JS

Working within the New York State legislature, I anticipate it will be difficult when there are different interests always trying to compromise a legislator’s integrity. We saw in New York a group of so-called progressives in the state senate recently who, as soon as they got into power, entered into a power-sharing agreement with the Republican Party. I’m not really interested, as you can imagine, in the fact that they betrayed the Democratic Party, but they betrayed the working class. They did that by not just agreeing to caucus with Republicans, but by giving up the power that had been invested in and entrusted to them by the electoral process. I don’t think they did it because they’re all secret Republicans, they did it because they negotiated a deal that would be advantageous for them, that would result in more funding for their districts in the budget process and ultimately better career prospects. This compromise would ultimately be in their own interests.

I think there’s always going to be private interests competing for a legislator’s favor and exerting various pressures, and the best way to remain accountable to the working class — that is, the kind of people who would elect a socialist in the first place — is to remain materially beholden to those people, for example by not taking corporate money. The importance of running a grassroots campaign isn’t just on principle, but in practice it means that if you were elected on a campaign funded entirely by the movement, then you’re more likely to stay accountable to the movement.