https://socialistaction.org/2019/03/07/books-a-round-table-discussion-on-socialist-electoral-strategy/
Books: A round-table discussion on socialist electoral strategy
/ 17 hours ago
March 2019 Ocasio (Scott Eisen:Getty)
Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), a member of Democratic Socialists
of America, speaks at an Oct. 1, 2018, rally in Boston against
nomination of Brett Kavanaugh to the Supreme Court. (Scott Eisen / Getty
Images)
By ERWIN FREED
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.
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March 7, 2019 in Democratic Party, Marxist Politics and Philosophy.
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