Elections for smaller constituencies are easier to win.

This might seem to be an obvious point, but it also seems to be one that people are missing.

Photo by Dorian Le Sénéchal on Unsplash

The fewer total votes you are chasing, the less money that you need to spend, and the less time that needs to be spent. It is way easier to get someone elected to a city council than it is to get them elected president.

Big money is way less involved in small-scale elections, and there’s a much bigger chance that you might personally any given voter, or be able to get endorsements from local community leaders.

Yes, municipal politics are less glamorous, but that’s actually an advantage. The farther up you go, the more the owning class will get involved in things.

I’m not saying that they won’t still try to stop you, even at the municipal level — I think that electoral politics, in general, are inherently a losing game for socialists of any stripe. I’m an anarchist, and I really am serious about that.

But a lot of you seem to insist on bashing your brains open against the jagged wall of electoralism, regardless of what I and a significant portion of socialist theorists might think. You might as well do it properly.

Electoral socialism is, in general, a silly idea. Elections will never be allowed to abolish capitalism — but, clearly, some amount of social democracy is possible.