Introduction

A recent surge of membership in socialist organizations, most notably the Democratic Socialists of America, renewed debates regarding tactics and strategy on the left. For a long time the U.S. left was lost, but now there is a glimmer of hope. After decades of defeat we have the opportunity to rebuild the Left. This process must begin with re-establishing roots in the working class through the construction of working class institutions. As it now stands, every socialist organization, including the DSA, is disconnected from the working class, whose eroding power is at the edge of nonexistence. As a result we are not a movement of the working class, we are a movement of sects.

There are two major strategic trends that dominate the broad socialist left today: Trotskyist, Marxist-Leninist, and anarchist sects that compete to recruit activists to their parties, who believe that slowly building their organization and attending rallies while agitating for a mass movement will build popular support for socialism, and progressives who want to either take over the Democratic Party and/or create pressure groups to pass legislation on the local, state, and federal levels. Being the big tent organization that it is, both of these trends are present within the DSA. The right-wing believes that the DSA must push the Democrats to the left by running grassroots insurgent campaigns on the Democratic ballot line and adhering to the old inside-outside strategy. The center sees elections as important but secondary to the goal of building a movement that pressures Democrats to enact “non-reformist reforms” as a step towards building socialism. The left-wing, part of which is coalescing around the Refoundation Caucus, wants the DSA to cut ties with the Democrats and focus resources on building a base through the creation of working class institutions that improve working class power, and a multi-tendency socialist party united around a political program for the establishment of socialism.

One major ideological underpinning of both the right and center is the belief that the ballot box and protest culture will further their goals. They believe socialism can come to fruition through legislation (by voting for democrats and pressuring lawmakers to pass reforms through social movements). Their tactics differ only in emphasis while their visions for the future differ dramatically. The right-wing Berniecrats wish to reform the state into a social democracy. The center takes it a step further and argues that a social democracy is necessary before socialism can be implemented. In the end though they both reject revolution and advocate reformism.

The reformism that permeates the DSA has created confusion regarding what constitutes socialism. A strong welfare state and/or a system of workers co-ops is not socialism. Socialism entails, of course, the workers controlling the means of production. But it also necessitates the ascendance of the working class as the dominant class, the political suppression of the capitalist class, and the abolition of the bourgeois state replaced by a workers’ state. Without the total destruction of the bourgeois state, and the political domination of the workers through the establishment of a truly democratic workers’ state, then workers’ control of the workplace means nothing.

Any hope for building socialism requires a total break with the long term strategy and tactics of right-wing and centrist socialists who wish to work within bourgeois parties and aim to take power within the bourgeois state.

The State

Contrary to its liberal conception, the state is not a neutral tool. It’s not a bureaucracy subjected to both popular democratic pressures and elite interests that diffuses the power of both. Its purpose is not to take input from every sector and create an output of compromises and solutions to societal tensions and problems. It is not an even terrain on which we can struggle against the capitalist class. The bourgeois state is an instrument of class oppression and relying on it to bring about the society we wish to build is naive.

The state arose from the contradiction between classes. When classes came into existence a coercive instrument used by one class to oppress the other became necessary. Throughout history, the existence of a state implied the existence of a class system. Leaving the bourgeois state intact means accepting the current class relations, i.e the bourgeoisie owning the state and the means of production, and the workers owning only their labor which they must sell on the market. The singular way to end capitalism, to destroy and replace the intolerable social relations present today, is to abolish the bourgeois state and replace it with a radically democratic workers’ state designed to wither away.

Right-wing and centrist socialists have no strategy to achieve this end. The right simply wishes to alleviate the worst excesses of capitalism. They crave a strong social democratic state, which some imagine existed in the United States during FDR’s time as president, a state that is impossible to achieve in today’s conditions. On the other hand, centrists do not limit themselves to social democracy, but genuinely desire socialism. Their fatal flaw is a lack of vision and strategy about how to engage the state and take power.

The Democrats: Not a Party, a Graveyard

Both the right and the center argue for engaging with the Democratic Party. The two differ on how to engage, but each strategy represents a dead end. The journal Socialism and Democracy recently published a round table conversation surrounding the formation of a socialist party. A piece by Gerald Meyer titled “An Identifiable Moment” serves as a brief summary of the right-wing socialists’ position. Meyer (rightly) argues that a socialist party is necessary and outlines some of its tasks,

The Left needs an institutional center to carry out the functions that a movement, which thrives on spontaneity, cannot. These include: (1) construct a minimum program embodying transitional demands that are widely agreed upon but not entirely attainable within the existing political-economic arrangements; (2) craft an ideological construct which has the potential of overtaking the hegemonic ideology of the ultra-right, on the one hand, and the piecemeal, reactive political program of liberalism; (3) coordinate movements so that political activity does not erratically ebb and flow; and (4) ensure that immediate issues not overtake the often more consequential distant issues….A party would be the entity best able to build a force powerful enough to stem the proto-fascist tide and move millions forward around a common program….

Meyer continues arguing for working within the Democratic Party until we reach a point where a socialist party can be built. He explains,

The Democratic Party does not represent the Left, but it does contain all the forces upon which a Left mass movement depends: African-Americans, Latinos, Asian-Americans, the LGBT communities, feminists, progressives. Almost every trade union in the United States maintains a close relationship with the Democratic Party. Surveys of Americans’ identification on the political spectrum reveals that the most Left segment of the population is not “Independents,” but rather self-identified Democrats. Moreover, the Democratic Party has been moving gradually to the Left.

This statement, the justification for Meyer’s entire argument, is built around false assumptions and bad conclusions. The Democratic Party is not a party in any real sense; it has no membership that could even theoretically hold the leadership accountable, and exists mainly through networks of elected officials, elite technocrats, and donors. The base of the would-be-socialist-party does not participate in the institutions of the Democratic Party beyond voting for their candidates, and a lack of alternatives serves as the sole fuel for that minimal participation”. The two party system ensures that the most progressive candidate will be a Democrat even if they are wholly reactionary.

Large sections of working class do not enthusiastically vote for Democrats, they either desperately vote against Republicans or do not vote at all. Furthermore, the notion that the Democratic Party is moving “left” in any meaningful sense of the word is outrageous. There are only two ostensible examples of this: the Bernie Sanders campaign and the latest version of the Democratic Party Platform. Sanders, a middle of the road social-democrat, played a useful role in rallying sections of the working class towards progressive ends, but the DNC crushed his campaign. The Democratic Party Platform, often touted by Clintonites as “the most progressive platform the party has ever had”, is non-binding, totally arbitrary, and completely ignored by Democratic politicians. There is no evidence to support the claim that the Democratic Party is moving to the left. In fact, the opposite is true– recent events proved that any attempt to shift the party to the left will be ruthlessly suppressed or merely ignored.

Meyers claims that “the Left simply does not have the time to recruit workers, one by one, willing to build a Left party,” which is true enough. The sect model of recruiting workers in the ones or twos until there are enough for a mass party is a proven failure. But it is also true that the Left does not have time to suffocate itself inside the swollen, technocratic, corpse of the Democratic Party. They will never allow us to take over, they will never allow us to push it to the left.

The Democratic party was not designed to do those things, it was designed to govern the state according to the interests of certain sectors of the capitalist class. If the left uses its energy and resources working within the Democratic Party then there will never come a time when a socialist party can be built. Instead, we will waste years associating with, and campaigning, and fundraising for a party with no intention of furthering our cause. Our current task should be to focus on building a socialist party in the here-and-now, while being careful to not repeat the mistakes of sects that have dominated the left for so long. We cannot afford to put off this task indefinitely for the sake of allying ourselves with capitalists.

The center has less faith in the Democratic Party, but continues to advocate for socialists’ participation within it. Ethan Young, in his essay “Growing From the Concrete: Left Electoral Politics in the United States”, sets up the debate between the left and center of the socialist movement, “The odds of actually taking over [the Democratic Party] are pretty poor. The real question is whether working to increase left influence inside would help or hurt the efforts to strengthen unions and rescue and empower the public”. Centrist socialists like Young answer this question with a “yes”. Young concludes his essay by admitting that any “economic populist tendency” that develops inside the Democratic Party will “quickly face slamming doors and empty promises” and that “to prioritize jockeying for position in the party would lead to disaster”. While Young concedes the ultimate futility of working with the Democrats in one instance, he states his support for “running against both Republicans and machine/corporate Democratic candidates, whether as independents, fusionists, or opposition Democrats” in the next. Young believes that while it is unreasonable to trust the Democrats we must still work within their party in certain instances.

At the beginning of his argument, Young states that, “the U.S has never had a socialist or labor party that could effectively challenge or replace the Democrats as the political home of labor and working class constituencies. As a result there is no national, coherent, political center rallying left social movements”. In one respect he is correct- there is no political center for left social movements. But Young is mistaken about the role of the Democratic Party. The Democrats are not a political home for the working class, they are merely the least detrimental electoral option– and a home is much more than a ballot. Construction of a political center, a collection of working class institutions that build working class power, is a long-term task that we must start now, without wasting time and resources trying to get Democrats elected.

Young goes on to elaborate on a dichotomy which completely mischaracterizes and oversimplifies the options open to socialists today. In his framing, the centrist strategy of building a protest movement to pressure the Democrats while simultaneously running “progressive” Democratic candidates is contrasted with the sect strategy of building a socialist party that inserts itself into popular social movements and recruit members until it is large enough to lead a revolution. He rightly criticizes these sects,

Building an alternative in a blissful isolation- or ignoring the attitudes of millions of people involved in the actual political arrangement- alienates the Left from the developing political direction of social movements. And this approach, with ready-made, self interested leadership groups (sects) as the centerpiece can’t help but run counter to democratic forms growing out of social movements.

In his criticism, Young conflates bureaucratic sects with the entirety of the anti-Democratic-Party left. Sects often build in “blissful isolation” from the working class, but working inside the Democratic Party does not constitute paying attention to the “attitudes of millions of people involved in the actual political arrangement”. There are millions of people who are aware that both the Republicans and the Democrats are their enemies, and there are socialists with no illusions regarding small sects who also refuse to work inside the Democratic Party. A third route rejects the two strategies laid out above. Instead of focusing on just turning out bodies at protests, or working within a capitalist party, the base building strategy focuses on building working class institutions alongside a multi-tendency party united around a political program.

This entails a total rejection of working with the capitalist Democratic Party. Young makes it clear in his piece that rejecting the Democrats completely is unacceptable and sounds the cry of “lesser evilism”,

Small business and social conservatives of all classes have made the GOP their home in a real sense, exercising real power because they share the goal of destroying unions and pushing back the social gains of the 1960s and 70s. And that is what the Republicans are actively doing in every state and region where they dominate lawmaking, while the Democrats, however weakly, are all that stand in the way nationally… Under these circumstances a wholesale rejection of the Democrats is suicidal. Independent campaigns actually do act as spoilers for the GOP sometimes…

It is a familiar, and totally unconvincing, argument. The Democrats stand in the way of nothing. Sometimes through sheer incompetence, other times by malicious intent, the Democratic Party has, time after time, proven itself the enemy of the working class. They have turned unions from organs of working class power and solidarity into nothing more than fundraising machines for their party, instituted welfare reform, deregulated the banks, facilitated mass incarceration, increased mass surveillance and the power of the executive branch, etc.

In every major city where a Democratic mayor is elected, the lives of working people continue worsen. Even New York City mayor Bill De Blasio, whose election Young praises as a progressive victory, has overseen gentrification and the continuing transfer of wealth upward in the city. People of all demographics within the working class are fed up with both parties. They are tired of politics as they see it; they recognize that few politicians have their interests in mind, and know that the ones that genuinely wish to assist the working class will never be allowed to do so. The system operates in a way that eliminates all hope of liberation through the electoral system– millions of people recognize this already. The working class is well aware of the Democratic Party’s betrayals and failures.

Young comes close to admitting the popular negative perception of the Democrats even among the party’s base when he states, “The party base is changing from a faithful flock to an angry and worried mass. As the base gradually becomes aware of its actual political leverage, populism serves as a rallying point for diverse tendencies and constituencies…” This should indicate that now is the time to break with the unpopular Democratic Party, but Young draws the opposite conclusion and argues that now is the time to mobilize a populist uprising from within.

It is worth hammering the point home: why should we allow ourselves to rub shoulders with this rotten party? The working class knows what the Democrats stand for — greed, means-testing, austerity, corruption, incompetence — and they can smell the stink of elitist technocrats a mile away. To associate ourselves with them, to ask the working class to support this party with their money, time, and votes — a party that actively makes life more brutal and less equal — is suicide. We must break with the Democrats immediately. We can not afford to associate socialism with failed Democratic policies.

Young, anticipating the above argument, counters that the Democratic party is not a monolith and has many fault lines that we can exploit for our own gain. He claims that “the Democratic Party holds divergent tendencies, some rooted in the New Deal, some in neoliberalism. It gives the reins to corporate capital, but includes most of the labor movement among its biggest donors and vote-getting operations.” The Democrats do have divergent tendencies ranging from New Deal to neoliberalism, but the neoliberal tendencies dominate the party. They must dominate the party. The Democrats exist to facilitate the success of capitalism, and capitalism’s order of the day is austerity and neoliberal economics. Additionally, organized labor’s alliance with the Democrats has led to its total immiseration and the marginal amount of influence that 21st century New Dealers hold in the party is superfluous: the New Deal is not socialism and, as witnessed in the 40s, is not even a stepping stone towards socialism.

Reformism and Elections

In the essay “A Blueprint for a New Party” Seth Ackerman positions himself to the left of Young by clearly denouncing the Democrats and documenting, in detail, the history of the U.S. electoral system and the Democratic Party’s place within it. As a study in history, the piece is a brilliant resource, but it’s barely coherent in its function as a “blueprint”.

Ackerman spends paragraph after paragraph shattering arguments in favor of the Democratic Party and efforts to work within it. He distills a popular argument of the anti-democratic-party left down to its core in the following two paragraphs,

But electing individual progressives does little to change the broad dynamics of American politics or American capitalism. In fact, it can create a kind of placebo effect: sustaining the illusion of forward motion while obscuring the fact that neither party is structurally built to reflect working-class interests. Working within the Democratic Party has been the prevailing model of progressive political action for decades now, and it suffers from a fundamental limitation: it cedes all real agency to professional politicians.

It’s a solid repudiation of working within the Democrats. The rest of the essay goes on to examine the anatomy of the two party system and harshly critique the Democratic Party and the strategy of right-wing and centrist socialists while citing historical examples.

But when the time comes to lay out his blueprint for a new party, Ackerman essentially makes an argument for setting up a socialist SuperPAC (with the backing of the labor movement) that could fund socialist candidates, and the essay comes to an abrupt end. The history lessons, the detailed take down of the Democrats, the dissection of how the two party system operates, all lead to a plea for more electoralism and leaves many unanswered questions, such as how elected socialists are to relate to the institutions they find themselves working in, and how exactly a socialist organization can ensure that their elected officials further the organization’s stated aims.

The three essays by Meyer, Young, and Ackerman all have a common thread running through them: faith in reformism. Their arguments rest entirely on the foundations of reformism. It is taken for granted that the working class builds power through electoral politics and that a socialist party must be primarily an electoral party. But socialism— the coming to power of the working class, the formation of a radically democratic workers’ state, the fundamental altering of the current social relations—will never come through elections.

For one, the capitalists will never allow it. They’ve created the two-party system to make sure of it. The proponents of working within the Democratic Party constantly remind us that an electoral third party will be crushed by the combined power of the GOP, Democrats, and the state structure itself and they are correct. A socialist party attempting to take power through elections will be buried under mountains of corporate money and anti-democratic electoral rules.

Secondly, socialism cannot be implemented through the bourgeois state. Winning elections to state power puts socialists in the position of maintaining capitalism. Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party is a useful example. Social democratic gains under a victorious Corbyn-led Labour government would not be enough to end capitalism. Instead, as acting head of a capitalist state operating inside the capitalist global economy and subject to its rules, Labour would be forced to manage capitalism.

The history of reformist socialism suggests capitulation and defeat would follow a Labour victory. As far back as 1969, the British Marxist Ralph Miliband was pointing out that left-wing reformist politicians had failed to threaten capitalism,

…these men [who] have quite often professed anti-capitalist convictions, they have never posed- and indeed have for the most part never wished to pose- a serious challenge to the capitalist system…whose basic framework and essential features they have accepted much more readily than their pronouncements in opposition, and even sometimes in office, would have tended to suggest.

In recent years, France’s Socialist Party and Greece’s Syriza both capitulated to the demands of capital, implemented austerity at home, and in the case of France’s Socialist Party, actively took part in imperialism abroad. It could not have been any other way. If socialists choose to work inside the system, then they must operate by the rules of that system.

Fighting for and winning reforms is important for building working class power, but without a plan to go farther, these reforms simultaneously shore up the foundations of capitalism. This can be said even for important victories such as the National Health Service in the United Kingdom or a Medicare For All victory in the United States. Miliband pointed out that the NHS, “did not, for all its importance, constitute any threat to the existing system of power or privilege. What it did constitute was a certain humanisation of the existing social order”. Although many capitalist elites would like to see it eliminated, the NHS exists wholly within the confines of capitalism and doesn’t directly challenge the power structure of society. In the U.S., Medicare For All and similar reforms, though a positive development and an improvement on people’s lives, would work the same way.

We should fight for reforms but we cannot delude ourselves into believing that these reforms constitute socialism or are part of a piecemeal process of building socialism. Commanding the capitalist state apparatus, even in an attempt to benefit the many and not the few, is still commanding the capitalist state apparatus. The logic of capitalism would force a reformist-socialist government to implement austerity, or an inevitable economic crash will occur and be blamed on socialists instead of capitalism. An international socialist revolution is the only chance of ending capitalism. Reforms will not disassemble the vast capitalist bureaucracy. Reforms will not build a workers state designed to wither away. Reforms cannot take power away from the capitalist class. Only a revolution can do these things and we must begin the process of building workers’ power now if one is to occur in the future.

Faith in reformism manifests itself in the authors’ conception of the party. In each essay, parties are envisioned as mostly electoral parties held accountable by nebulous “social movements” (Ackerman states that elections would be secondary but offers no evidence in his blueprint for the role of the party outside of anything more than elections). This obsession with electoral politics and social movements is indicative of their reformism. Whether the goal is to push the Democrats to the left from the inside, outside, or both the strategy rests on the same assumptions: that legislation will build socialism.

To be clear, socialists should participate in elections, but not as Democrats, and free of any illusions that we can reform our way out of capitalism. A socialist party must run candidates under its own banner and ballot line. Electoral campaigns are a way to spread our message and are a great platform for critiquing capitalism and capitalist candidates. It must be stressed, though, that taking executive office should be discouraged. As members of a legislature socialists can have their voices be heard and can vote against, and use procedural methods to slow or stop, capitalist legislation. As a member of an executive office a socialist will be forced to manage the very system they wish to destroy.

Additionally, building a social movement is a good thing. It’s what socialists are here to do. But without a mass base in the working class we are left with a group of activists marching and speaking to one another. Our current social movements do not scare those in power, they are easily contained and toothless.

The Party We Need

What we need is a multi tendency socialist party united around a political program (as opposed to uniting around an ideological line) that is radically democratic and allows for the creation of publicly organized factions. This party should use its time and resources to build a mass base by creating workers institutions inside working class communities. These institutions will help build workers power by providing services while simultaneously organizing communities and preparing them for the future development of dual power. The party should run its own candidates for legislative seats on the state and federal level as a way to spread socialist messaging, gauge its support, block and disrupt legislation, and push for legislation that helps to build workers’ power.

The working class has been utterly defeated in this country. We have lost the class war. The tactics and strategies of the sects, and reformist socialists have only, and will continue to only, lead us to defeat. Mobilizing protests and running progressive candidates have become our leading tactics. What we need is to organize our communities around institutions such as free breakfast programs, legal services, medical clinics, educational programs, tenants unions, neighborhood councils and much more. Building these institutions will be long and difficult, but the alternative is being swallowed up into the abyss of the Democratic Party, continuing to watch people’s lives degenerate into nightmares, while we stand on sidewalks, signs in hand, surrounded by police, chanting “Whose streets? Our streets!” These institutions, combined with concerted effort to rebuild the labor movement by being active members of unions where they exist, challenging union bureaucrats, and organizing unorganized workplaces, will build the power of the working class from the ground up.

Being revolutionary is not about reenacting the October Revolution. It is not about forming an insular club of people who shout empty revolutionary slogans. It is not about trying to “out-left” our reformist comrades. Being a revolutionary socialist means accepting that we cannot reform capitalism into socialism. It is accepting that there are two classes: a small class of people who own the things people need to survive and a massive class of people who do not own those things. It is accepting that the owners will never give up what they own. It must be taken by force.

It should be said that a revolution will not happen tomorrow. In fact, I do not believe that I will live to see one. But if capitalism is going to end it will be through revolution. We must use the time we have now to build the power of the working class, not steer it into electoralism and the Democratic Party.