, we’ll be with them in spirit—but if it involves sharing a podium with Democrats, we won’t be with them in practice. We’ll be a partner in these fights, but a loudly absent one.
“The absent partner strategy neither leaves our hands clean, nor does it make us large enough to be in the driver’s seat. It leaves us committed to the state and its outcomes, but totally unable to affect the course of events.”
This is not a strategy that will allow DSA to effectively organize working-class people around shared material interests. We cannot, for example, expect labor unions—even left-led ones—to back us if we refuse to participate in fights to protect and expand workers’ rights. Using reform fights to organize people does not require (contrary to Meyer’s suggestion) winning those reforms; on the contrary, losing such fights, particularly due to the opposition of corporate Democrats, can be radicalizing and a strong organizing opportunity. But we can’t access this organizing opportunity if we don’t even fight for reforms. And again, under current conditions, fighting for reforms requires some degree of negotiated cooperation with Democratic Party elected officials. If DSA rejects such cooperation and stands aloof, we will cede this organizing terrain to the centrists.
The absent partner strategy neither leaves our hands clean, nor does it make us large enough to be in the driver’s seat. It leaves us committed to the state and its outcomes, but totally unable to affect the course of events. We cannot build coalitions, we cannot take credit, we cannot grow. In fact, as I will argue in the next part of this series, the absent partner strategy can only work in—and will inevitably create—a situation where DSA is even smaller than it is now.