Read part two here: Marxists and Elections: FAQs
Joe Biden’s withdrawal from the presidential race and the candidacy of Kamala Harris has changed the character of the coming election. Instead of just another in the endless, monotonous slog of election cycles, with the same two candidates reprising the previous contest, this election now has an air of excitement to it. Suddenly the Democratic Party is actually interested in campaigning.
This new situation provides both an opportunity and a challenge for revolutionary socialists in testing our approach to electoral politics. Our view of elections is not the same as those of liberals or progressives, in which individual voters express their politics by choosing between the available options. Socialist politics are necessarily a collective effort, struggling together to free humanity from oppression and exploitation. We therefore have to make all our strategic decisions collectively and then implement them, with the aim of winning liberation.
This is the first of a two-part argument about the upcoming election. Part one will place the current election in the context of Marxist politics; the next part will address some frequent objections to the conclusions drawn here.
“You got to make a distinction”
A key component of revolutionary working-class politics is consistently supporting the working class in opposition to the capitalist class. We cannot build up one side by giving our support to the other. Fred Hampton once said:
But when I leave, you can remember I said, with the last words on my lips, that I am a revolutionary, and you’re going to have to keep on saying that. You’re going to have to say that I am a proletarian. I am the people. I am not the pig. You got to make a distinction, and the people are going to have to attack the pig. The people are going to have to stand up against the pig. (emphasis mine)
Not long after delivering this speech, Hampton was assassinated in a coordinated effort between the Nixon administration, the Chicago Police Department, and the FBI. A brief thought experiment seems appropriate. Imagine a ballot with three candidates: Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, the Chicago Police Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In this election, it should be a no-brainer for socialists to support and vote for Hampton and the Panthers.
But what if there were only two candidates on the ballot? Would socialists endorse the CPD or the FBI? Those two organizations are certainly not the same, and arguments could conceivably be made that one or the other is less harmful. However, they are obviously both part of the repressive apparatus of the capitalist state, and we as socialists have to make a distinction.
Foundations of a Marxist approach to elections
In their 1850 “Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League,” Marx and Engels, writing in the aftermath of the revolutions of 1848, take up the question of political organization and elections — particularly in the context of the rise to power of the German bourgeoisie. They acknowledge that the working class is not the only class oppressed by the state. The petty bourgeoisie and the peasantry are likewise in opposition, so the question of who to run in elections, and who if anyone to join forces with, is an important one.
Marx and Engels argue that:
Workers’ candidates [must be] nominated everywhere in opposition to bourgeois-democratic candidates. As far as possible they should be League members and their election should be pursued by all possible means. Even where there is no prospect of achieving their election the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention.
The goal of getting workers’ candidates elected is certainly there, but the point is that elections can also serve as an opportunity to present socialist politics to broader layers of the working class, and to gauge what kind of support exists for them. You’ll notice that Marx and Engels are not concerned here with “splitting the vote” by undermining a bourgeois-democratic candidate and leaving the door open for something worse; the focus is on building working-class politics and organization through elections.
Just what exactly “something worse” might look like became clear when Lenin and the Bolsheviks took up these basics decades later. In the 1906 elections to the Duma, the Russian parliament, Russian Marxists had to decide how to address the threat of the violently ultranationalist Tsarist group the Black Hundreds. The Mensheviks (the Bolsheviks’ more moderate Marxist rivals) argued that Marxists should form electoral alliances with liberal groups, specifically the Cadets, a liberal monarchist party, to keep the Hundreds out of the Duma. This would have entailed supporting Cadet candidates and avoiding “splitting the vote” by fielding candidates in opposition to the Cadets.
Imagine a ballot with three candidates: Fred Hampton of the Black Panther Party, the Chicago Police Department, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation. In this election, it should be a no-brainer for socialists to support and vote for Hampton and the Panthers. But what if there were only two candidates on the ballot? Would socialists endorse the CPD or the FBI?
Lenin identified three problems with this approach. Firstly: would this alliance have actually reduced the danger of the Black Hundreds? Despite their differing politics, both the Hundreds and the Cadets recognized the authority of the Tsar and the legitimacy of the Tsarist state. With the Hundreds frequently waging bloody anti-Jewish pogroms with either the tacit or explicit approval of the Tsar, it would have been foolish to expect the Cadets to consistently and directly oppose the Hundreds. Making an electoral alliance would have sent the message to the working class that the Cadets could actually be trusted. It would have been misleading the working-class movement.
The second problem is that this would have effectively surrendered leadership of the movement to the Cadets. The Cadets were certainly going to be running their candidates, regardless of what the Marxists did, so avoiding splitting the vote would, in practice, have entailed Marxists standing down and endorsing Cadet candidates. Having acquired the support of the political forces to their left, the Cadets would have been able to masquerade as the voice of the working class and oppressed. As Lenin wrote at the time, “Why should the Cadets get to pretend to be democrats?” Rather than taking the opportunity to put forward communist politics, the alliances favored by the Mensheviks would have ceded leadership and political influence to the Cadets.
The last problem is that placing primary emphasis on Duma elections as a strategy for opposing the Black Hundreds would itself have been a mistake and misunderstands the role of parliament. Keeping proto-fascists out of office does not mean you have defeated them. Rather, they have to be defeated politically and in the streets by a mass working-class movement.
Lesser-evilism
US socialist Hal Draper took this approach into the late 20th century in his pamphlet “Who’s going to be the lesser-evil in 1968?” It’s an enduring and decisive argument that deserves to be revisited in its entirety by socialists every election year.
Draper begins with what he calls the “classic case” of lesser-evilism, the appointment of Hitler to the position of chancellor in 1933 by President Hindenburg, the very person who had defeated him in the election. In this situation, we can see the proof of Lenin’s argument regarding the Black Hundreds above; not only did voting for a lesser evil not stop the rise of fascism, it didn’t even slow it down. As Draper famously put it, “the people voted for the Lesser Evil and got both.”
The US in 1967 was a very different situation than Germany in 1932, of course, but this is exactly the point. Germany was facing a social crisis the existing government had no way to resolve, and the choice in the immediate term was revolution or fascism. These are the highest stakes imaginable, but even here, falling back and voting for a conservative to fight back fascism didn’t work. So why, in 2024, when the threat of an immediate fascist takeover of the state is not on the table, would the strategy be any more advisable?
Germany was facing a social crisis the government had no way to resolve, and the choice in the immediate term was revolution or fascism. These are the highest stakes imaginable, but even here, falling back and voting for a conservative to fight fascism didn’t work. So why, in 2024, when the threat of an immediate fascist takeover is not on the table, would the strategy be any more advisable?
Draper gives the example of the 1964 election, in which “people convinced themselves that Lyndon Johnson was the lesser evil as against Goldwater, who was going to do Horrible Things in Vietnam, like defoliating the jungles.” In reality the liberal Johnson did exactly that, widely deploying Agent Orange and inflicting devastating damage to public health in Vietnam; the deadly herbicide continued to kill people for decades after the formal end of the war.
Some of Johnson’s former supporters complained that he “actually carried out Goldwater’s policy,” but this is actually unfair to Goldwater, who never proposed anything on the scale of Johnson’s violence. Draper attributes this to Johnson’s ability to “hypnotize the liberals with ‘Great Society’ rhetoric” — that is, holding up all of the progressive domestic reforms to cover for their continuing maintenance of empire and capital.
This classic liberal maneuver means that liberal supporters come into every election claiming that the fascists are coming and everyone needs to vote for the lesser evil. Democrats therefore know that they have the liberal vote in their back pocket and don’t need to do anything to win it. Instead, what they do have to do is appease the forces to their right. This process has forced politics in the US to “move steadily right-right-right — until even a Lyndon Johnson could look like a lesser evil.”
Hopefully this sounds familiar. It didn’t stop with the Johnson administration and hasn’t stopped yet. While there are key differences between Draper’s time and ours, supporting the lesser evil over multiple election cycles undercuts any ability for the left to actually fight the far right.
Draper was writing in 1967, in the context of the postwar American economy, and he argues that both liberals and conservatives were at the time converging under “bureaucratic-statified capitalism,” the system of capitalism that existed in the US at the time. He gives the example of Truman vetoing Taft-Hartley, an anti-union bill, and then invoking it against striking workers. Liberals always have to make use of repressive measures that conservatives advocate, and conservatives at the time were forced to maintain the welfare state, because that was what the maintenance of the system demanded. No electoral choice on offer was in any way willing to challenge the established structure of the state.
Commonalities
We can see the common shape of the revolutionary socialist approach to elections emerging from these writers. Each of them views the question as one for a revolutionary organization, or for the entire movement — not for the individual.
When we talk about voting in the US, the framing of the discussion is often, “Who should I vote for?” or “Who should I feel bad about voting for?” or “Who can I stomach voting for?” as though we’re shopping for the least-expired carton of milk in the supermarket. Socialists need to approach elections differently, as a political event into which we seek to intervene collectively. We need to aim to make strategic decisions as a group.
Additionally, there is a focus in the revolutionary tradition on political dynamics on a much longer scale than one election cycle. Everyone on the left has, at one point or another, become frustrated with the mysterious amnesia that afflicts liberals every two to four years, enabling them to treat each election as a new crisis out of the blue, requiring new concessions every time. This is both a cause and an effect of what Draper describes as politics moving “right-right-right.” If both “lesser” and “greater” evils are further to right every election, it is necessary for liberals to forget what their own candidates from a few years ago said and did. At the same time, this rightward march means that each cycle brings new horrors from segments of the right that were not long ago completely outside the mainstream, to which liberals respond with their cries about impending fascism.
Socialists need to take a longer view so we can understand the political and economic dynamics that shape society, and plan our strategy accordingly. After all, Draper would never have been able to formulate his diagnosis of lesser-evilism if he limited his observations to one election cycle.
That said, socialists should view every election as a political opportunity to put forward our politics and win people to them. The guiding principle is to orient the working class toward confrontation with capitalism. As was the case with Lenin versus the Cadets, we can never afford to concede political leadership to the capitalist class, or worse, provide them with cover from the left.
The capitalist state and the executive under neoliberalism
Our situation is different from 1967. For one thing, we no longer live under the system of statified capitalism described by Draper. That postwar boom, which constituted the longest period of growth and stability in the history of capitalism, and was the only time the US had anything like a functioning welfare state due to economic expansion and an established labor movement, doesn’t exist anymore.
The economic crisis of the 1970s led the capitalist class to look for new solutions, and what it arrived at is neoliberalism. Rather than the fairly large form of capitalist state that compels liberals and conservatives alike to act to maintain it, neoliberalism introduced rampant privatization and financialization. Under neoliberalism, the US and other countries began hacking off parts of the state to sell to private enterprise, furthering control of the market by financial institutions and weakening the ability of the state to intervene economically. At the same time, massive attacks on organized labor and shifts toward more casual and precarious forms of employment further weakened the working class.
Ideologically, neoliberalism is usually accompanied by rhetoric about small government and personal responsibility, such as Margaret Thatcher’s famous statement: “There is no such thing as society.” The idea here is that there isn’t any large collectivity, only rationally self-interested individuals and the nuclear family. Everything should be privatized.
But if there is no society, what is the function of the state? Thatcher, naturally, was lying. She and Ronald Reagan and the generations of neoliberal politicians who have followed them have had no actual interest in dismantling or shrinking the capitalist state. The question is which pieces they wish to preserve.
When we talk about voting in the US, the framing of the discussion is often, “Who should I vote for?” or “Who should I feel bad about voting for?” or “Who can I stomach voting for?” as though we’re shopping for the least-expired carton of milk in the supermarket. Socialists need to approach elections differently, as a political event into which we seek to intervene collectively.
The Marxist conception of the state is that it is the means by which one class imposes its will on another. The capitalist state aims to stabilize and maintain profit extraction in the interests of the capitalist class as a whole. Despite all the privatization of neoliberalism, these repressive functions of the state persist and have indeed expanded. We can’t have healthcare, but the army, the police, public banking institutions, and other state bodies continue to repress the working class and keep the bosses’ interests secure.
The president serves as the captain of the capitalist state, and always has. This is both an extremely powerful position and an extremely limited one that does not allow for experimentation or any but the most surface-level reforms. The job of the president is to maintain the neoliberal state, no more or less — just as it was to maintain the postwar bureaucratic state in Draper’s era.
Imagine our best, most politically unwavering, and charismatic communist — say, for instance, this author. If I were somehow elected to the presidency right now, in the absence of an extremely formidable mass working-class movement, I would have the choice to either serve the interests of capital or to be quickly and probably violently removed.
We have seen this throughout the history of capitalism, perhaps most clearly in the doomed presidency of Salvadore Allende in Chile in 1973.
Neoliberalism has been afflicted by crises of its own, especially after the global financial collapse of 2008. The credibility of governments worldwide has been severely damaged, contributing to the rise of the far right. The committed parties of neoliberalism, like the Democrats, are at a loss for ways to resolve these crises, and the far right is putting forward its solutions.
This instability is no reason to fall back to supporting Democrats, however. If we are to make any headway under whatever economic order may supplant neoliberalism, we will need our political independence more than ever.
Lesser-evilism since Draper
The exploits of the Democrats in their steady march “right-right-right” since Draper’s essay could fill and have filled books. But to briefly recap:
The Clinton administration destroyed such welfare as existed in the US and decisively removed the idea of even basic responsibility toward the poor on the part of the government from official political respectability. These attacks on welfare were met with virtually no pushback from liberal organizations, as might have been expected had Reagan or George H. W. Bush attempted such a move. Clinton also imposed brutal sanctions on Iraq; in defense of this policy, Madeleine Albright famously claimed of the 500,000 Iraqi children who died by starvation, “We think the price is worth it.”
Liberal supporters come into every election claiming that the fascists are coming and everyone needs to vote for the lesser evil. Democrats therefore know that they have the liberal vote in their back pocket and don’t need to do anything to win it. Instead, what they do have to do is appease the forces to their right. This process has forced politics in the US to “move steadily right-right-right.”
After the widely reviled administration of George W. Bush, characterized by the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and the expansion of the federal repressive apparatus, including the PATRIOT Act, Barack Obama took office on the crest of a wave of liberal optimistic fervor. It is easy to forget the degree to which liberals felt this was a decisive political and cultural shift in their favor. The antiwar movement, which had grown under Bush, very nearly disappeared, in no small part because major organizations believed Obama would end the wars and close the US torture prison at Guantanamo Bay. He did neither of these things, and in fact expanded the so-called War on Terror (with a new fervor for drone-bombing), the repressive powers of the PATRIOT Act, and the repression of social movements like Occupy. He also became known as “Deporter-in-Chief” for his draconian policies towards immigrants. We should remember that the Black Lives Matter movement and the Standing Rock pipeline opposition originated under and were militarily attacked by the Obama administration.
True to form, our most recent “lesser evil,” Joe Biden, has expanded many of the repressive measures of his predecessor, from attacks on antiracist organizers to the maintenance of the US’s southern concentration camps. He pleaded powerlessness as the right to abortion was overturned, and preemptively broke a railroad strike, outlawing the strike before the authorization vote could even be held. Most importantly, he has continued the US’s direct facilitation of the genocide in Palestine, which began in 1948 but reached horrifying new levels of mass violence in 2023 and 2024. In backing genocide, Biden has pushed the idea of “lesser” evil to its theoretical limits.
What is different with Harris?
The nomination of Kamala Harris after Biden’s decision to withdraw has changed the shape of the upcoming election. While lesser-evilism has not changed at its core, the difference between the two Democrats and their approaches has thus far been striking.
Perhaps most importantly for socialists in our work organizing face-to-face during an election year, we can expect much more enthusiasm from the Democratic base. Democrats finally have someone they actually want to campaign for now, in contrast to the grimmer lesser-evilism that was reluctantly mobilized to defend Biden. Appallingly, this will require Harris supporters to tacitly accept the genocide in Palestine.
We should also expect a renewed strength of pseudo-anti-oppression arguments to rally votes. The Democrats were already attempting this, with various editorials and astroturfed social-media presences claiming it was racist to demand Biden step down — the argument being that all Black people supported Biden — but they had, at best, limited success with this. Having lucked into a candidate who is both Black and a woman, the attempts to frame support for the Democratic candidate as not actually a lesser evil but rather a progressive champion will only grow in strength.
Socialists should view every election as a political opportunity to put forward our politics and win people to them. The guiding principle is to orient the working class toward confrontation with capitalism. We can never afford to concede political leadership to the capitalist class, or worse, provide them with cover from the left.
We must also, however, be prepared to oppose racist and sexist attacks on Harris from the right. The worst reactionaries will attempt to mobilize on this basis, and will no doubt see her nomination as an avenue for projecting their politics. As much as we resolutely oppose Harris and the Democrats on principle, socialists have to fight racism and sexism everywhere it occurs.
The campaign for Harris will capitalize on people’s sense of relief at being rid of Biden. The political impact of this is not to be underestimated; despite nearly the entire Democratic apparatus supporting him well into the campaign, and Harris being the sitting vice president, the campaign appears to be revitalized from its moribund near-acceptance of defeat only a couple of months ago.
The weirdo GOP goblins who have moved from the darker fringes of the internet to the center of the Republican Party appear to have no clear idea of how to deal with a Harris candidacy. They will probably get their shit together eventually, but for the time being, this has led to a very confident Democratic campaign.
Lastly, the Democrats will use Harris’ record as a prosecutor as a selling point. It fits perfectly with the established Democratic messaging about how Donald Trump is a convict. We have already seen her hammer a law-and-order narrative in her remarks at the Democratic National Convention, establishing Trump as a criminal and Harris as the law. Tellingly, Harris makes use of this narrative to argue that she will be even tougher on border “security” than Trump.
On the other hand, we should also expect the student intifada to be targets of this security-mindedness, along with any other oppositional left-wing movement.
The socialist approach to the Harris campaign
So, does the candidacy of Kamala Harris present socialists with a situation in which we need to abandon our longstanding opposition to both parties of capital?
In short, no. We have a different political terrain in front of us than we did recently, but the renewed enthusiasm for the party of union-busting, repression of protest, and genocide does not mean we should change our political orientation.
Unlike those political currents that would see such a shift toward the Democrats as a call to turn to the right to gather easy supporters, we should see it as a confirmation of the importance of maintaining our political independence, and only ever granting political support to the opponents of capitalism.
We must also be prepared to oppose racist and sexist attacks on Harris from the right. The worst reactionaries will attempt to mobilize on this basis, and will no doubt see her nomination as an avenue for projecting their politics. As much as we resolutely oppose Harris and the Democrats on principle, socialists have to fight racism and sexism everywhere it occurs.
The new confidence of the Harris campaign masks the chaos that led to it. The Democratic Party has fumbled and bumbled its way to a candidate who is genuinely popular. This in no way addresses the actual problems faced by the working class, which persist across and between election years.
We should keep in mind that, for a lot of our audience, this is going to be a difficult concept to grasp, let alone act on, especially with the left as historically weak as it is. People aren’t seeing convincing socialist candidates being put forward, or any socialist organizations capable of doing that, so it’s our job to continue to build these organizations so that we can begin to act in the electoral sphere and pose a reasonable alternative one day in the future.
More importantly, we have to win people to the idea that an electoral campaign is not the ultimate expression of politics, nor even a primary battleground, and to convince them to work with us to build social movements, labor struggles, and revolutionary organizations that can fight back. To do this, we have to stand outside of the Democratic Party and in direct political opposition to it, not least when it has a popular candidate. Our long-term goal is the construction of a revolutionary party that can lead the struggle to overthrow capitalism; every decision we make in the electoral arena must be in service of this goal.
Kamala Harris is a former prosecutor and current cheerleader for genocide. We can expect that, should she win, her administration will be another in the long line of Democrats moving “right-right-right.” There is nothing to be won by the working class helping her get the job.
The conclusion that all this should lead us to, and that we need to be prepared to argue for in an election year, is that we grant no support for any party of capital. We will not be supporting our oppressors, even if our candidates are not yet on the ballot. These are the principles that will best enable us to build a robust socialist left.
Illustration by James Radek
