This presented a problem in the early history of the global socialist movement. After the deaths of its founders, Marx and Friedrich Engels, the appearance of reformism and opportunism tended to confirm their prognostication that socialist electoralism produced the problem of collaboration with liberals. This would contribute to the loss of the working-class independence so vital to their politics, according to Soma Marik in Revolutionary Democracy: Emancipation in Classical Marxism. In the late 1890s, the Second International confronted precisely this problem when a leader of its French section, Alexandre Millerand, became Minister for Commerce in the government of “republican defense” as a maneuver to keep out the clerical far right. Rosa Luxemburg, several years before writing her classic takedown of Eduard Bernstein’s reformist socialism, summarized the lessons of the Millerand experience:
… a ministry is not, in general, a field of action for a party of the struggle of the proletarian classes. The character of a bourgeois government isn’t determined by the personal character of its members, but by its organic function in bourgeois society. The government of the modern state is essentially an organization of class domination, the regular functioning of which is one of the conditions of existence of the class state. With the entry of a socialist into the government, and class domination continuing to exist, the bourgeois government doesn’t transform itself into a socialist government, but a socialist transforms himself into a bourgeois minister.
It’s important to consider two things that social democracy (the movement to achieve socialism by reform of the system) has consistently demonstrated — since 1914, obviously, but in much, much more recent experience as well. The first is a national peculiarity: as I argued in 2018, American social democrats “must confront the strict limitation of the political mainstream to two equally capitalist parties, one of which has, by posing as a defender of the interests of the working class and oppressed groups, repeatedly thwarted any prospect of their independent organization.”
We do not question whether Mamdani will sell out. We say that he has already sold out by running within the Democratic Party.
Since the 1930s, US social democrats have sought to resolve this problem not by creating a party of their own to match European social democracy, but to maneuver inside the Democratic Party to eventually transform it into something approximating that model, or in more recent times to use the party’s ballot line to “implode” the two-party system and cohere a left-populist or reformist party out of their current work. The latter position of the “dirty break” being unsustainable for reasons I outlined in that article, the tendency is to postpone any kind of break into a future that is so far away it is useless to talk about.
Therefore, Eric Blanc, who coined the term “dirty break” in relation to the experience of the Farmer-Labor Party in 1920s and 30s Minnesota, argued in 2021 against DSA running with his own invention because it would “make it more difficult for us to elect [Democrat] class struggle candidates,” and that the problem of the Democrats restraining independent working-class action will be resolved gradually and automatically over decades. For this Blanc invoked a new model, the British Labour Representation League’s collaboration with the Liberal Party, which ended in the formation of the independent Labour Party in 1906. One might question, given the scale of the ecological crisis humanity faces, whether we have decades to wait for the appearance of a milquetoast reformist party which will move steadily right over the next century, purging radicals repeatedly along the way.
Hence, in the US, we do not — and have never — faced a specifically left-wing social democracy, as European comrades did in the case of the Labour Party under Jeremy Corbyn, or going back further, to SYRIZA in Greece before the elections of 2015. Rather, we face a very right-wing social democracy — an anemic policy, a dependence on liberalism, and seeing the future solely within the Democratic Party.
Another tendency is what I referred to in 2018 as the “diminishing returns” of social-democratic perspectives. This is not unique to the US, but I outlined the process of retreat from the Communist Party’s vision of a class-collaborative socialist transformation in the 1940s, to the realignment strategy pursued by social democrats to turn the Democratic Party into a European-style social democracy contained within capitalist bounds, to the perspective of splitting off a minority of the Democrats through tactical campaigning for certain candidates. As I wrote, social democracy “becomes more cautious with each new iteration.” This is a built-in feature of the reformist project.
It is not a personal failing of Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Zohran Mamdani, or the socialists who have oriented on their campaigns. It’s an outcome of the electoral process itself, which, under normal circumstances, breeds a lack of critical thinking and passivity: get 50% plus one of the ballots and our person will be elected and do the things we want. As the Palestinian American academic and activist Steven Salaita has written:
Electoralism is salted against insurgency. It’s not a space for ideas, for creativity, for the simple decency of not asking the least powerful among us to defer their freedom; it’s hostile to anything that impedes the reproduction of orthodoxy.
Specifically, “left electoralism diminishes socialism. By emphasizing celebrity, it cultivates an assemblage of ruling class stooges in leftist cover.”
What I want to propose, therefore, is a politics that is, for the foreseeable future, hostile to electoralism, hostile to elections. It realizes our opportunities are not there and seeks to break out of the limitations of bourgeois politics into the broader world and give the iron supplement to comrades who have been bitten by Democratic Party vampires. Call it electoral nihilism — because, say what you want about the tenets of International Socialism, it’s definitely an ethos.
Zohran Mamdani’s politics and prospects
The classical Marxist understanding of electoral politics is important to hold onto, as is the history of the US left’s experiments with Democratic Party electoralism. Without it, you can end up saying silly things like, “Mamdani’s campaign is the best thing the US left has done in the last century,” as one Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) member said at a debate regarding the Democratic Party and electoralism at the Socialism 2025 conference. The electoral process limits how people think about our past as well as our future.
This is something that has appeared and reappeared consistently in the international history of our movement, as early as the 1848 European revolutions. Engels noted of German radicals who had gotten themselves elected to various state parliaments at the time:
They had, from the beginning of their legislative career, been more imbued than any other faction of the Assembly with that incurable malady of parliamentary cretinism, a disorder which penetrates its unfortunate victims with the solemn conviction that the whole world, its history and future, are governed and determined by a majority of votes in that particular representative body which has the honor to count them among its members, and that all and everything going on outside… is nothing compared with the incommensurable events hinging upon the important question, whatever it may be, just at that moment occupying the attention of their honorable house.
Turning to Mamdani himself, what can we say about his politics? He won the Democratic nomination based on three campaign promises: a city-wide rent freeze, free buses, and publicly owned grocery stores. The prospect of a rent freeze is huge for folks in New York City and probably won him the nomination on its own. As mayor, he could implement this pretty much immediately without needing to consult anyone. But as comrade BC Hamilton has written for Tempest, his other promises are “somewhat small bore.” Moreover, they rely on state budgets that a completely hostile neoliberal Democratic administration in Albany has ultimate say over.
I think it’s worth saying that these reforms are not socialist, but fundamentally liberal in character. As Luxemburg reminds us:
… coming from a minister, social reforms can’t have the character of the proletarian class, but solely the character of the bourgeois class, for the minister, by the post he occupies, attaches himself to that class by all the functions of a bourgeois, militarist government. While in parliament, or on the municipal council, we obtain useful reforms by combating the bourgeois government, while occupying a ministerial post we arrive at the same reforms by supporting the bourgeois state.
Certainly, a rent freeze and free buses would be beneficial not just generally. It’s likely that comrades in New York would have more time and resources to organize if these happened. The point is not that we are against the enactment of liberal or social-democratic reforms, but that the role of a working-class revolutionary organization is not to run candidates, campaign for, or vote for the ones who are only interested in promises of legislative reform. In the US, we see policies such as these as radical or even socialist because we are mesmerized by reformism when it appears so seldom. It’s not a typical feature of our political landscape, and we can get enchanted, as Spectre editor David McNally said in his presentation at the Socialism Conference, “Hope at the Edge of the Abyss,” on July 4, 2025.
As the boss of the NYPD, Mamdani will be required to enforce racist policing, and will find himself in the position of defending everything from stop-and-frisk policies to the next police murder of a Black person in New York.
We have seen over and over again the rightward-moving dynamic that happens on the activist left when “democratic socialists” like Mamdani make their occasional appearances: they run for and sometimes win office to enact policies that would, in the past, have been the bread and butter of a more vigorous liberal opposition. In turn, activists on the left, including revolutionaries, are drawn into the space vacated by the Bernies, AOCs, Brandon Johnsons, and Mamdanis as a loyal opposition that seeks to put pressure on them or “hold their feet to the fire.”
As our Tempest comrade Charlie Post recently put it, the division between reformist and revolutionary politics is expressed tactically: whereas reformists focus on the ballot, the campaign, and lobbying, revolutionaries focus on the strike, the riot, and actions that disrupt the accumulation of capital to achieve the most basic reforms. In principle, this is articulated as a difference between the reformist approach, “which supports reforms in order to ameliorate the current situation of the proletariat, versus the revolutionary approach, which “supports reforms in order to put the proletariat in a position to install a new social system,” as Émile Vandervelde argued over a century ago in the Second International.
There was a lot of talk at the Socialism Conference about “whether Mamdani will sell out.” Some comrades who urged a wait-and-see approach towards his campaign avoided the question by answering that the left in New York needs to build up the forces that would make possible the positive reforms he is proposing: we cannot say people are wrong to vote for a Democrat, but rather we work on building the self-confidence of our class, until they recognize why voting for Democrats won’t deliver.
I sympathize with the approach, but I think it’s a tactical error. Self-confidence does not come from voting Democrat: when they inevitably compromise and betray their supporters, it can do quite the opposite. We do not question whether Mamdani will sell out. We say that he has already sold out by running within the Democratic Party. I wrote in 2018:
… the Democratic ballot line, rather than being an empty vessel to be filled with socialist content, represents, as Kim Moody rightly argues, “the entry point into the maze of dead ends, false starts, and compromised hopes that is the Democratic Party.”
What about Mamdani’s prospects? He is not mayor yet; he is merely the Democratic nominee for the position. It remains a possibility for the Democratic Party establishment in New York to defeat him by uniting behind Andrew Cuomo or Eric Adams. They have already started to think about this, as evidenced by Cuomo’s commitment to unite behind whoever has the best chances of beating Mamdani by some point in September.
If Mamdani surmounts this obstacle, in office he will face a basic choice to either become a friendly, neutered progressive figurehead for the Democrats, like AOC, or to pursue his program in the face of opposition by the Democrats in Albany and Donald Trump in Washington. I think it’s likely that Mamdani will choose the first route. If not, the state Democrats and federal MAGA will unite to strip him for parts.
In another important respect, Mamdani doesn’t face the choice whether to sell out or not. The position of a mayor as chief executive of the City of New York has selling out in its job description. As our Firebrand comrade Kenneth G has written, “the mayor will enforce the will of the local capitalist class, regardless of their personal feelings on the matter.” As the boss of the NYPD, Mamdani will be required to enforce racist policing, and will find himself in the position of defending everything from stop-and-frisk policies to the next police murder of a Black person in New York.
How will Mamdani implement the free buses and grocery stores? These require Albany’s sign-off for a tax hike. On this subject, Tyler Zimmer has written:
City government is severely limited by state law in terms of what it can do to democratically govern its own affairs. Since the financial crisis of the 1970s and the power-grab by big business that followed its resolution, New York City has been in what Alexander Zevin describes as a kind of “eternal receivership,” firmly under the thumb of Albany.
There are a couple ways that comrades with a wait-and-see approach to Mamdani have responded to this, as others like them did in the cases of Sanders, the Squad, and Johnson. The most common response I heard in interventions at Socialism was to call on Mamdani to explain to the broader movement that the mayor does not have very much power and they will need to organize to get his proposals through the state assembly. But Mamdani, as a Democratic candidate, has no interest in explaining he won’t have power. He wants to get elected. He wants more support from people to his right, not to demoralize his base by saying he doesn’t really have the power to do the things he’s campaigning on.
The second is to propose “infrastructures of accountability” for Mamdani. One unaffiliated comrade put it to me this way on social media:
For me, if I was in NYC, I would argue that our work begins NOW — that is, after the victory. To build infrastructures of accountability. (Even simple neighborhood committees will do to start with.) To both defend Mamdani from the right and push him to not sell out.
This kind of proposal is not original to the Mamdani moment. After the end of Bernie Sanders’ 2016 Presidential campaign, many leftists who worked on it gravitated to his organization Our Revolution, convinced that this would be an extra-electoral means of keeping pressure on Bernie and his allies to fight. Instead, Our Revolution became another Democratic 501(c)(4) fundraising operation. One Tempest comrade who voted for Mamdani and is involved in the struggle against the genocide in Gaza said:
I’m close with many comrades in DSA and JVP [Jewish Voice for Peace] actively involved in Mamdani’s campaign… and there is zero discussion about what, how, and whether to build the infrastructures of dissent needed to actually win the things Zohran is talking about. Outside of far leftists like myself raising these issues — which are often met with abstract agreement — there’s zero talk of planning and building beyond electoral work.
If the people most interested in this kind of thing among those organizing his campaign can only offer “abstract agreement,” I think it’s fair to say that it isn’t happening.
These flawed proposals respond not only to Mamdani’s prospects in office, but to a deeper problem concerning the US left since 2015. This is how to relate to the enthusiasm of supporters of Mamdani without seeming aloof or ultraleftist. I’m not going to pretend that it isn’t a problem we face as revolutionaries, when most of our audience in social movements votes for people like Mamdani and expects change to come from electing him, and we are facing in a different direction.
Whatever the solution to this problem may be, it clearly does not involve suspending criticism or riding with the Democrat supporters for a while in the hope we can criticize down the road. Marxism’s principle of working-class independence means to us that the problem of Mamdani being a Democratic candidate can’t be ignored at any stage. If we have learned any political lesson in the last decade on the US revolutionary left, it’s that downplaying our fundamental disagreement with these campaigns will lead to suspending that disagreement soon enough.
Marxism’s principle of working-class independence means to us that the problem of Mamdani being a Democrat can’t be ignored at any stage. If we have learned any lesson in the last decade on the US revolutionary left, it’s that downplaying our fundamental disagreement with these campaigns will lead to suspending that disagreement soon enough.
Revolutionaries in New York and the US cannot develop our orientations on what a Democratic Party candidate like Zohran Mamdani will or won’t do. He is not our ally: right now, he’s a successful competitor for our audience, proposing an approach that we recognize as disaster. While he also isn’t our enemy yet, he has offered to become one by running as a Democrat for an executive office. We must defend ourselves and the struggles we’re involved in first and foremost by broadcasting the truth about Mamdani, the Democratic Party, and electoralism in general.
The success of reformism, as I wrote in 2018, “strengthens the argument not for opportunistic use of the party ballot line to build a social democratic party but ipso facto for broader and more extensive entanglement in the Democratic Party.” To quote our comrade Kenneth G:
The real function of politicians like Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, Johnson, and Mamdani is to confuse and disarm the left. They give the impression that change is possible within the Democratic Party. They provide political cover for the horrible policies of their more openly conservative colleagues — even when that policy is genocide. Most importantly, they divert attention and resources away from efforts to found an independent party, which could actually threaten the status quo.
The method of holding a Democratic Party candidate accountable after they are elected has seen zero results. The excitement mesmerizes radicals, and once the dust has cleared, in the words of Tempest comrades, Andy Sernatinger and Emma Wilde Botta: “the efforts of an organization like DSA follow these candidates rather than direct them. We don’t tell Sanders or AOC what their positions should be; rather, they tell us what ours should be.”
Didn’t we just pass by here? Brandon Johnson’s campaign and the Chicago left
There’s a very recent example relevant to considering Mamdani’s campaign and the left’s approach to it. I mean the involvement of the left and the Chicago Teachers’ Union (CTU), arguably the most militant and successful union in the US, in backing Brandon Johnson’s campaign for mayor of Chicago in 2023. Johnson is a former teacher and CTU staff organizer, and had been a Democratic Cook County commissioner since 2018. Before becoming mayor, he was known in the movement as “a charismatic individual, a great trade unionist, and a generally sincere guy,” much like how Zohran Mamdani has been praised as a sincere, talented, and effective communicator.
As in the case of the Sanders campaigns nationally, some comrades in Chicago argued that joining Johnson’s campaign was a unique opportunity for the left to break into doing working-class politics on a mass scale. A Chicago teacher and Tempest comrade wrote, “the dynamic in Chicago is… unique, resting on the particular legacy of class struggle and social justice unionism led by the CTU and its intimate links to the liberatory thread of radical Black politics.” The Johnson campaign, despite being both in and of the Democratic Party, was hosting “discussions about the need for a party of our own” that revolutionaries should intervene in, lest we become politically irrelevant.
Johnson ran for the Democratic nomination against Paul Vallas, a GOP-leaning businessman who had served under Mayor Richard M. Daley, Jr. as CEO of Chicago Public Schools. Chicago’s ruling establishment backed Vallas to make the mayor’s race a referendum on the execrable conduct of the Chicago Police Department (CPD) in the wake of the George Floyd Rebellion. And they lost. Decisive in Johnson’s victory was the backing of the CTU, which, along with its parent bodies, the Illinois Federation of Teachers and the AFT, poured $3.2 million into the campaign. The CTU under the reform leadership of the Caucus of Rank-and-File Educators was committed, since at least the unsuccessful 2015 mayoral campaign of Jesús “Chuy” García (currently the Democratic representative for Illinois’ 5th congressional district) against Rahm Emanuel, to winning ground for the union within the local Democratic Party.
Mamdani is not our ally: right now, he’s a successful competitor for our audience, proposing an approach that we recognize as disaster. While he also isn’t our enemy yet, he has offered to become one by running as a Democrat for an executive office.
The CTU campaigned for Johnson as part of its initiative United Working Families (UWF), along with other labor and community organizations. The record of UWF as a grassroots, union-backed electoral project interested in breaking the Democratic Party monopoly in Chicago and elsewhere should be examined. It is tremendously important not just in drawing lessons for how to put in place the “accountability structures” on Zohran Mamdani, but a unique chance in our recent past for the US left to reckon with the appearance of a supposedly independent working-class force in electoral politics.
Unfortunately, the record of UWF has not been at all positive. As our comrade brian bean wrote after Johnson’s election, “many—but not all—UWF candidates hold Democratic Party committeeman positions within the structure of the Cook County Democratic party,” despite the fact that UWF members in the past had been hostile to the idea of working within the Democrats. Upon Johnson’s victory, important UWF activists were incorporated into his administration, and it is significantly less active today. The Chicago left came out weaker from the CTU and UWF tying themselves to Brandon Johnson and the Democratic Party.
A figure previously associated with the 2020 rebellion, criticism of the police and particularly of the CPD, Johnson the mayoral candidate quickly disassociated himself from the movement, saying: “I said [defunding the police] was a slogan. I never said it was mine,” and committed to hiring 200 more detectives. As mayor, Johnson quickly lined up behind Joe Biden’s administration, which, he argued, had “delivered for working families.”
Johnson has held the position of a mainstream Democrat on Palestine. This was evident before he became mayor, when he said in the runoff contest with Vallas, “any speech or any effort to delegitimize Israel and its right to exist, that’s how I view antisemitism.” Shortly after Operation Al Aqsa Flood, Johnson played an instrumental role in rushing a pro-Israel resolution through the city council by having Palestine demonstrators tossed from the council chambers. This resolution helped set the tone for a wave of racist violence against Palestinians, Arabs, and Muslims in the US, particularly the murder of six-year-old Palestinian American child Wadea al-Fayoume in Plainfield, a suburb of Chicago, by his family’s landlord. The landlord shouted, “You Muslims must die!” as he choked Wadea’s mother, before stabbing Wadea dozens of times.
Most importantly, perhaps, Johnson brought the 2024 Democratic National Convention to Chicago. He was instrumental in getting unions, including the CTU, to agree to a no-strike pledge during the convention, in fulfillment of billionaire Illinois governor JB Pritzker’s wish that the 2024 DNC be “the biggest ever.” His police beat up demonstrators intoning the names of the murdered children of Gaza as conference delegates enthused for Kamala Harris or closed their ears.
The Democrats, Mamdani, and Palestine
Unlike Johnson, Zohran Mamdani has been up to now a forthright advocate for Palestine. He talked about having Benjamin Netanyahu arrested as a war criminal if he becomes mayor and Netanyahu were to set foot in the city — unfortunately, it seems rather clear this isn’t in his power. Specifically, the US is not party to the ICC convention under which Netanyahu has been charged as a war criminal, and there are federal and state laws forbidding local authorities’ cooperation with the ICC to protect the large number of US politicians and military commanders who might be charged similarly.
The Democrat establishment chose the sexual predator and nursing-home murderer Andrew Cuomo in the mayor’s race to pitch a referendum in New York on Israel’s genocide and Zionism. For the moment, they lost. There is a real sense in which Mamdani is a child of the Palestine movement.
Anyone who organized for Palestine in the US from 2015 to 2023 knows that the movement had a problem named Bernie Sanders. Sanders is a liberal Zionist, a former dweller on a kibbutz in occupied Palestine. But many organizers, even some Palestinian Americans, didn’t want to hear this. The best you could hope for was “abstract agreement” that we had to do more than campaign for Bernie if we wanted Palestine to be on the national agenda. As Salaita writes, Sanders’s Zionism “wasn’t lost on his Palestinian American champions. It just didn’t bother them.” He continues:
Electioneering requires compromise, but compromise isn’t a neutral practice. The people are made to sacrifice for the affluent. That’s how compromise works under capitalism. Every time, every single time, it’s some aspect of Palestinian freedom that must be compromised. Never the candidate’s position. Never the system’s inherent conservatism. Never the ongoing march of settler colonization.
It was only after the heroic operation of Palestinian militants on October 7 to change the game of the occupation and draw a line against the slow annihilation of their people that Sanders was exposed to the movement, when he denounced it as terrorism and cheered the IDF’s invasion of Gaza.
The Democratic Party is an apparatus of the US state which has a direct interest in the occupation and genocide of Palestinians. Palestine cannot be defended within the Democratic Party. As with other issues, how the Democrats function is to maintain the illusion that they can be shifted on this commitment.
The Democratic Party is an apparatus of the US state which has a direct interest in the occupation and continuing genocide of Palestinians. Palestine cannot be defended within the Democratic Party. As with other issues, how the Democrats function is to maintain the illusion that they can be shifted on this commitment, and the best thing is to get involved, “educate the candidate” and permeate the opinion of that political elite over time.
Soft Zionism is the leftmost stance that will ever be possible as a Democrat. Even at the federal level the presence of Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar as Muslim women who support Palestine has not moved us an atom closer to the ending of military aid for Israel or sanctions on the entity. This very much applies to Mamdani. He supports Palestine but also refers to “Israel’s right to exist.” What can he do as mayor of New York City for Palestine? Local office doesn’t have any bearing on foreign policy.
If Mamdani is successful in his professed aim to make his campaign a model for local Democratic politics, the movement for Palestine in the US will face a sharp choice. It is a tremendous danger to be drawn into local politics, where the extent of your power is so limited and the maze is potentially endless.
As Salaita writes, “Palestine has its own vocabularies of freedom worth forcing into the American conversation.” It cannot be reduced to electoralism in the Democratic Party or anywhere else. He goes on:
Anti-Zionism isn’t simply a politic; it is a sensibility, an attitude, a worldview. It is a refusal to accept any society predicated on suffering and displacement. It detests the ruling class. It rejects the misery presented as natural under capitalism. It honors those old revolutionary devotions: fuck Israel; fuck landlords; fuck civility; fuck the police.
Conclusion: What do we say to do?
Voting and campaigning for Zohran Mamdani cannot be reconciled to building the struggles of the working class and oppressed independent of the Democrats. As I argued in 2018, “Because running as a Democratic candidate” — to which today I would add campaigning or voting for a Democrat — “entails deprioritizing building powerful, disruptive social movements of the working class and the oppressed, it is contradictory to the task of building real power.”
Why single out voting? It seems like a harmless act. But the choice to vote or not vote, particularly for Democrats, represents a political commitment: either to the integrity of capitalism or its revolutionary overthrow. In New York City and across the US, not voting is a commitment to building workplace and movement struggles in opposition to both wings of the capitalist class. It is also a commitment to recruit, educate and cadre-ify everyone we can into revolutionary Marxist politics.
Voting for a Democrat especially is a danger in a more practical sense. I mean the slippery slope: during the Sanders campaigns, we observed a dynamic in which the private decision by a leftist to vote for Sanders in the electorally charged atmosphere turned into convincing several of your friends or people at your workplace to vote for him, which led to campaigning for him outright.
The choice to vote or not vote, particularly for Democrats, represents a political commitment: either to the integrity of capitalism or its revolutionary overthrow. In New York and across the US, not voting is a commitment to building workplace and movement struggles in opposition to both wings of the capitalist class.
The one general exception to our electoral nihilism is certain ballot initiatives. In the past decade, we have seen state-level initiatives, some of them successful, to abolish the death penalty, to enshrine the right to abortion, to restore voting rights to felons, or to legalize cannabis. These issues directly concern the working class and the oppressed. Organizing for and winning these initiatives can, unlike campaigning for a Democrat, build the independence and confidence of the working-class revolutionary current, even if they don’t end up succeeding.
Electoral nihilism is not necessarily a permanent position. It’s conceivable that things could open up in the US to the point that a mass working-class party that ran in legislative elections could emerge, which we would want to intervene in. But our sights are set quite higher than holding down seats on city council, the state house, or even Congress.
In the US, we commit to not running, campaigning, or voting for an executive office like that of president, governor, mayor, district attorney, or any kind of judge, because these are frontline roles that involve taking responsibility for the repression of the struggles of workers and the oppressed. Even in a city, state, or county legislative body, we would be committed to being in a permanent minority in that house, undermining the system from within.
We are emphatically not interested, should the opportunity arise, of participating in a so-called left-wing government under capitalism. This commitment, again, goes all the way back to the founders of our movement. When the unified, legalized Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was expected to make huge gains on the eve of the elections of 1890, Engels was worried that it would gain too many seats! He was interested in using elections to recruit effective working-class party members, not in getting 50% plus one, as detailed by August Nimtz in The Ballot, the Streets, or Both? From Marx and Engels to Lenin and the October Revolution.
The examples of Salvador Allende and the Socialist Party in Chile, François Mitterand in 1980s France, SYRIZA’s government in Greece starting in 2015, and the Communist Party of India (Marxist)-led ministries in Kerala and West Bengal since the late 1950s up to the present are lessons and portents for us.
In their recent articles, our Firebrand comrades Kenneth and Reed present four criteria for revolutionaries to support an electoral campaign: first, it must be genuinely independent of the Democrats and Republicans; second, it must be for a legislative role, not an executive or judicial one; third, the campaign should be rooted in the working class and its objective interests; finally, it has to “aid the organization, and thus consciousness, of the working class to develop into a distinct political movement — a party.”
I think the final point that Reed emphasizes is crucial: the campaign must aid the organization and consciousness of the working class to develop into a party. Several leftist organizations in the US, such as the Party for Socialism and Liberation (PSL) and Workers’ World Party regularly run candidates for president. There is also the example of the Trade Union and Socialist Coalition in Britain, which has been standing candidates for Parliament and local councils to the left of Labour for the last several decades, and whose vote tallies are frequently counted in the several tens or dozens. Comrades might seek to justify such efforts in the terms of Marx and Engels, who wrote in 1850,
Even when there is no prospect whatever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates to preserve their independence, to count their forces and to lay before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint.
But Marx and Engels didn’t face the absurd restrictions of the US electoral process in the 21st century. Comrades who make a principle of running electorally have their time and resources consumed not just in the process of campaigning, but in gathering signatures to get a spot on the ballot, a time-consuming and frustrating experience even in states with more liberal ballot laws. Furthermore, unlike in the latter half of the 19th century in Europe, in today’s US it is certain that none among competing small leftist groups’ offerings is the “workers’ candidate” that Marx and Engels assumed would be singular. To go through all this and get less than a hundred votes would be a setback for working-class independence and confidence.
I would argue that the “advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action” is, at this point, more likely to come from spending our energy and time outside the electoral process. This isn’t to say there could never be exceptional circumstances in which a local independent socialist candidate, even a reformist one, could emerge as a locus for building struggles outside the electoral sphere. One such case was Kshama Sawant in Seattle, as Kenneth lays out in his article.
For now, we in Firebrand should be electoral nihilists. We will not organizationally unite with those who do not absolutely oppose voting, campaigning, or running as a candidate for any bourgeois party in the US.
Marx, Engels, Lenin, and Luxemburg all emphasized that the candidates of a workers’ party, and the party fraction in a bourgeois parliament, must be subordinate to the will of the party’s democratic leadership. Our future party, organized based not on bourgeois politics’ artificial geographical lines, but in the workplaces and in working-class and POC neighborhoods, will be able to run candidates drawing on these lessons without thinking for a moment that the center of our struggle is in Congress or Parliament.
But for now, we in Firebrand should be electoral nihilists. We will not organizationally unite with those who do not absolutely oppose voting, campaigning, or running as a candidate for any bourgeois party in the US. This includes, in cities where races are non-partisan, independent bourgeois candidates, and, I would argue as well, the petty-bourgeois socialist Green Party. Our only defense here is our immaculate politics.
We fight for reforms as revolutionaries. Lenin said that reforms “are only real in proportion to the intensity of the class struggle,” and consequently, when Marxists merge their slogans and forces with the reform-oriented members of the ruling class, “we weaken the cause of revolution and consequently, the cause of reform as well because we thereby diminish the independence, fortitude, and strength of the revolutionary classes.”
I won’t bullshit comrades. This is a tough position to hold, and we have committed to holding it long-term, until the working class and oppressed masses are ready to hold it with us. Much more storied revolutionaries than us have been drawn into the electoral, and in the US specifically, Democratic swamp. Capitulation to capitalism, to paraphrase Leon Sedov, is an inclined plane.
Our comrade Reed has written of the Democratic Party and electoralism as a “spider’s web.” The metaphor I prefer is Lenin’s chain, which links all capitalist countries together and which every question of struggle runs along. The first link of the chain is the US state, and it runs through the DNC; left-wing Democrats such as Sanders, AOC, and Mamdani; the fundraising operations and NGOs; our unions, coalitions and campaigns; and finally, the radical left itself. Through our arguments and action, we can break the chain at this link. This is the first step; we can convince our comrades to sever their connections to the lower echelons of the Democratic Party where its tentacles extend into movements. As our capacities grow, we will be able to break the other links of the chain as well.
Salaita has written that recalcitrance — towards Sanders, the Democrats, and the electoral process — “can be a deep, abiding act of love” for Palestine. Staying true to our hard-won position on the Democratic Party and electoral politics is a deep, abiding act of love for our struggles, our class, our people, ourselves; and a wager on the communist future of humanity.
Illustration by Molly Mendoza
