Electoral Activity: A Necessary Revolutionary Tactic

by Saturn

Huge opportunities present themselves to the socialist movement which have not been properly met. Occupy Wall Street came and went, raising tremendous class anger but leaving the masses it mobilized drifting in frustration without a plan or an organization. A 2012 Gallup poll revealed that 39% of Americans see socialism as a positive word. In a country of roughly 310 million people, that is something like 120 million budding socialists. So the mentality in which existing socialist groups have settled, tolerating membership figures of a few hundred active members or some thousands of paper members, is totally unacceptable.

However, today’s revolutionary socialist groups may have simply hit a wall with how far they can grow, without using alternative strategies and tactics. Fortunately alternative strategies and tactics exist, which they can utilize and partake in. But first we really need to explore the problem of hyper-specific party lines more thoroughly (or groups which claim to have limited party lines, but actually have an unwritten encyclopedia of positions which members are expected to support).

It is possible that the model of groups with hyper-specific party lines which engage with protest movements can attract their enthusiastic core of a few hundred people, but beyond that, such groups are simply not going to be interesting to the millions of brand new socialists. The newbies may be eager to hear a well-refined specific socialist ideology, but they are certainly not interested in committing to it, because they’ve just heard this stuff for the first time, if even that. In fact this may remain the nature of American socialists even as the masses proceed into political maturity: their ideas and stances maybe become more specific and better in general, but the masses may remain interested in primarily only socialism, and shy away from groups which expect them to pin down a stance on every issue under the sun.

Many Leninists are tempted to draw the lines early, in advance of the new socialist masses’ own path of development. It may seem logically consistent to us that “you can’t be a real socialist unless you also think X, Y, and Z; otherwise it’s just self-contradictory.” But what they think is more important than what we think. Take it far enough, and ideological walls end up becoming organizational walls between the radicals and the real living movement. It’s true that you can take positions while still engaging with people who don’t share them. However it runs into diminishing returns. Drawing too many party lines seems farsighted, but actually prevents us from being in meaningful dialogue with the masses during their process of ideological transformation.

So what do we do? People usually respond to organizational rigidity by turning toward social movements, typically demonstration-based coalitions and such. While these are an important piece of the puzzle, they are one that the Left already knows and practices while still slogging in irrelevance, so the answer does not lie precisely in protest movements either. We’ve already raised hell with movements of various kinds: Occupy, outrage against the killings of Black people, union workers in Wisconsin, various protests against budget cuts in California and elsewhere. But to what extent have we even slowed the 1%’s offensive against our standard of living – let alone reversed that into an offensive of our own, as we should? The movements matter, if only because the mass-outpourings help people realize they are not alone. But in truth even the most successful waves of protest have only changed public opinion, not public policy, and have done almost nothing to establish lasting centers of working-class power and organization.

To get to the point, we need a socialist party – and not another little one, but a truly national mass party. Previously people would scoff, “yes, that’s the goal, but how do we get there?” However, to imply that we must still rely on indirect routes to that goal, and still cannot pursue it directly as a possibility in the present, places you horribly behind the times – as the Gallup statistics indicate. It’s amazing how much the socialist movement has unscientifically ignored the quantitative evidence that we are horribly lagging behind our potential, and we have chosen against the proof to remain in our corner of obscurity.

The little socialist groups can continue bashing each other, if that satisfies them, but we need them to put aside those differences tactically for the sake of supporting each other in electoral campaigns. For better or for worse, millions of people who don’t care at all about marching in issue-based demonstrations become energized and interested when they hear someone is running for office. We need to smack ourselves out of our irrelevance and actually learn how elections and campaigns work, a skill set of which protest-oriented socialists are grossly lacking. We need to stop having six different socialist meetings in one city every time some big topic hits the news or we cover basic matters – we need to pool resources. We might even start buying ads. And of course the existing socialist electoral efforts need some work – many just seem completely unserious, while others focus entirely on building the ultra-narrow group they are sponsored by. We need to drill two things into our heads and everyone else’s:

(1) We should not run just for the sake of running but can now raise our expectations toward ambitious expansion and growth.

(2) To do this, we need to overcome the fragmentation which makes all socialist groups appear futile and unserious to newcomers, and we need to start pooling our resources.

This is not giving up on revolution. Revolutionists must be involved in the broad party, and in fact revolutionists must lead the way in founding the broad party, starting now – starting yesterday, really. Of course if some future force within the broad party ever asks us to silence our revolutionist goals, we must fight back against the censorship and win – but that is a problem for when we get there! No, this is not giving up on revolution – this is the best, possibly the only way to actually bring socialist politics into the mainstream, and along with it a space for our revolutionist message.