Planting the Flag: The State Budget and Clarifying our Electoral Project
NY State Assembly in session [Credit: Hans Pennink/AP]
DSA has a problem, or rather, DSA has had the same recurring problem in the years since it broke into national prominence with the election of AOC in 2018. For as much as the DSA likes to present its relationship to the assorted representatives it calls its “electeds” as being the result of a deliberate and conscious intervention into the electoral sphere, the concrete reality of the situation suggests the relationship is a great deal more tenuous than it may seem.
The latest example of the mismatch between theory and practice can be found in the fallout resulting from the vote on the latest New York state budget. The budget itself has a marked police bent, it includes broad provisions and funding to police retail theft, which is a point of pride in the budget bill. Considering the rest of the bill isn’t much better, except for the inclusion of a weakened form of good cause eviction, there is very little in the budget that deserves the support of proclaimed Socialists. Despite that, two DSA electeds voted in support of the budget: Julia Salazar and Emily Gallagher.
How can we explain the Socialist vote for what is essentially a budget set out to criminalize vast swaths of the working class? To hear Salazar tell it, it was the only way that some key planks of her political agenda would ever get passed, mainly good cause eviction. It’s important to point out that despite the inclusion of a clause introducing good cause, the budget was largely opposed by housing rights advocates and tenant organizations because the final language was significantly weaker than what was originally proposed.
It is important to mention the structural considerations of Albany politics, where any representative trying to pass legislation will need to present something other representatives in the State Assembly will be willing to vote for. Fair enough, compromise is the lifeblood of democracy (or so they say in high school civics textbooks). But Socialists should confront this problem in a unique way. We don’t just stand against this or that particular law or injustice in society, but against the whole of the social and political order that generates these injustices. Socialists therefore have to tackle the problem of society in the broadest possible way, that means in large part that our job is to explain to large numbers of people why the capitalist system generates these injustices and inequalities and why the bourgeois political order is incapable of solving the problems that its social system throws up.
The horse-trading and influence peddling of Albany politics is particularly ill-equipped at giving Socialists the opportunity to do this. The structure of Albany politics (and bourgeois politics generally) forces participants into the double-bind of what can be practically passed by a legislature dominated by pro-capitalist forces and what constituents expect the representative to do on their behalf. As long as ostensibly Socialist reps play into the dynamic of Albany politics, trading in their principles for what is immediately achievable, they wind up accelerating the alienation that their constituents experience when the reps inevitably end up compromising and causing Socialists to lose face with the working class who increasingly begin to identify them with the entrenched status quo.
It was once a well established principle that Socialists would not vote or otherwise support funding for the repressive apparatus of the state, “Not one person, not one penny for this system.” The first reason is practical, we shouldn’t vote to hand the state the weapons with which they will use to repress or frustrate the growth of our movement. The second reason is somewhat more abstract, but it concerns what is probably the most important role of the Socialist movement prior to achieving state power: education. The budget, and what it says about what is prioritized in this society, can be an enormous opportunity to educate very large groups of people on Socialist principles. Why have we voted to give cops more money and power to attack the poorest sections of the working class under the guise of “policing retail theft”? Socialists can provide an answer to workers by pointing out the aspects of the budget that function as unabashed class warfare. Attacking poor workers and gutting eviction protections is a very clear example of a class society making its priorities known to everyone.
This isn’t to say that Socialists cannot pass meaningful legislation designed to materially improve the lives of working people, and Socialists have been responsible for many instances of such legislation. However, the horizon of our activities cannot be solely to pass “good laws”, and in fact Socialists find greater success in passing those laws when coming from a position of intransigent opposition to the existing capitalist system. To put it simply, people learn to identify us with the solution and not the problem. One might object: “Well, if we’re just intransigent and oppositional we’ll never get anything done!” But this misunderstands a crucial fact of Socialist legislative policy: we win when we make people understand the nature of the society in which they live. By agitating against the budget we can organize the working class against a concrete manifestation of their own oppression and spread our ideas at the same time.
To address the issue of our own circumstances directly: electeds often don’t follow DSA’s lead because there is nothing that binds representatives to our political project. In fact, the current relationship between org and elected reproduces bourgeois modes of politics. The horse-trading and backroom intrigues of Albany become dominant modes of conduct for our electoral activities, and these are politics designed to rob the agency and protagonism of self-organized working people. Our electeds begin to talk and act like the same politicians that we claim to stand against, and these modes of conduct are then reproduced within the org and movement. These bourgeois modes of politics are intimately wrapped up with the way that representatives perpetuate their own careers, including how they secure political support and funding outside of the working class.
Giving the DSA a positively articulated program could go a long way toward clearing up the confusion between our electoral efforts and our Socialist aspirations. It would be a means of holding members of the project accountable to a clear set of principles. It would give us concrete goals to work towards, but it would also be a means of constant self-clarification for the movement, answering the question: “What are we fighting for?” The first step of any movement is to plant a banner in the sand and put the call out for those who agree to rally to it. In that respect we’re still at step 0.5 of that process, and the ambiguity continues to produce morbid symptoms of DSA talking left while electeds move to the right.
The debate about the direction of DSA electoral work will continue to rage on, no doubt it will continue to be spurred on by individual instances of betrayal. One does have to credit the work of the comrades who have built the electoral infrastructure that has reintroduced socialism into the political mainstream, which had been dormant for nearly two generations prior, and the resulting shift in public consciousness. But, there is something to be said about recognizing when changing conditions call for a shift in tactics and strategy. We no longer live in the world of 2016 or even 2020. Social and political conditions have produced a situation where a clear opposition to the status quo is necessary. When masses of people begin to move into politics we have an even greater responsibility as Socialists to lead by example, like during the historic uprisings in 2020 or even today with the electric mass movement around Palestine. There is an opportunity to plant a banner and rally sympathetic workers and elected representatives to our organization, it just requires us to be clear. Until that happens we can expect growing contradictions between the organization and its elected.