Re: "Nero fiddles while Rome burns"

Marv, John,

You have both read the recall and the wage as demands on the state. They are not. They are conditions an organization imposes on its own candidate, and every one of them can be operated tomorrow without a vote in the House, the City Council, or a constitutional convention. That distinction is most of the answer, so let me take Marv's three headings in order.

The wage. AOC does not need the support of the House of Representatives to live on $51,844. The Treasury pays the salary to her. What she does with it on the fifteenth of the month is hers to decide, and no one has to consent to a member of Congress writing a check. Kshama Sawant did exactly this for ten years on the Seattle City Council, taking roughly an average worker's wage and remitting the balance to a fund her organization controlled, and she was reelected twice while doing it. The Socialist Party TDs in Ireland do the same. The Bolshevik Duma deputies did it. The Commune did it as a rule of the Commune, not as a bill submitted to Thiers.

So the question is not whether the bourgeoisie will consent. It is where the remainder goes and who audits it. If the difference goes to a charity of the officeholder's choosing, you have a virtuous individual and no mechanism. If it goes to a fund the organization controls and the organization publishes the ledger, you have a material relation: he is paid by us, the payment is contingent, and the contingency is visible to every member. It becomes an empty gesture at precisely the point where it is an announcement rather than a transfer. That is an argument for auditing it, not against demanding it.

Recall. Here, you and John are both right about the thing you are describing and both describing something I did not propose.

There is no recall of a member of Congress in this country, and there is not going to be one. Granted, and it was never the claim. The recall that matters is revocation of the mandate, not removal from the seat. The organization cannot unseat him. It can withdraw its name, its endorsement, its canvassers, its list, its money, and its members, and it can say publicly why. Whether that is a serious consequence depends entirely on whether those things were worth anything to him, which is the same question as whether the campaign was ours or his.

And DSA has done it. The NPC rescinded Jamaal Bowman's endorsement in late 2023. So the instrument exists, is real, and has been used. Note how. After the votes, after a year of pressure, once, and with no procedure specifying in advance which votes would trigger it, by what majority, or on what timeline. That is the disease in a single case. Not that we lack the instrument. That the instrument is discretionary and retrospective, which means it gets used at the moment when it costs the most and secures the least.

John, your objection is the honest one, and I want to grant it flatly. DSA would not pull the lever because the incumbent is better than the alternative and because it would be written up as disarray in the DSA. Agreed. But look at what that concedes. The barrier is not the bourgeois constitution. The barrier is that we prefer the officeholder to the mechanism, and we will keep preferring him every time, for reasons that will always be available and will always be true. "We cannot" is doing work for "we would rather not," and the two are worth distinguishing because only one of them is fixed.

On your replacement question: there is no replacement, and that is not a defect. Revoking a mandate is not installing a successor. The seat stays occupied by a man who no longer speaks for us and who has to run next time on what he actually did rather than on what we said about him. That is the sanction. It is modest. Modest and real beats grand and absent.

The fraction. Marv, you write that it would have no more power to act than the general population has to discipline a politician between elections. It has one power the general population does not have. The candidate is a member of it, and it decides what he is endorsed for before he is endorsed for anything.

That is the entire lever, and it is available exactly once. The fraction writes the mandate, publishes it, makes the endorsement conditional on it, meets while he is in office, and receives his votes as a report from a member rather than as news from the Times. He is then disciplined the way any member is disciplined. None of this requires the state's permission. All of it requires that the organization be willing to lose a seat over it, which is the real cost and the reason it is not done.

Now the PS, which I think is the more consequential thing you wrote. You suggest I may be calling on DSA to campaign for constitutional changes enshrining popular recall and salary caps, and that both could gain traction inside DSA and in the class.

They might. It is not what I am proposing, and I would resist it becoming the answer, for the reason that goes to my whole argument. A constitutional campaign takes a mechanism the organization could operate on itself this year and relocates it into the bourgeois constitution, where it will be enacted, if ever, by the institutions you and John have both just correctly said would neuter it. That is displacement, and it is the same operation I have spent a year documenting in every caucus in DSA: If the accountability demand is affirmed, then it is assigned to a body where it cannot function, and the affirming is what makes the assigning feel like progress. I have no objection to agitating for popular recall. I object to it answering the question of what we do about our own electeds, because then the answer is "after the amendment passes."

On the pedagogical reading, no. You suggest I might want to advance these in the fraction in order to demonstrate that they cannot be realized under capitalism and that it would be better to puncture the illusion directly in writing. I do not want that and would not do it. A demand raised in order to be defeated is a trick played on the members who take it seriously, and it produces exactly the cynicism it was meant to instruct. I am not proposing these because they are impossible. I am proposing them because they are trivially possible, legally costless, and not done, and the reason they are not done is the thing worth knowing.

So let me put it back as a specific rather than a principle. Take the next DSA endorsement, whichever one it is. Name the three commitments the mandate contains. Name the majority of the fraction that revokes. Name the timeline and name what he loses when it does. If the answer is that no such procedure will be written because writing it would cost us the seat, that is a real answer; it is probably the true one, and I would rather argue with it than with the constitution. What I do not accept is that the constitution forbids it. The constitution has nothing to say about what we ask of our own people before we put our name on them.

--
Tony


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