No One Is “Politically Independent”
You wake up. It's 2036, and the nation formerly known as the United States is now a parliamentary democracy. You remember just a few short years ago when the 2028 General Strike brought capitalism to its knees: escalating working-class insurrections forced a constitutional convention, abolished the Senate, Presidency, and Supreme Court, and put all power to an expanded, improved House of Representatives, placing workers at the helm of a brand new democracy. Reminiscing, you make your way out the door and down the street, stopping for a newspaper and a cup of nationalized Red Starbucks coffee. As you scan the headlines for results of the recent national election, your stomach drops. You fall to your knees, splashing yourself with near-boiling Chiapas single-origin. But you hardly feel it—you've gone numb. Your party, Marxist Unity, secured only a paltry 40% of the House, and can pass nothing without the 20% won by the Bread and Roses Labor Party. Screaming, you throw the rest of your coffee into the street and tear frantically at the newspaper. Your worst nightmare has come true: for another two years, you are politically dependent.
DSA members love talking about political independence. You can't go to a convention without voting on multiple resolutions about it. Every faction on DSA's National Political Committee praises it, prescribes it, debates how to get it, writes open letters to elected officials about it, or accuses opponents of trying to abandon it. At a post-2024-elections forum on party building held by the Reform & Revolution caucus (who also want political independence), it felt like the phrase "political independence" came up maybe 500 times in 90 minutes.
But here's the thing: no one has ever really defined this. They just keep saying we should have it. There is no actually good definition, because "political independence" is an oxymoron: no political force in the world is "independent" from other forces. Politics is a contextual struggle for power between allied and opposed actors, and whether it’s political parties, unions and bosses, protesters and government officials, countries at war, or two people arguing, everyone’s actions directly “depend” on someone else’s.
We all know this, but we keep showing up to debates using a confusing buzzphrase that pretends it isn’t true. Beyond not making sense, “political independence” misleads members by implying our ideal version of the left is one that ignores important political forces and avoids collaboration with even the most aligned allies. That’s a quintessentially American fantasy of how politics ought to be done, but it’s not how democracy works—or successful revolutionary movements, for that matter. To get clear on where our party project needs to go, we should understand why we’re wired to fixate on “independence”—and why we need to instead graduate to talking about owning our infrastructure, and having measurable power to override other actors in the political matrix.
All Political Independence, No Breaks
When "political independence" comes up in DSA, it's almost always in the context of the Democrats, so let’s start there: what does it actually mean to be "politically independent" from them? We got one attempt at an answer in the aforementioned forum from some of DSA's strongest conscripted soldiers, the Marxist Unity Group:
“Socialists should support a break with the Democratic Party and create an independent Socialist Party and platform. But that party must run, contest, and win elections to persuade the class that our party can be the vehicle for the working class to build a real democracy and a path to socialism. It's important to stress that none of what I've mentioned has anything to do with what ballot line we use or what the bourgeois state classifies as a 501c(3) [sic] or a formal political party in the law courts. What matters is we are asserting our independence. That's why we in MUG generally don't like to talk about the break—because the break isn't an event, it's a process. It happens in a small way every time a chapter builds an independent electoral strategy, and in a bigger way when we campaign with DSA and socialism on the literature.”
…Okay. Noting the whole "none of this has anything to do with ballot lines" thing, let’s explore what it means to "assert our independence" with an “independent electoral strategy” beyond putting a logo on literature. Bread and Roses member Nick French does so in a piece elaborating on the caucus’s successful 2023 "Act Like an Independent Party" convention resolution. In it, he too says that DSA should operate as "an independent, party like organization—a 'party surrogate'" willing to use whatever ballot lines are necessary to get elected, due to America's uniquely legally restrictive current ballot system. And to operate that party surrogate, he suggests "building 'Socialists in Office' committees (like the one that currently exists in New York State) across the country, so that socialist elected officials can coordinate their legislative strategy independent of Democratic caucuses."
“Even in a legislature where DSA were a comfortable majority, our policy and campaign decisions would inevitably “depend” on how our allies and opponents maneuvered.”
Speaking as someone with years of experience working with New York’s Socialists in Office, that description could not possibly be more wrong. SIOs—virtually always a small minority of a given legislature—spend nearly all their time either coordinating to get enough Democrats to vote with them to win legislative battles, or responding to corporate Democrats with opposition in news cycles and elections. Their actions entirely depend on what members of other parties do, and they always will. As Socialist Majority member Michael Kinnucan outlines in his essay “The Absent Partner Strategy,” even in a scenario where we elect a record 5 socialist congresspeople on our own ballot line in the next cycle—or, what the hell, 100—they would not be able to pass any legislation "independently." That party, even if it managed to organize and activate the around 36% of Americans with a positive view of socialism, would be unable to elect a president "independently." We'd have to do what virtually every other socialist party in the world does: form a coalition government and "depend" on others, negotiating with and making concessions to them in order to cohere a majority able to pass legislation and elect an executive. Even in a legislature where DSA were a comfortable majority, our policy and campaign decisions would inevitably "depend" on how our allies and opponents maneuvered. And in that world, a subset of our party might break off and form their own party in order to negotiate concessions from us, in exchange for keeping the governing majority together.
For better or worse, we will never be “politically independent”, and neither will anyone else. Yet many of us are so attached to the idea that we’re bending the definition of this word past its breaking point to include things that aren’t “independent” at all, and it makes for confusing and unproductive arguments. If your response to this is, “that’s a strawman, I’m not using independent to mean “not dependent on other things,” you’re proving my point. That is very confusing. We should aspire toward something more honest.
Quit Your 9-to-5 and Be Your Own Boss
So why are we so obsessed with "political independence" in the first place? Because it's a fat fucking dopamine hit for our American lizard brains. Hyper-independence has coursed through the veins of American politics since the country's birth. We founded ourselves with a Declaration of Independence and then fought a war over it, which we now call our revolution. The beating heart of American democracy and law are, in brand if not in outcomes, the moral ideals of individual freedom and liberty. Many of America’s settlers were religiously motivated Protestants, breaking from the Church of England to pursue their own idea of a personal relationship with God. Our constitution’s authors decried political parties and mass politics, codifying a tradition best expressed a century later by a leading Mugwump’s declaration that “When I am in a small minority I believe I am right. When I am in a minority of one, I know I am right.” Our economy is pathologically individualistic—to the point that we accept worse outcomes than other capitalist countries in areas like healthcare and higher education—because many Americans ideologically prefer the "independence" of individual responsibility for every aspect of our lives, to the perceived tyranny of having to pay into and depend on socialized programs. Our idealized image of the American working class is far closer to the bootstrapping small business owner than the many millions of service wage workers at McDonald's or Wal-Mart. From top to bottom, start to finish, we are a nation of rugged individuals, suspicious of institutions, of negotiation, and above all, of interdependence.
“For socialists, there is no virtue in being alone.”
That is the culture we're raised and immersed in. The rugged individual fighting a perpetual war for independence is, so to speak, the cop in our heads. Marx diagnosed this ages ago as a psychological effect of capitalism, writing that, "the right of man to private property is, therefore, the right to enjoy one’s property and to dispose of it at one’s discretion, without regard to other men, independently of society...It makes every man see in other men not the realization of his own freedom, but the barrier to it."
"Political independence" is, at its core, a liberal framing that flattens material power and ownership behind a moral spectrum of individualism, and it resonates because we’re raised to believe that other people are the barrier to our freedom. We need to deprogram from that. My appeal here isn't just about retiring distracting and contradictory language; it's about how we are teaching ourselves to relate to the idea of needing other people. For socialists, there is no virtue in being alone. That's a core distinction between individualistic and solidaristic worldviews, and understanding it is how we graduate from liberal leftism—where success is measured by individual right-thinking and aesthetic choices—to organized socialist politics, where we work together as a class to replace capitalism and improve life on this planet.
Ownership and Power
Look: I get why we talk about this all the time. We want to own our own brand, finances, membership, and infrastructure so that nobody can take it away from us just because we defy them. We want to be distinct enough from the major parties that our health and popularity don't depend on theirs, because our explicit goal is to highlight their corruption and failures, present a viable and better alternative, and cleave off portions of their bases. Those are the right goals for a socialist party in a staggeringly unequal and oligarchic country. But achieving them is a product of ownership and power—not of isolation for its own sake.
If we start replacing “independent” with “powerful” in our discourse, the path forward gets a lot clearer. A powerful movement can take uncompromising stances and force its demands to be met without watering them down in negotiations. A powerful organization can protect its elected members from consequences for defying the political establishment—and can one day replace it and become the new establishment. A powerful party project can convince people that investing their votes and their energy will translate to positive change in their lives. “Independence” can be powerful or powerless—three guys subsistence farming on a commune in the woods is more "politically independent" than a socialist party of tens of millions of people leading a coalition government. But only one has the power to restructure society and keep elected officials accountable to the working class, and only one owns the infrastructure required to stage a democratic revolution.
“If we start replacing ‘independent’ with ‘powerful’ in our discourse, the path forward gets a lot clearer.”
Making this switch exposes the misguidedness of addressing our situation by passing resolutions to “act” independent—acting more powerful doesn’t change anything. Becoming more powerful does, and that takes material, measurable increases in our size, resources, and infrastructure. To change the world in the ways we want, we need power for our specific, democratic socialist vision. But you can build a stronger political machine if you don’t reflexively reject every opportunity to rely on anything besides yourself—which is what centering on “independence” instructs us to do. In reality, you can absolutely use infrastructure you don't (and currently can't) own—say, the mainstream press, or the country’s only two legally protected ballot lines, or software products like VAN, ActBlue, and ActionNetwork—to build power you do own, like an incumbent socialist legislative delegation and a gigantic, loyal base of politically active and experienced socialist campaigners. You can form coalitions and alliances with larger, more powerful institutions, and "depend" on them to achieve things that you believe will increase your power and ownership in the long run. And you can passionately debate inside your movement which relationships increase versus dilute that power and ownership.
Not only can you do these things, it's what every politically ascendant and successful force in history has done, in some form or another. It’s what the American right has done ruthlessly for fifty years, to great effect. And at a local scale, it’s what I’ve spent the last five years doing in Ithaca, New York. I’ve had multiple experiences where chapters in other parts of the country, hoping to start or strengthen their electoral programs, excitedly meet with us to learn how we maintain regular meetings with our endorsed electeds, run them as a united openly socialist slate, and lead together with them to pass policy priorities—then get deflated when they learn we win by combining forces with other left membership organizations and coordinate heavily with the Working Families Democrat council majority to move policy. Sadly, on the left, we’ve set each other up with wrong assumptions about how political power is actually built and used, because we continue to talk about it in confusing and contradictory ways that point toward self-isolating ideals.
Focusing on ownership and power instead of "political independence" allows us to draw a consistent strategic thread between our current situation—where we often rely on others due to our small numbers and legally restrictive election system—and our future goals, where we change the ballot laws to viably incorporate our own party, and wield the numbers and power necessary to override more conservative parties and institutions. It frees us from the false choice between giving up on DSA as it is, and giving up on socialism as it could be. We have the opportunity in our generation to make this the most powerful socialist party in American history. But to get there—and to really transform our society beyond the surface level—we need to start seeing our interdependence as the realization of, not the barrier to, our freedom. And we need to get obsessive about power.