Members of DSA participate in the May Day parade in Minneapolis, May 2018. Photo by Nic Neufeld / Shutterstock

Can electoral politics shift us from capitalism to socialism? Since the late 1800s, many socialists have viewed the politics of parties and elections as a way to change the course history, forming a core component of their strategy.

By the mid-20th century, “democratic socialism” had been coined as a kind of political brand to refer to the socialists oriented to electoral politics as a strategy for social change. This was partly based on their defense of the systems of “representative democracy” in western Europe and North America combined with critiques of the “communist camp” states of the mid-20th century such as the Soviet Union. This defense of “representative democracy” is tied in with the basic strategy of working to gain political power through elections.

In the USA, the democratic socialist brand gained a huge boost in 2016 when Bernie Sanders called himself a democratic socialist during his presidential campaign. He attacked economic inequality that the Occupy movement had foregrounded a few years earlier and his reform proposals reflected the precarious conditions faced by young people. Many young people were inspired to join the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), which now has over 40,000 members.

A particularly influential group within the DSA is the Bread and Roses caucus, which includes members on the editorial masthead or staff of Jacobin. Bread and Roses proposes a strategy they call “the democratic road to socialism.” Their strategy combines unionizing workplaces and “the politics of mobilization” with an electoral strategy based on the eventual creation of a mass socialist party.

Bread and Roses counter-pose their strategy to “ultra-left tactics that substitute adventures organized by a small cadre of activists for a mass, organized working-class movement. And we oppose politics defined by radical posturing that appeals only to the already convinced.”

In “Our Road to Power,” Vivek Chibber points to the lack of a real presence in the workplaces of people with socialist or radical politics. And this is indeed a long-standing weakness of radical politics in the USA. But for Chibber, the main focus is building a social base for a socialist party. For the transition to socialism, the Bread and Roses strategy relies on the role of the electoral socialist party pushing through structural change after winning state power through elections.

The aim of combining electoral politics with a socialist goal has also led to a revival of interest in non-Leninist forms of Marxist theory. A number of the writers and activists around Jacobin Magazine and the Bread and Roses caucus have thus revived an interest in the ideas of Karl Kautsky.

Kautsky was the pre-eminent Marxist theorist of the pre-World War I electoral socialist parties. Kautsky’s strategy was for the “gradual accumulation of forces” through the growing votes of the German Social-democratic party and the growing membership of the centralized German trade union federation. “Class struggle,” for Kautsky, was conducted primarily through electoral politics. He tended to see actual strikes and mass struggle as secondary to “the main battle.”

In explaining “why Kautsky was right,” Eric Blanc explains Kautsky believed that a fundamental “ruptural break” with the capitalist regime would be necessary but differs from the Leninists in “how to get there.” Kautsky believed that a revolution could be triggered by achieving a parliamentary majority. This majority would “occupy government power” and use this as a platform for transforming the state, eliminating the old military corps and the autocratic executive power. Kautsky’s ideal was the supremacy of the British House of Commons.

In its more radical form, democratic socialists propose that a party committed to socialism could use the state to enact reforms that would break the old capitalist scheme. This would mean, according to Neal Meyer, “nationalizing the financial sector so that major investment decisions are made by democratically elected governments and removing hostile elements from the military and police. It will mean introducing democratic planning and social ownership over corporations (though the correct mix of state-led planning and market socialism, a mix of publicly owned firms, small privately owned businesses, and worker cooperatives is a matter of some debate in our movement).”

Here we see one of the traditional problems with electoral socialism: a tendency to think of socialism in terms of nationalization — state takeover and management of banks and other industries and “state-led planning.” After all, politicians are seeking government office. Thus their program focuses on what they propose to do through the state once elected.

But the liberal state is not “neutral ground” for the working class. Class oppression is inherent to the structure of the state. This is shown by the subordination of public sector workers to the managerialist bureaucracies of the state.

Officials against direct action

For libertarian socialists with a syndicalist orientation, building “a mass, organized working class movement” is also central. We can agree with the Bread and Roses Caucus on that point. However, our strategy is fundamentally different than the electoral socialists. The syndicalist strategy is based on the development of movements built on non-reformist forms of action and organization. But what is the difference between “reformist” and “non-reformist” methods?

A “reform” is any partial change in society that is within the power of movements to fight for. There are different ways to fight for “reforms,” different ways to organize and different forms of action. Each will have effects on the development of working class power to make change. A reformist approach relies upon paid “professionals of representation” to win gains “for us” — the layer of paid officers and staff in bureaucratic “service agency” unions, the paid staff and executives of non-profits that advocate for us, the politicians whom we vote into office.

The method of action is indirect because it does not rely on the direct participation and action of working class people themselves. The activists may do door-to-door canvassing to get working class people to vote for candidates, but this does not bring these people into organizations they can control and use as vehicles of direct activity of struggle by working people themselves.

The electoral socialist parties tend to be controlled by the paid layers at top, such as the politicians who are focused on retaining office and holding on to votes. This means they have a lifestyle that will lead them to oppose the development of direct action such as strikes and occupations when these reach a level of social conflict that may threaten their institutional position.

The relationship between the bureaucratic layers in politics and unions tends to be mutually reinforcing. When the focus is on electoral campaigns, electoral socialists tend to look to the paid apparatus that controls unions and has financing and staff to support candidates. Electoral socialists — and Democratic party politicians — have always depended heavily on support from unions.

Unions are large organizations and they can provide votes and funding. Since electorally oriented socialists and left wing Democrats look to pull in working class votes, getting the support of the union officials is very important for them. But support depends on their relationship to the paid officials who run the unions. When these officials have conflicts with the rank and file, often electoral socialists support the positions of the paid officials of unions. In other words, they will tend to accept bureaucratic trade union methods and structures.

As with the professional politicians, the way of life of the full-time union officials is based on their institutional role. They are not subject to harsh discipline from supervisors or stressful conditions on the job. Yes, they are elected, but this does not necessarily mean they are controlled by the members in any meaningful way. They tend to favor negotiations staying in their own hands so that they can negotiate deals that the employers can be persuaded to sign onto without risky levels of mass struggle. Strikes are a lot of work and they do not lead to pay raises. Like the professional politicians, union officials will tend to oppose direct action getting to the point of threatening severe risks to the union that is the basis of their prestige and way of life.

In bureaucratized unions, there are often conflicts between the paid officials and the members, and a struggle for social change from below depends on building up forms of unionism that are controlled by workers who have the capacity for mass struggle. The entrenched union bureaucracy gets in the way of this. They will shut down struggles that develop into major battles — as the officials of ILWU did in the Longview grain terminal struggle in 2011-2012. There have been many similar struggles as far back as World War II.