A Communist's Guide To Elections
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Note: I use socialist and communist interchangeably in this article, and it is intended to be understood as not social democrats, but as people who want a socialist society in which the working class owns the means of production and capitalism is abolished.
The United States is unquestionably in a state of freefall. The question of whether future elections will be legitimate is not trivial, as Republicans have moved to consolidate their power around an increasingly draconian executive and made decisions that indicate that popular opinion is irrelevant and won’t affect their ability to rule. Despite that, nearly all of the mainstream political discourse seems to revolve around the next election or the one after that; about whether AOC will run and should the left support her, will social democrats be able to unseat corporate democrats, or should Chuck Schumer be replaced as minority leader. As soon as one election ends, all political conversation immediately jumps to the next, despite the growing crises unraveling the world before our eyes. This can be frustrating if you, like me, understand that voting cannot fix the myriad crises we face. It can feel like a diversion from our true goals: radically restructuring society.
Under a capitalist organization of the economy, socialists understand that there can be no true democracy and that even with legitimate elections, power can merely be transferred back and forth between different managers of capital, all of whom ultimately exist to protect the bourgeois state. Victories in the electoral sphere are often purely symbolic, as they cannot upset the existing order or deliver substantial material improvements to the working class. At some point, a communist might ask themselves why they would engage at all if, regardless of which party wins, real change can never be enacted at the ballot box. Wouldn’t it make more sense to chalk this entire farce up to a distraction and ignore it entirely? Historically, the giants of the socialist movement would disagree. They understood that while elections cannot deliver the future we are fighting for, they remain a useful terrain of struggle one can and should contend with, but without illusions, and with a clear goal in mind. This article is not about “voting blue” or even voting at all; it is about how to use the electoral arena to connect directly with the working class and ultimately create more communists, so we can upend this system and breathe new life into a dying world.
Criticism
The primary critique I see from the DSA-aligned left is that communist parties like the Party for Socialism and Liberation run what they call “doomed” campaigns outside of the confines of the Democratic Party. These candidates do not garner a significant enough vote share to actually win elections and "gain power” therefore, the entire project is pointless. This is a fundamental misunderstanding of the purpose of engaging in electoral politics in the bourgeois state if your ultimate goal is enacting socialism. Communists understand that they are called to intervene in every struggle, including elections, which, unfortunately, remain the primary expression of the politics of the average American. By running candidates in an unapologetically socialist party, organizers can connect with people where they are and deliver a vision of what a future would look like if the working class were in power rather than the capitalist class. The goal for communists is never to integrate themselves into a capitalist government, but instead to integrate the working class into a mass movement. When tepid left liberals or social democrats represent the highest expression of the possible, when free buses or universal childcare are all that the masses' imagination can grasp, the terrain is entirely ceded to the ruling class. By not using mass attention moments like elections to bring a message to workers that we can have more - that we can, in fact, have a government that is by and for us - we are allowing discourse to be restricted to the narrow arena set out to us by the ruling class. To socialists, elections are not a vehicle for compromising with capitalists and integrating ourselves into their machinery; they are mass educational opportunities. By choosing not to participate at all, we surrender the ground to class enemies and reformists who will mislead the masses and funnel them perpetually into the same dead ends that have produced worse and worse results every cycle.
Critical Support, A Dialectic
In 2020, the Party for Socialism & Liberation offered critical support for the Bernie Sanders campaign without a formal endorsement. They encouraged people to vote for Sanders in the Democratic primary, seeing his campaign as a dynamic insurgency against the establishment. While this may appear to be a contradiction, it was actually a demonstration of how a communist party can engage in a movement of the people without dissolving itself into reformist politics. While they offered a temporary alignment with the Sanders campaign, viewing it as a revolt within the Democratic Party and, more broadly, a rebuke of the ruling class, the PSL emphasized that class independence was necessary and that true change would never be achieved within the confines of bourgeois elections. In that spirit, the party entreated its base to support Sanders in the primaries, but refused to follow him if he did not win the nomination, instead endorsing the pro-ruling-class nominee in the general. This is an explicit rejection of Democratic Party tailism. The view of PSL was that communists can critically engage in insurgent moments within the Democratic Party if they recognize that the movement is not the campaign itself, but the people who have been awakened because of it. Critical support means maintaining independence while offering temporary aid in service of a broader goal: a mass movement that is never beholden to the reactionary forces that govern our lives. Seeing an insurgent campaign within the Democratic Party as a way to move people closer to a revolutionary mass politics - without allowing that campaign to fold people back into reformism - is the central dialectic that allows communists to engage the mass base, without subordinating themselves to it.
“The Sanders campaign is, at this moment, the vessel for a progressive, vaguely socialist insurgency within the confines of the Democratic Party. The Democratic Party has consistently acted against the interests of working people in the United States while trying to present itself as the only option for progressive values. It is a brake on the development of an independent and militant movement in the country. Socialists who understand the Democratic Party is a ruling class party that can not be reformed should support this insurgency.” - PSL
Why Bother?
A frequent trap I see communists fall into is correctly recognizing that the Democratic Party is a reactionary, ruling-class party that is fully beholden to capital and therefore incapable of reform, yet concluding that this means there is no reason to pay attention to the party's machinations at all. This leads communists to believe that there is no purpose in acknowledging insurgencies in primaries, no reason to take note of what the leaders of the party are doing, or to attend liberal protests like No Kings or the Stop Oligarchy rallies. While this logic is understandable, I would argue that it draws the wrong conclusions and severely limits the ability of communists to reach the reachable and develop their class consciousness, leaving them prey to the same bad actors that have been funneling them back into dead ends for decades.
Elections under a bourgeois state are, at minimum, a great diagnostic tool that helps us understand where the minds of the masses are. They can help us determine which messages resonate with people and what ideological terrain we are operating in. While we should never subordinate ourselves to reformist politics, we can and should critically support insurgent primary campaigns that may push class consciousness forward and disrupt the machinery of the ruling class, while still maintaining that no number of elections can fundamentally change the nature of a capitalist system. By maintaining our independence outside the confines of the party system in the United States, we are able to both support tactically and criticize ruthlessly, politicians and systems. We can recognize that unseating powerful democrats can put cracks in the stranglehold of our rulers, but we must maintain that while the system remains intact, there will never be radical change. The only way to bring about that change is to overthrow the entire order.
If we check out of engaging in this arena at all, we lose. We lose visibility into the current state of mass consciousness, we leave the political terrain that currently exists completely uncontested, and we remove ourselves from moments where millions are politically activated and ready to hear us. Trying to lead the masses starts from a place of deeply understanding where they are and where the gaps in their consciousness lie. The middle path between disengagement and reformism is to maintain complete independence but be deeply visible and connected to the places where people are activated, bringing an uncompromising revolutionary message into their awareness over and over again. It is a politics of “yes, and”: understanding that the masses may be on the right track but can still be easily misled, and that it is your job to intervene and prevent this.
Lenin: Correcting The Misread
The critical difference between the approach of communists like myself and that of parties like the PSL, and that of democratic socialists, is the maintenance of independence and the refusal to be integrated into bourgeois parties. A common justification for the latter approach is often based on a misreading of Lenin on ultra-leftism and on participation in parliament. While it is correct that Lenin had ruthless criticism of ultra-left abstention in elections and refusal to engage in political struggle, it does not mean he would've supported operating within the Democratic Party:
“it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.” - Lenin, “Left-Wing” Communism: an Infantile Disorder
The emphasis here is on “party of the revolutionary proletariat”. What Lenin is saying is that there should be an independent political party willing to enter the hostile terrain of bourgeois institutions, with the primary purpose of agitating and educating. This is fundamentally different from winning elections, becoming embedded in reactionary parties, and trying to change the system from the inside. In contrast, when running candidates within the Democratic Party, a democratic socialist organization’s survival depends on the relevance and upward trajectory of their electeds. This inevitably results in the organization making excuses for a politician’s compromises, adapting their messaging to maintain their alliances, and being in a constant tug of war for influence against the ruling class on the inside. The constant pressure to win the next election and stay viable often overrides the impetus to stay principled, blunting the sharpness of positions to keep them in alignment with other party members. The whole organization is then pulled rightward by its obligation to these representatives and by the need to continually align with what the system considers acceptable. Operating within the confines of a reactionary political party will reliably reproduce this outcome.
“Opportunism means sacrificing the fundamental interests of the masses to the temporary interests of an insignificant minority of the workers or, in other words, an alliance between a section of the workers and the bourgeoisie, directed against the mass of the proletariat” - Lenin, The Collapse of the Second International
Synthesis
As unbearable as watching two awful parties compete for voters - trapped helplessly ping-ponging between them with no real avenues for change - can be, it is imperative that we don’t check out entirely. These are hostile terrains that we can, and should, act upon, while being clear-eyed about their limited utility and ultimate function. Elections are a tool by which to understand the mass base we must reach and how to reach them. The danger is not in the elections themselves, it is in the illusions, misplaced hopes, and demobilization they often engender. For a communist, an election is just another place we can intervene in struggle while maintaining our independence and showing voters there is another way. We know that restructuring society for the working class can never come through the ballot box, but from ordinary people becoming an organized force that can bring the system to its knees. Engaging in elections should never be confused with supporting the Democratic Party; it means identifying where the spark of class consciousness is emerging and guiding those masses towards true change, rather than allowing them to be misled. If we do not show up with a revolutionary program, if we disengage and surrender this ground, we will render ourselves irrelevant and forfeit all that energy back into the very system that seeks to destroy us.