The Absent Partner Strategy, Pt 2: Consequences of Absence
This is part two of an article, the first part of which can be read here. Michael is presenting his individual opinion rather than representing an official caucus position.
Jumping back in:
In the first part of this article, I argued that critics of a “junior partner strategy” fail to realize that the dynamics that they are frustrated by in how left elected officials approach governing - especially the reliance on the votes of mainstream Democrats to pass reforms - are not the result of a “strategy,” but a product of the situation in which the left is embedded. I also argued that to successfully “opt out” of these dynamics would not result in a more forthright and effective pursuit of power by working class organizations, but instead place us in an even less desirable situation than the one we are in. Opting to be an “absent partner” would not only make us smaller and less powerful than we are, but in fact a smaller DSA would be a requirement for pursuing this strategy. Were we ever to grow into a true mass organization, we’d find ourselves right back where we started with the same unresolved strategic dilemma. Opting to be an absent partner is not only self-destructive, it becomes less tenable the more successful we are.
Planning for a Small DSA
The “absent partner strategy” is a plan for a small DSA. It’s not just that DSA will be smaller if we pursue it, though many current members who joined to fight for reforms will undoubtedly leave. I mean the strategy is only plausible for an organization the size DSA is now or smaller, with the number of elected officials the organization has now or fewer. This assumption is sometimes made explicit in discussions of the presidential race, where those who argue that DSA should make clear its indifference to the outcome often preface their comments with the observation that DSA is too small to make a difference in such a race anyway. That’s likely true! But it’s worth pondering the implications: If DSA had, say, two million members, and could thus plausibly shape the outcome of the election, would it be so easy to disclaim responsibility here?
The same applies to legislative politics. A hypothetical DSA Congressional caucus that had, say, 50 members, whether ballot-line-independent or not, would be in a position to wield significant power through negotiation with mainstream Democrats: We might choose to make Hakeem Jeffries (or, ideally, some other Democrat) speaker or we might abstain and throw the vote to Mike Johnson. Is it likely that we would choose to do the latter? It’s hard to imagine. In that situation, DSA would have both the obligation to prevent the far right from controlling Congress and the opportunity to significantly shape national legislation. A DSA of that size would certainly be sensitive to the obligation and seize the opportunity. Among other things, our base would demand it: We couldn’t possibly run on working-class issues and then refuse to advance them when we had the power to do so, even if those advances were limited by our continuing need to negotiate with centrist Democrats.
That’s not to say that in this happy hypothetical we’d all agree on what to do legislatively! On the contrary, if DSA were large enough and electorally successful enough to wield real power, we’d argue even more vigorously about exactly which issues to prioritize and how hard to negotiate, since those questions would be almost infinitely more consequential than the questions (of how to “discipline” the handful of remaining federal elected officials who care what we think of them) that have been such a focus for DSA’s national leadership in the past three years. But the idea of simply remaining neutral while consequential battles took place, of not attempting to wield power, would lose all its appeal if we were large enough to wield undeniable power.
The absent partner strategy is a bet on a different outcome–that DSA will remain small enough that its ability to advance its priorities is sharply limited, that efforts to advance this agenda consequently pose a risk of discrediting the organization or allowing it to be co-opted with no corresponding advantage, and that isolation from ongoing fights is thus its best bet until the situation changes.
An Admission of Defeat and a Step Backwards
It is, after all, no accident that DSA caucuses are now advocating the same electoral strategy pursued by organizations like ISO, Socialist Alternative, and PSL for decades. That strategy is proper to moments of political defeat and marginalization for the left. Suggestions that DSA can and should launch a workers’ party may sound optimistic, but they’re just the opposite. When DSA members say that we need to cut off electeds in order to “keep them accountable,” it is not the statement of strength that they believe it is. Rather, it comes from a position of weakness. Instead of projecting confidence, it suggests, “We can’t even hold AOC accountable, our project is headed towards cooptation, we need to get smaller so we can maintain unity and discipline.”
A clean break is not a bold new strategy for DSA, it’s an admission that we think organizations like Socialist Alternative and ISO were right all along and a choice to imitate them. If DSA pursues this road it will have fewer elected officials, less political power, and fewer members than it does today. It accepts the marginalization of socialists as inevitable and attempts to plant a flag which will attract the handful of people sufficiently politically developed and committed to pursue socialist politics anyway, rather than attempting the apparently hopeless task of organizing progressive elements of the working class towards socialism.
DSA in its current form comes out of a very different political moment—the Bernie Sanders 2016 campaign. That campaign demonstrated what many on the left, myself included, had never imagined might be true: That tens of millions of Americans, mostly inside but also some outside the Democratic base, were already prepared, under the right circumstances, to vote for a self-described democratic socialist candidate with an explicitly class-struggle message proposing sweeping and radical change. The optimism of that moment was characterized by the slogan widely celebrated on the left after the 2016 general election, “Bernie would have won”—asserting as it did that class struggle politics might be the key not only to changing the Democratic Party but to defeating the right and changing the world, not someday, but right now. The implication of Bernie’s relative success seemed to be that many Democratic primary voters really did want what the Democratic Party frequently promises but never delivers: universal healthcare, taxes on the wealthy, real action on climate change, etc. Activists across the country responded to Bernie’s campaign by pursuing his strategy at the local level, running in the Democratic primary on a radical message, and we in DSA developed it much farther by building an organization-centered, explicitly socialist electoral program.
We’re now in a much bleaker political moment, and I don’t know many people who are as optimistic about our prospects as they were in 2016. The left of 2024 certainly isn’t all I hoped it would be back then. On the other hand, the left of 2024 is vastly stronger than it was in 2015–better organized, more experienced, with a dramatically larger mainstream presence and a significant electoral operation. Even if the moment is less optimistic than it was in 2016, we can absolutely continue to build the left this way.
People are entitled to their own analysis, and if some in DSA feel that 2016 was a false dawn and we aren’t in a position to organize on a larger scale, I don’t necessarily blame them. In such circumstances maybe a retreat to the electoral strategy of the Trotskyist groups would be appropriate. Personally I think that a shift away from electoral politics entirely would be more appropriate than a series of largely symbolic third party runs, and I think that’s what a “clean break” strategy will likely amount to in practice: A handful of dispiriting defeats followed quickly by an admission that we can’t win.
But if that’s our analysis, we should be clear-eyed about it.