Profiles in Political Cowardice:

Tempest and the National Leadership of DSA

By Max Elbaum

Fighting effectively for social transformation is hard. Socialists and revolutionaries don’t square off against our class enemies on any kind of level playing field. The country’s political structures are formidable barriers to radical change. We don’t have the luxury of determining the terrain on which we fight or the timetable on which battles will be waged. We have to deal with the specific circumstances shaped by forces far more powerful than we are.

This means, among other things, that practicing radical politics means making a lot of tough choices. At almost every juncture, our options are not what we might wish for. Every course holds both opportunities and pitfalls. There are no easy roads and no guarantees.

So, we make the best assessment of the landscape and balance of forces that we can, choose a course of action, and then throw ourselves into implementing it. When a particular campaign or stage of struggle wraps up, we look at the choices we made, learn from what we got right and what we got wrong in both conception and execution, and make the next set of tough choices. 

In late August 2024, the tough choices facing US socialists are front and center. An authoritarian MAGA bloc that incorporates openly fascist elements at all levels of its apparatus is bidding for enough power to impose its white Christian nationalist agenda on the country. The most powerful current in the opposition offers an alternative agenda on numerous important issues but is complicit in Israel’s genocidal war in Gaza and has caved to right-wing fearmongering on immigrant rights. A general election is approaching whose outcome – especially at the presidential level – will be decisive in determining whether MAGA or anti-MAGA holds federal power for the next four years. Throughout the socialist left – and more broadly in almost every sector of the electorate – people are wrestling with what to do when they enter the voting booth. There is a choice to be made. 

Tempest: Ready, Set… Punt 

The Tempest Collective was formed largely by former members of the International Socialist Organization (ISO) soon after the ISO disbanded in 2019. Tempest describes itself as “an organizing and educational project. Our goal is to put forward a revolutionary vision that is clear and understandable, that weighs in on strategic and tactical questions, and that offers concrete guidance about how to put a consistent set of working-class politics ‘from below’ into practice today.”

Tempest has published two articles by Collective members on the 2024 elections this month. Let’s see what “concrete guidance” is offered in those pieces. Author Ashley Smith writes:  

“…we must be crystal clear: The two candidates and parties are not the same and it is an ultra-left mistake to characterize them that way. The greater evil is obviously Trump and the far-right GOP. He, not Harris, is threatening the deportation of 13 million human beings and the criminalization of queer people. Harris and the Democratic Party are lesser evils by comparison. But that does not exonerate them of being evil."

Smith’s article also asserts:

"In this epoch of political instability, socialists must develop a strategic approach to elections. We are not anarchists; we do not dismiss elections as irrelevant to the class struggle. Electoral politics are one of the battlefields of the class struggle."

Putting those ideas together, the article says:

"…what should the Left do? First of all, we should not argue with individuals about what they do at the ballot box. That is not the key question and debate to have. Instead, we must argue that activists, social movements, and unions should not spend our time, money, and energy campaigning for Harris as the lesser evil." (The other Tempest article, by Collective member Natalia Tylim, offers the same punchline: “I want to stress that I’m also not going to spend my time or resources arguing with individuals about how they vote as individuals out of their fear of Trump.”)

Wait a minute. The left, and those paying attention to what left groups and leaders think, is debating electoral strategy. That strategy is not limited to – but certainly is commonly understood to include – a stance on who to vote for or against. An electoral strategy that refuses to take a position on who people should vote for is not a strategy; it’s a refusal to make a tough choice. Or in Tempest’s terms, to offer “concrete guidance” to those you seek to influence.

What we have here is a new twist on an old adage:

When the going gets tough, the tough…. change the subject.

DSA Leadership Redefines the Word “Bold”

The new “Workers Deserve More” program for 2024 recently announced by the national leadership of DSA is similar in essential respects. In a vein similar to Tempest, the program declares:

“We recognize that a second Trump victory would be catastrophic for the international working class. Relying on the Democrats to defeat Republicans isn’t working.” 

In the preamble, the DSA leadership lays out their view of dilemma US voters face and offer their guidance as to how to proceed:

“In the 2024 elections, working people have few good options. In most races, Americans will have the choice between far-right Republicans and corporate Democrats. In both cases, workers lose, and our politicians will remain controlled by their corporate donors, not the ordinary people who voted for them…. Neither major party is capable of advancing a positive program for the 2024 elections that meets the needs of the majority of Americans. That’s why the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) is presenting a bold alternative course of action. In our 2024 program, “Workers Deserve More,” we hope to bring together millions of people throughout the U.S. to fight for a true democracy where working people have control over their own lives, their government, and the economy.”

What follows is a list of 18 demands/programmatic goals (Medicare for All, Tax the Rich, Free Palestine, etc.).

Again, wait a minute. Isn’t something missing? That list of programmatic goals is good. But aren’t similar lists put forward by many progressive and left organizations? And is fighting for them really an “alternative” to taking a stand on who people should vote for in 2024? Doesn’t the DSA text imply that prospects for making headway toward those goals would be immeasurably more difficult under a Trump administration than a Harris one? Isn’t calling it an “alternative” just another way of saying we don’t like the options so we’re taking a pass on making a choice? What is “bold” about that?

And how about some candor about why no recommendation is being made? Pretty much everyone in or anywhere near DSA knows that members of the organization – including members of the national leadership body – are badly divided on who to vote for in 2024. Is there a reason not to come out and say so? Isn’t one of the hallmarks of “democratic socialism” supposed to be that it rejects the practice of a left organization or party projecting an image of monolithic unity to the working-class public when that is not the case? Where is the credibility in an organization saying it hopes to “bring together millions of people across the US to fight for a true democracy” when it won’t offer any guidance on who workers should vote for two months from now or explain one of the reasons it is sitting this one out?

“Revolutionary Phrase-Making”    

It’s no secret that I advocate a vote for Kamala Harris in 2024 to prevent the MAGA authoritarians and fascists from taking control of the federal government. I’ve argued in numerous articles and webinars that advocacy of abstention or a third-party vote is a profound error that underestimates the danger of MAGA, misunderstands the way working-class and revolutionary organizations can build political power, and does nothing to strengthen our immediately urgent or long-term Palestine solidarity efforts. (See here, here, here, and here.) But a certain respect is due to those who advocate abstentionism or third-party voting: they put their politics out there and fight for them. That’s a serious way to do politics.

Respect is also due to most issue-based and constituency-based organizations that do not offer a who-to-vote-for recommendation. Matters regarding the specific issue which is their main focus, the sentiments within their base, and/or internal differences in groups whose main focus is not electoral need to be taken into account. And the main thing is that such groups do not promote themselves as offering a revolutionary vision for the US working class or as building a new party that will lead the working class to socialism. 

Organizations that do self-identify that way and issue pronouncements about the tasks of socialists in today’s class struggle have greater responsibilities. They need to be held to a higher standard. Part of their responsibility is to make tough choices, or in cases when they cannot make a choice, straightforwardly explain why. 

There is an unfortunate history of organizations not doing so and, like Tempest and the DSA national leadership today, substituting “bold” radical pronouncements for biting the bullet and making a difficult choice. There is even a term for this practice – “revolutionary phrasing-making” (or “the revolutionary phrase”) – coined by none other than V.I. Lenin:

“Revolutionary phrase-making…is a disease from which revolutionary parties suffer…when the course of revolutionary events is marked by big, rapid zigzags. By revolutionary phrase making we mean the repetition of revolutionary slogans irrespective of objective circumstances at a given turn in events, in the given state of affairs obtaining at the time. The slogans are superb, alluring, intoxicating, but there are no grounds for them; such is the nature of the revolutionary phrase.”  

“Superb, alluring, intoxicating…” – perfect for battles on twitter or Facebook and the publication of “bold” programs. Unfortunately, outside of actual revolutionary situations, practicing working class politics usually involves making choices between less-than-ideal options. No radical organization or party will get those choices right every time. But organizations with an aversion to choosing, and especially those that encase their taking a pass in clouds of radical rhetoric, are avoiding rather than engaging with objective circumstances and are traveling a dead-end road. 

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Max Elbaum has been active in peace, anti-racist and radical movement since joining Students for a Democratic Society (SDS) in the 1960s. He is the author of Revolution in the Air: Sixties Radicals Turn to Lenin, Mao and Che(Verso Books, Third Edition, 2018), a history of the 1970s-‘80s ‘New Communist Movement’ in which he was an active participant. He is currently a member of the Convergence Magazine Editorial Board.