3206. Book Review: Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics, A Report

By Erwin Freed, Socialist Action, March 7, 2019

The Haymarket/Jacobin/Verso jointly edited collection of articles titled “Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics: A Report” is timely and interesting but ultimately does not put forward what its title promises. Almost the entire history of the electoral practices of independent socialists, the working class, and oppressed nationalities in the United States is missing from the book. More than any other piece of analysis, this burning absence shapes the content of the essays in this collection. What the reader is left with are partial ideas on how the socialist left ought to orient towards the electoral arena.

A common theme of the book is that the left must support Democratic Party candidates since it is not strong enough to run candidates on its own ballot lines right now, although doing so should be a goal in the future.

The three exceptions which call for an immediate break with the Democratic Party are Kim Moody’s article “From Realignment to Reinforcement,” Socialist Alternative City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant’s “The Case for Strong Independent Campaigns to Build the Left,” and Todd Chretien’s “A Million Votes for Peace: Notes on Independent Politics.”

Taken together, these three articles make the argument that the Democratic Party is not an empty ballot line but rather a hierarchical, tightly controlled organization; that the Green Party is fatally oriented toward the electoral process, insufficiently anti-capitalist, and internally undemocratic; and that the best way forward to build workers’ power in the electoral arena is for socialists to run independent candidates.

The only really concrete suggestion in this category is Sawant’s argument that the “DSA is well-positioned to run at least five to ten strong [independent] campaigns … throughout the country this year aiming not just at winning votes but also to popularize socialist ideas and build movements. This could be a step toward running strong independent socialist candidates in most major cities next year and in 2020.”

The qualitative changes that would occur if the DSA adopted this perspective and cut all ties with the Democratic Party can not be underestimated. The whole organization, or at least its most active members, would be forced to think about how to formulate their own demands to build class consciousness and not depend on the minimum demands of Democratic Party politicians. They would also have to begin to struggle with keeping their candidates in line with this program and have a real internal discussion about whether the job of socialist politicians is to administer the capitalist state.

Unfortunately, despite providing an example that proves independent socialist candidates can win elections, Sawant and Socialist Alternative have fallen into the trap of attempting to administer the bourgeois state. Underlying Sawant’s support for police unions and chiefs, coalitions with “progressive” Democrats, and ultimately Socialist Alternative’s recent support for Bernie Sanders is the organization’s apparent loss of confidence in the working class to organize their own fights.

This adaptation to capitalist politics by Socialist Alternative and other left groups undoubtedly reflects an impressionist response to the decades-long ebb of militant activity by U.S. workers, which has been worsened by the lack of class-struggle leadership in the labor movement. Left political activists are also surrounded by arguments like the ones in this book—i.e., that the important goal of electing socialists is to pass legislation rather than organizing and educating workers.

DSAers for Sanders

Against this, DSA members and regular authors for Jacobin magazine Meaghan Day, Seth Ackerman, and Ben Beckett all argue that the important thing is to support Democrats right now while making sure that they call themselves socialist and use “class-struggle” rhetoric. The strongest article in this category is Day’s, who makes all of the right arguments for why socialists use the electoral arena but fails to take the essential next step of definitively calling for the working class to form its own party.

What she is right about is that participating in electoral politics allows revolutionaries to talk to thousands of workers about their program, gives us the chance to measure how popular our program is, and shows that we are serious politically by participating in the “normal” political arena. What she is wrong about is that these things remain true when campaigning for Bernie Sanders.

When socialists campaign for Sanders or any Democrat, they are supporting that candidate’s program, political past, and inter-class alliances. Socialists supporting capitalist politicians say to working people that they are not capable of really accomplishing anything on their own initiatives in the political arena.

Electoral strategy is not just an abstract question; as Eric Blanc points out in the book, the political arm of the 2018 teachers’ strikes was destroyed by running militant teachers as Democrats and not as the bud of an independent labor party. (In other articles, unfortunately, Blanc fails to advocate adhering to a clear working-class line in politics. In 2017, he argued in Jacobin for a “dirty break” with the Democrats, in which working-class and socialist candidates would use the Democratic Party ballot designation along the way to building a labor party.)

Bernie betrays

In general, all of the articles agree that Sanders and his newly elected democratic socialist cohorts are not ideal candidates. Instead, they are said to represent the best of what is considered to be possible. There is a consistent narrative running through most of the articles that the supposed “neoliberal wing” of the Democratic Party is being contested by “insurgent” campaigns by Sanders, AOC, and others.

Behind this argument is the recognition of the Democrats as administrators of austerity, war, and racism. On the other hand, the solution to this problem is supposedly realized by different formulations of the classic “inside-outside” strategy. This strategy, based on the idea that the left should support the “least bad” bourgeois candidates while building a movement outside of electoral politics that will “keep their feet to the fire” has persistently failed for the last 150 years.

In the case of Sanders, Alexandria Ocasia-Cortez, Ilhan Omar, Rashida Tlaib, Julia Salazar, and the rest of the democratic socialist candidates, these authors see an alternative to “business as usual” Democrat elites. At the same time, they surely have read Kim Moody’s article in the book, which describes the necessary discipline these candidates undergo from those very same apparatchiks.

All of these perspectives, while giving rhetorical support to workers’ self-agency, leave open the door for positive developments in the workers’ movement to come from outside of that movement and outside of our class. Looking for a possible driver of the historical agency of the working class to come from capitalist politicians leads to a wholly imagined history for Sanders. Whereas he has consistently voted with the Democrats on everything from budgets to immigration policy, to his “socialist” supporters he takes on the figure of an oppositional current and embodiment of the actual demands of the working class.

His cultivated image as an “insurgent class-struggle” candidate surely was part of the reason that led to his appointment as Outreach Chair of the Senate Democratic Steering and Outreach Committee.

Need for a labor party

The year 2018 was the strongest showing of worker militancy since the 1980s. To say that the best way to maintain momentum is to offer support for Democrats with “class-struggle” rhetoric is to miss an important political moment. As the teachers’ and hotel workers’ strikes showed, a broader vision of class struggle is developing within a section of the U.S. working class. An important way to facilitate the growth of this class consciousness is to educate about the need for a workers’ party based in the trade unions.

No one in the collection, including Sawant, who ultimately advocates what sounds like a multi-class populist third party, puts forward the formation of a labor party as one of the burning questions of the day. Even Barry Eidlin’s “The Phantom Limb” leaves the matter in the abstract, saying it is necessary but without mentioning how. What is clear from Eidlin’s essay is that the presence of a party based in the trade unions, with all of the bureaucratic and reformist implications, is a step of infinite importance for winning any demands for the working class.

The big historical pieces in the book give important information and context on the development of U.S. capitalism, its white supremacy, and its two-party stranglehold. What they miss is the long history and experience of independent parties of workers and oppressed peoples.

With all of the talk about getting a socialist message in front of large amounts of people, there is no discussion of the hundreds of campaigns the Socialist Workers Party ran, including the first Black and Latino candidates for president (Clifton Deberry and Peter Camejo respectively), with the latter receiving over 90,000 votes in 1976. There was also the Raza Unida Party, a militant Chicano party that refused to support Democrats and won hundreds of thousands of votes and even some elections on its own ballot line in the 1970s.

More recently, Socialist Action has made a contribution to independent left electoral politics by running its own candidates for president, Senate, and Congress. The most recent of these campaigns, Fred Linck for U.S. Senate in Connecticut, succeeded in putting our program in front of tens of thousands of people. We collected close to 11,000 signatures for ballot status and were ultimately illegally knocked off the ballot by mostly Democratic Party state election officials.

The question of what a winning strategy looks like is on the mind of virtually all socialist activists. Although “Socialist Strategy and Electoral Politics: A Report” offers a decent spectrum of answers to the question, none are totally satisfying. The book works best as a whole, giving a view of current debates within the movement. The content of these debates also reveals the current limits of discussion—namely, a lack of urgency to form either a labor party or a unified socialist electoral organization with a revolutionary program.

2454. The Presidential Election: What Is Left?

By Bruce Lesnick, Socialist Action, June 3, 2016

With the imminent demise of the Bernie Sanders campaign for the Democratic Party nomination, discussion has turned to what should come next. Some, including Seattle Socialist City Councilwoman Kshama Sawant, have agitated for creating a generic “party of the left.” But what does that mean? As we shall see, it’s a troublingly vague slogan whose beauty, if it exists at all, is solely in the eye of the beholder.

But first, we must step back and survey the lay of the land. Those inspired by Sanders’ campaign and those disillusioned with the two major parties come in various favors:

1) In the first category, there are those who see the status quo—characterized by unequal distribution of wealth, endless war, rampant racism, unemployment, mass incarceration and diminishing expectations—as fundamentally unjust, while having no coherent analysis whence comes the injustice. These are liberals, progressives, or populists: concerned, well-meaning individuals who decry society’s illness with no clear idea of its fundamental cause.

2) At the next level are those who have come to suspect that the drive for corporate profits conflicts with the exigencies of humanity as a whole. As a result, this stratum accepts that in order to solve society’s fundamental problems, capitalism might have to go. However, those in this group are fuzzy about what it means to supplant capitalism or how such a change might come about. They favor amending the current system, hoping that gradually, bit-by-bit, it can be converted into something fundamentally different. The historical name for this outlook is social democracy.

We should note that the minimal requirements of this grouping already exceed the program and perspective of many of the popular opposition voices of today—including Bernie Sanders, Ralph Nader, the Green Party, Bill McKibben of 350.org, and others—each of which accepts the continued existence of capitalism and so consigns themselves solidly to the populist category above.

3) In the final category are those who hold that eliminating capitalism means nationalizing the banks and critical industry under workers control; dismantling Wall Street and the Pentagon; building new institutions of workers democracy to replace the current corporate-occupied government; and creating workplace, regional, and national committees of working people to democratically plan and run the economy. This perspective calls for replacing the current political and economic system from top to bottom with a new system, democratically run by working people, which prioritizes human needs over profits. Those who advocate this approach are called revolutionary socialists.

Once again, we can see that the philosophical underpinning of this category (revolutionary socialism) exceeds the program and outlook of some well-known activists—Naomi Klein, Michael Moore, and Cornel West among them—thus positioning these activists squarely in the social democratic camp.

 Beyond horseshoes and hand grenades

 When the goal is to save humanity from extinction, half-measures won’t cut it; close is not good enough. The liberal and social democratic approaches fall short; the revolutionary socialist approach is what is needed to save the world. Of course, one can object to this assertion, but then you have the responsibility to demonstrate why tweaking the current system has gotten us precisely nowhere in the last 250 years.

One might ask, as propagandists for the ruling rich always do, “Why can’t you point to a single example where revolutionary socialism has created the utopia you advocate?” It’s a loaded question, but one requiring a response nonetheless.

First, there is the simple logical rejoinder: if non-existence of an ideal result were grounds for declaring that an approach is a failure, then the pro-capitalist, liberal,   and social democratic strategies would all be condemned on those very grounds—doubly so, in fact, since each of these has been implemented or attempted countless times in recent history, unlike revolutionary socialism.

Then we must answer the disingenuous element inherent in the question as it is posed by defenders of capitalism—a disingenuousness that even some critics of capitalism fail to appreciate as they blithely repeat the challenge. First, every attempt at a revolutionary socialist advance the world-over has been ruthlessly attacked by the very forces who cynically assert that such an advance is not possible or practical. Second, the unfortunate truth is that no socialist revolution has yet occurred in any advanced capitalist country. Therefore, to judge the efficacy of revolutionary socialism by its success or failure in small or isolated countries, under siege by the forces of global capital, is akin to judging the seaworthiness of a ship that’s forced to navigate in a puddle.

If we accept that a full-blown political, social, and economic revolution is what’s needed to fix the world, then certain conclusions are inescapable:

• For working people to take over the management and running of the government and the economy, they have to be organized.
• Working people have to be on board with the plan and clear on the goal. They have to be willing and able to fight for political and economic power in their own name.
• Working people have to be crystal clear as to who’s on which side, and who their friends are and who their enemies are. Current government institutions, police, and spy agencies are not benign vessels that can be bent to the will of whomever gets the most votes. They are the creations of, by, and for the 1%, designed to maintain their minority rule. Those institutions need to be replaced by genuine democratic structures, responsible to and controlled by the majority.

In this context, what does it mean to break free of the Democratic and Republican parties? What does it mean to build an independent party of the “left”?

Breaking free in the very narrow sense of forming a separate party is not enough. Clearly, another party of the 1% would be not be a step forward. Neither would it be sufficient to build a new populist party of those simply disillusioned with the two major parties. To truly break free means to build a party of, by, and for the working class.

But what does that mean? How do you ensure that a new party doesn’t just spout lofty rhetoric but is actually an exclusive instrument of the working class—that it gets its power, authority and marching orders only from that class? You base it on the fighting organizations of that class—labor unions, committees of the unemployed, organizations and communities of the most oppressed sectors of the working class: African American, Latino and Native American. A convenient name for such an organization is a labor party.

Yes, current labor unions are for the most part small, bureaucratic and even corrupt. But that just means we have more work to do. Building a labor party goes hand in hand with organizing. Every workplace and industry that doesn’t currently have a union should fight to organize one. Every existing union that’s hobbled—whose leadership is too cozy with the bosses, that’s saddled with an undemocratic structure, or whose leaders are unwilling to break with the two capitalist parties and fight politically and economically for the needs of the union and the working class as a whole—needs to be overhauled and retaken by the ranks.

This is what really breaking from the two major parties would look like. This is what would really set us on the road to transforming society.

 Left out

 So now it should be clear what’s wrong with calling for a generic “new party of the left” or “new party of the 99%.” It’s too vague. It’s a Rorschach test. Anyone envisioning such a party sees whatever they want to see. Such populist conglomerations are not anchored organically to any class and so cannot be counted on to lead the kind of changes that are needed.

Those who argue for this inkblot concept are caught in a tangle of logical contradictions. For example, is the Green Party that “new party of the 99%”? If so, then why call for the creation of a new party at all? If not, why not? What is the Green Party missing, exactly? Advocates of the “new party of the left” don’t know or don’t say. However, if instead we use the framework outlined above, there is no confusion. We have no trouble recognizing the Green Party and all similar class-agnostic formations as fitting comfortably within the populist category.

 “Safe” states

 Not surprisingly, a lack of precision on what it means to break with the Democratic and Republican parties leads to other problematic positions.

We see Sawant argue that Sanders should run as an “independent” once his bid to win the nomination of a major capitalist party comes up short. But more than that, he is urged to consider not running in states where the race between the two capitalist parties is close. The rationale—the same one the Green Party used in 2004 at great cost to its reputation—is that the “independent” candidate should not be seen to be a “spoiler.” The message here is painfully schizophrenic: break with the parties of the 1%, but—just kidding—if the race is close, make sure the least-worst of the capitalist politicians wins at all costs!

(If Sander’s won the Democratic nomination, would Sawant’s Socialist Alternative party urge everyone to vote Democrat in November? If so, we are witness to a sad reversal, where a fighting socialist organization embraces the notion that change can indeed come through the Democratic Party. If not, how confusing for those whom Socialist Alternative has mobilized to go all out for Sanders in the primaries.)

 In defense of language

 Sanders says he is campaigning for a “political revolution.” Sawant and other genuine socialists have embraced this call and taken it up as their own. This is indeed strange since the expression has historically been used to describe a change at the top that is distinct from a fundamental change of the whole. The expression “political revolution” was popularized by Leon Trotsky in his fight against Stalinism in the Soviet Union. In that context, it was a call to replace the murderous, bureaucratic regime at the head of the Soviet state with a form of workers democracy, while retaining the socialized economy and property relations that had been won in the Russian revolution. The idea was to replace the rot at the top without reverting to capitalism.

Sanders clearly uses the term in a similar way. His political revolution is all about rearranging things at the top without challenging the underlying economic system. Again, a lack of clarity on what independent political action really means, and an over-eagerness to build a vague “new party of the left,” has led some to embrace Sanders’ half-baked slogan instead of critiquing its fatal limitations.

Language matters. It can be used to enlighten or to deceive. If someone is in the habit of substituting the word salad for the word chicken wherever it’s used, and they tell you that they eat nothing but salad every day, that doesn’t make them a vegetarian; it makes them a disingenuous manipulator of language. Sanders calls himself a socialist and pretends to be for some kind of revolution. Ignoring his abuse of language adds to the lack of clarity and makes it harder to explain to people what breaking with the parties of the 1% actually means.

Is building a labor party practical? Absolutely. Organized labor, diminished and battered though it may be, has significant financial and human resources. For the last several elections cycles, tens of millions of dollars and thousands of labor foot soldiers were placed at the disposal of the major capitalist parties. Those resources, shifted from the parties of the 1% to labor’s own campaigns, would give the new-formed party instant viability. Meanwhile, such a shift in resources would deal a body blow to the Democrats and Republicans.

But there’s something more behind the idea of a labor party that really boosts its viability. Working people produce everything. All of society’s wealth, though distributed unequally, has its origin in the labor of ordinary people. This gives us tremendous power. If the 1% took a day off, nobody would notice. But when all working people take the day off, it’s called a general strike, and the entire country grinds to a halt.

What’s needed is not some new party in the abstract, but a new tool that can be used by working people to fight for political power as a class, with the ultimate aim of replacing the rule of the capitalist minority with the democratic rule of the working-class majority. Along the way, in our zeal to build the movement we know is needed to set the world right, we should remember: success is not measured by how many people you have marching behind your banner, but by the number of people marching behind your banner in the right direction.

Bruce Lesnick is a long-time political activist who lives and writes in Washington State. He blogs at blogspot.com. He can be reached at blesnick@bugbusters.net.