Our new issue, “After Bernie,” is out now. Our questions are simple: what did Bernie accomplish, why did he fail, what is his legacy, and how should we continue the struggle for democratic socialism? Get a discounted print subscription today !

Florida is home to over 1.6 million people with felony convictions. It’s also one of only three states that permanently bar convicted felons from voting. To get a sense of the sheer impact of the policy, do the math: the state is home to about 15 million adult US citizens, meaning that more than 10 percent of the Florida voting-age populace is disenfranchised. This November, a ballot measure aims to automatically restore voting rights to approximately 1.2 of those 1.6 million people. In an attempt to make it more palatable to already eligible Florida voters, the amendment — which requires 60 percent of the popular vote to pass — excludes convicted violent offenders. Disenchanted with two-party politics, American socialists haven’t always made voting rights a top priority. But we should. Expanded suffrage has been a key site of struggle for socialists throughout history, and with good reason. Voting alone may not deliver revolution, but universal suffrage is, as Friedrich Engels put it, “a splendid weapon,” and one we must have in our arsenal if we want to challenge the political power of capitalist elites.

A Working-Class Issue Like all restrictive voting laws, Florida’s felon disenfranchisement policy targets the working class, and especially working-class people of color. In the US, the total numbers of incarcerated white and black people are broadly similar, with Latinos trailing close behind; but the rate of incarceration is far higher for people of color, especially black people. That pattern holds in the case of Florida felon disenfranchisement. The numerical majority of disenfranchised Florida felons are white, but because of the racial disparity, an astonishing 21 percent of black adults in Florida can’t vote because of felony convictions. Felon disenfranchisement in Florida is therefore an issue that affects both white people and people of color and has an especially detrimental effect on the political influence of the latter. Across lines of racial difference, the pre-incarceration income of incarcerated Americans is drastically lower than the national average. And research shows that class status is a driving factor in who gets and stays locked up. While there’s no available data on the income of Floridians with felony convictions, we can extrapolate from the national data that they’re highly likely to be poor or working class — both because poor and working-class people are targeted by the criminal justice system to begin with, and because having a felony conviction harms job opportunities after release. So, when we see that 10 percent of eligible voters in Florida are barred from voting because of past crimes, we should interpret it as an assault on the political power of the multiracial working class. As socialists, whose primary project is to empower the working class to square off against capital, we have a vested interest in this fight.

A Socialist Issue Recall that Florida was the decisive state in the 2000 presidential election that gave us President George W. Bush. One study found that if Florida’s convicted felons had been permitted to vote, the outcome “would almost certainly have been reversed.” The potential electoral advantage, owing to the demographics of the constituency in question, is reason enough for Democrats to support reversing felon disenfranchisement laws. And many do — though they struggle to balance their desire for more votes against their commitment to appearing tough on crime. But as socialists, our main concern is not whether the Democrats emerge victorious over the Republicans. It’s whether the working-class majority triumphs over the capitalist minority that exploits its labor and makes off with the profits. Expanded suffrage is beneficial for us in this project, too. On principle, democratic socialists believe that the people who make up society should have a say in how that society operates. In furtherance of that principle, it’s incumbent on us to politically intervene in cases where that clearly isn’t happening — which is why socialists were front and center in the struggles for women’s suffrage and voting rights for African Americans. But our interest isn’t just moral; it’s also tactical. Friedrich Engels was an ardent proponent of universal suffrage as a matter of socialist strategy. He wrote of the dual effort to expand suffrage and to use that voting power to workers’ advantage, building toward the eventual eradication of capitalism: It’s slower and more boring than the call to revolution, but it’s ten times more sure, and what is even better, it indicates with the most perfect accuracy the day when a call to armed revolution has to be made; it’s even ten to one that universal suffrage, intelligently used by the workers, will drive the rulers to overthrow legality, that is, to put us in the most favorable position to make revolution. On another occasion Engels put it even more succinctly: Universal suffrage is the gauge of the maturity of the working class …. On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know where they stand. When Engels wrote this he hadn’t had a chance to observe the cleverest suffrage work-arounds of the American two-party system: the gerrymandering, voter suppression, strict laws stymieing independent political parties, and the pervasive feeling of alienated disempowerment among the working class engendered by decades of political disappointment. In light of these, and on top of them the generally low level of class consciousness in America, it will take a lot more than expanded suffrage to get us to the point where a working-class political force is challenging capital so effectively in the state that the capitalist class essentially invites a revolution by abandoning all pretense to democracy. But if we’re sympathetic to Engels’s argument that proletarian successes in the electoral sphere will both act as a barometer for preparedness for a revolution and also help establish the conditions for one, then we should also accept that nothing of the sort is possible if massive swaths of the working class are prohibited from participating in sanctioned democratic politics altogether.