Independence from capitalist parties is a fundamental principle of Marxism. History has demonstrated that any support for the Democratic Party catastrophically dilutes our politics and forestalls revolutionary organizing. Instead, for the foreseeable future, revolutionaries should embrace “electoral nihilism” — a politics that is hostile to electoralism and elections.
The history of leftist efforts to realign the Democratic Party demonstrates that strategies like the “dirty break” and the “party surrogate” are not ways forward for the left, but traps instead. Beyond sabotaging left Democrats like Zohran Mamdani and their proposed reforms, a greater danger is the party’s ability to absorb them. Instead, we need an independent socialist workers’ movement.
Zohran Mamdani’s victory in the Democratic mayoral primary in New York City has caused excitement on the left due to his democratic-socialist politics and his support for Palestine. Such excitement has historically led to disorientation and disillusionment when reformist Democrats — such as AOC and Brandon Johnson — inevitably betray the left. Revolutionaries must retain our opposition to all Democrats and executives of the capitalist state.
Read part one here: Why Socialists Don’t Vote for Our Enemies Won’t it be easier to organize under a Democrat? All else being equal, probably not. The variables at work in determining the prospects for working-class organization go beyond which party is in the White...
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...
According to the dominant view on the broad liberal-left, to achieve progressive change we must elect officials with progressive politics. Liberalism claims we can eliminate the problems inherent in capitalism without eliminating capitalism itself, and by using the...
Every year I teach an Introduction to Cultural Anthropology course. In the section in which we focus on socioeconomic class, I ask my students to read and interpret the famous first pages of the Communist Manifesto. These are the pages in which Marx and Engels broadly...