For any radical, or for those who have the potential to become radicals, the idea of reform seems tempting. It appears to be much more pragmatic, slow and steady wins the race, right? Many advocates of reform to the American political system argue that it will take time to ease into a more radical society, and that we should focus on shifting the American electoral system leftward, little by little. They argue that we can elect radical candidates to office in the various levels of government, from Municipal to Congressional to Presidential. According to them, this is the means we should take for the ends of a more radical, reformed United States of America.

Let my first caveat be that I do not think the US is legitimate. The US is a settler colonial state which is occupying the lands of indigenous Americans, upon the grounds of literally hundreds of outright broken treaties. The US is illegitimate, and has no claim to existence. To adopt reformism and electoralism is to presume the legitimacy of the American state, to presume that the hundreds of broken treaties, the land stolen from indigenous peoples and occupied, and the concentration of indigenous peoples in reservations or forcing their assimilation is legitimate. Any movement which seeks to truly pursue a just society should seek to disintegrate the United States of America and give absolute autonomy and priority to the wishes of indigenous peoples regarding this, their land. But, in order to examine whether reform-by-electoralism could even work, we must pretend as if the US is legitimate, in order to dispel this myth as thoroughly as possible, and as well as to discourage the idea that radical change encompassing de-colonialism could be brought about simply through electoralism.

Now, we shall begin with the first stage of seeking a spot in office: campaigning. This is arguably the most difficult step of the process, and what favors the wealthy capitalist class most blatantly. Campaigns are massive, incredibly expensive processes. They not only must be financed by donations and Political Action Campaigns (PACs), but by party funds and the personal wealth of candidates as well. Effective campaigns need a massive operation of laborers, from a publicity department to a research department to graphic design to speechwriters to secretaries to on-the-ground recruiters to manufacturers (to produce campaign items like signs, pins, shirts, etc). A candidate must either be wealthy in order to afford this, or, if they are poor, they must be very very good at groveling to wealthy capitalists, the party elite, and powerful corporations in order to receive any funding. And to receive such funding is highly unlikely, because such elites are far more likely to prefer a candidate who appears more “respectable”, and who has more experience. Poor people are less likely to have experience by the fact that it is insanely difficult for them to campaign and gain way into office.

Thus, it becomes a cycle of only the wealthy bourgeoisie and the “career politicians” among them being able to make their way into the government, because they already have political experience and will be favored for that. A candidate, whether poor or not, although especially if they’re poor, must make their positions as appealing as possible to those who fund them, which in essentially all cases for winning campaigns includes money from the capitalist class. A campaign funded by the donations of what little surplus money working class people have is bound to lose to a campaign funded by the millions of dollars capitalists can easily part with. Any candidate with truly radical personal leanings will be forced to compromise in order to gain or keep the support of the campaign fund AS WELL AS to keep the party’s endorsement. Sure, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez could run for president on the Democratic Party ticket, but she would have to compromise what radical leanings she has in order to receive the endorsement of the Democratic Party leadership before and after primary elections. In the US, political are not democratic. People can show their preference for candidates in primaries, sure, but they don’t actually get to choose what choices are offered to them. And often, parties will ignore primaries and simply choose the candidate they prefer, regardless of if the people selected them in the primary elections. People can nominate their choice for candidates, but they cannot select the party leadership. The party is unlikely to be shifted toward radicalism unless the party leadership wills it, and because they are inevitably bourgeois, they will not will anything beyond spineless social democracy, they will not become socialists.

Even the elections are often undemocratic. Consider how the Senate is elected with 2 representatives per state regardless of population size. That favors states with fewer people, over representing them and undermining the actual majority, which the House of Representatives more accurately does, since representatives within it per state are elected according to population size. Furthermore, Presidential elections are especially un-democratic, with the electoral college electing the president, and the popular vote simply electing the electors to the electoral college. Many defenders of it will argue that the electoral college shouldn’t be abolished because it selects the candidate chosen by the popular vote every time, and has only gone against it twice (in 2000 with the election of George W. Bush, and 2016 with the election of Donald Trump). But CLEARLY it is capable of betraying what the people have indicated that they want! So why not simply have the direct election of the President if the electoral college selects the candidate chosen by the popular vote most of the time? The electoral college exists to suppress the voice of the common people, this was literally the intention of the Founding Fathers of the US. They wanted to SPECIFICALLY keep radicals out of power in order to prevent the redistribution of the wealth of the bourgeoisie, people like them. They knew the commoners, the working class, would inevitably seek to pursue the property and exploitation-gained wealth of capitalists, and so they built their government accordingly to preserve their interests.

Even if a radical candidate reached office, they would be severely disabled by the legal limits of the American government, which is by design. They would face an unelected Supreme Court, the Justices of which are extremely difficult to recall. The Supreme Court Justices keep their positions for life, and are essentially the most powerful body in the government in terms of the overall structure of law. The Supreme Court can strike down laws as unconstitutional, interpret them in ways which benefit one view, and so on. And right now, the Supreme Court is a majority conservative, and the conservative members are extremely reactionary at that. Even if a radical managed to reach high levels of office, they would be severely limited by the undemocratic, elitist Supreme Court. Even aside from them, they would face stunting opposition. The party which they ran for would do its best to dictate their actions and limit their radicalism in order to appeal to the center and the right. Candidates could not seize control of the means of production and hand them to the working class, either, because the Fourth Amendment of the Constitution severely limits the power of the government to seize private property. A radical would have to break the law to do that, and that would be leaving the confines of reformism and electoralism.

The radical would have to compromise their beliefs to keep the favor of their party, and, if they could even shift their own rhetoric to the left, it would have to be so slow and subtle that it would be totally meaningless and simply spineless liberalism. They would have to focus on keeping party support and compromise their principles in order to do so, while being limited by the legal confines set on them. Radicals would need to be elected into essentially all branches and levels of government, from Municipal to State to Presidential to Congressional in order to be able to enact radical change without being checked by others. If a lone radical or a few were elected to one level or branch, they would be blocked by the bourgeoisie in the other branches or levels. They would be very unlikely to be able to be elected throughout the government because of the issues of campaigning which I described earlier. It would take literally centuries to try and shift the US leftward through reformist electoralism, and we don’t have centuries to take on such a project because global warming has become dire. We need radical change now, a complete shift in system, in order to combat its effects. Reformism, moderation, and compromise won’t offer that. Have you seen what the Democrats have proposed to “fix” this fatal situation? Taxes on fossil fuels and subsidies for renewable energy. That’s not going to cut it. We need immediate change, and reformism won’t give us that.

Even IF radicals could enact actual reform from within the government, they’d be limited in other ways. When focusing on the military, they could only reduce it, not abolish it in favor of the armed working class (and even then, reducing it would be difficult what with all the arms manufacturers who the government has contracts with and has spend billions of dollars on). When focusing on the police, they could only reduce them, rather than replacing them with working class, elected and immediately recallable law officers. The military and police cannot be reformed either, because they exist solely to preserve the capitalist state, to fight for the interests of the capitalist class. They cannot be “fixed” from within. Radicals would further be limited by local laws regarding gun control in attempts to arm the working class. They wouldn’t even be able to provide housing for all because it would be illegal to simply seize all the empty houses and buildings and use them to house the homeless. The legal confines which reformism chains itself with do not allow change that matters.

Rather than throwing everything we have at electoralism, we as a movement should focus on direct action and building dual power. We should build alternative structures for people to rely on in place of the capitalist state, so that, when the time comes, the capitalist state will become redundant, and more easily disintegrated. We must arm ourselves for our self-defense, protect our own communities with elected and immediately-recallable law officers in place of the police, build community health services, redistribute food to the people, engage in worker-controlled, democratic, and cooperative production of what our society needs. We should not work within the system, but do our best to gain independence from it. This doesn’t mean we shouldn’t vote. Voting, for those who are able, is an action which we should take, even if only to keep far right reactionaries out of power. We should also not discourage socialists from running for office. We should give them support (while not throwing too much out on them), but not expect them to win or be able to enact radical change. The purpose of a socialist running for office is essentially to draw attention to the issues we socialists care about, like the exploitation of the working class. As long as the working class invests itself in electoralism, we should use that avenue to draw their attention to socialism, and to encourage them to join our movement. We must essentially use the office and the campaign as a podium.

But we should not deceive ourselves into thinking voting is an effective means of change. If a radical actually managed to be elected, they would either be limited by the system and interests around them or, if they began to enact radical change, they would be thrown out, through legal or extralegal means. Look at what happened to Salvador Allende when he tried to seize only one industry’s means of production after being democratically elected. He was overthrown in a CIA-sponsored coup and replaced by a fascist dictator. When voting actually reflects the interests of the working class, the capitalist state simply discards illusions of popular power and becomes a literal dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. We must invest our energy not in taxing, expensive, and toothless electoralism, but in building socialism ourselves.