LEFTISTS HAVEN’T JUST been daydreaming utopians. For both good and ill, socialists won power, at various points, across much of the world. But nowhere have we been able to decisively break with capitalism and build a democratic alternative. Even with the more modest ambition of just humanizing capitalism, no national left government in Europe has been able to carry out its program in at least forty years. In the United States, the socialist movement hasn’t been relevant for decades longer than that.
Yet a better future still seems in reach. For all its resilience, capitalism remains prone to crisis, as people today know well. Its inequalities provoke resistance. Billions resent the unfair choices offered to them. But most people don’t have any reason to believe that politics can improve their lives. Collective action—either in the workplace or outside it—is often riskier than accepting the status quo. The dilemma for socialists today is figuring out how to take anger at the unjust outcomes of capitalism and turn it into a challenge to the system itself.
The task is made even more daunting by the fact that we in the United States lack the three ingredients necessary for almost every socialist advance of the past hundred fifty years: mass parties, an activist base, and a mobilized working class. We’re not starting from scratch, though. The Bernie Sanders campaign encouraged millions to believe that things can be different. New mass actions, such as 2018’s teacher strikes, have also revealed in our own age the power of working people. What we need now are organizations: working-class parties and unions that can unite scattered resistance into a socialist movement.1
Easier said than done. But this chapter offers a road map based on the long, complex, variously inspiring and dismal history of left politics—for challenging capitalism and creating a democratic socialist alternative to it.
On the face of it, Corbyn and Sanders advocate a set of demands that are essentially social democratic. But they represent something far different from modern social democracy. Whereas social democracy morphed in the postwar period into a tool to suppress class conflict in favor of tripartite arrangements among business, labor, and the state, both of these leaders encourage a renewal of class antagonism and movements from below.
To Sanders, the path to reform is through confrontation with elites. Rather than talking about an entire nation struggling together to restore the US economy and shared prosperity, and rather than seeking to negotiate a better settlement with business leaders (if only they saw that progressive change was in their interests!), Sanders’s movement is about creating a “political revolution” to get what is rightfully ours from “millionaires and billionaires.” His program leads to polarization along class lines; indeed, it calls for it.
Sanders’s vision is conflated so often with that of progressives that commentators frequently talk about the Democratic Party’s “Sanders-Warren wing.” But there is a vital difference between the class struggle approach of Sanders and the more wonkish approach of someone like Elizabeth Warren, who seeks to construct better policy but not an alternative politics. Not surprisingly, Warren is quick to assure business interests that she believes that “strong, healthy markets are the key to a strong, healthy America” and that she “is a capitalist.”2
Sanders was trained as a student in the Young People’s Socialist League and through trade union and civil rights organizing. His worldview was formed by this unusual background. For his part, Corbyn has been a long-standing member of the Labour left, a socialist committed to social movement and union struggles and the battle against Blairism.
Sanders and Corbyn don’t represent a social-democratic politics that will serve as a moderate alternative to more militant socialist demands. Rather, they offer a radical alternative to a decrepit center-left. They have introduced a language of class struggle and redistribution to audiences that haven’t ever heard demands like these. Class-struggle social democracy, then, is generating working-class strength through electoral campaigns rather than subordinating existing struggles to the goal of getting a few people elected. The difference between this political current and the social democracy of Tony Blair or even Olof Palme is striking.
This is more imminently likely in the United Kingdom, where Corbyn leads a working-class party, but consider where popular mood is in the United States. There’s widespread anti-establishment sentiment, but despite the rise of Donald Trump, the Left’s policies are favored on key issues, including immigration.
The president may want to build a big beautiful wall, but 60 percent of Americans oppose the idea. In a 1994 Pew survey, 63 percent thought that immigrants were a burden, and only 31 percent said they were strengthening the country. When asked the same question in 2016, just 27 percent saw immigrants as a burden, and 63 percent thought immigration was a good thing.3
Even after being subjected to three years of attacks from both the Right and corporate Democrats, Bernie Sanders is among the most popular politicians in the United States. His central demands—a universal jobs program and single-payer health insurance—both enjoy substantial support among voters. Polls show that 52 percent want a jobs guarantee nationwide, with even higher favorability in poor states like Mississippi (72 percent). Medicare for All could be just as popular a platform plank: in April 2018 support for the measure crept above 50 percent.4
The challenge is to take these individual “policy preferences” and bundle them into a coherent politics, but this has been precisely the Sanders campaign’s breakthrough. If not by Sanders, it seems a presidential election can be won by a left-populist candidate who shares his straightforward message and working class–oriented demands.
There’s been something of an overcorrection on the Left, from the “change the world without taking power” drum circle days of the postsocialist 1990s to an overemphasis on electoral mobilization today.
Elections are indeed important. In many countries, voting and paying attention to campaigns are the only political acts that most people engage in. Electoral races not only help advance our political vision, including among those who might otherwise not be listening to us, but also involve the construction of organizations and networks that can galvanize energy beyond the campaign trail.
But what’s the point of winning an election unless we can actually do the things we promise? In certain contexts, we could justify merely “occupying power”—like French socialist Léon Blum did in the 1930s—to keep out the Right for an election cycle or two or to dull the impact of austerity on workers, but that’s a surefire way to disillusion your base and lose in the medium- and long-term. Ever since the 1980s—with the impasse of François Mitterrand’s government and the retreat of Nordic welfare states—social democracy has just been the more humane face of neoliberalism. What appears at first to be a victory can soon enough be revealed as a defeat.
Working-class voters today are generally disillusioned with the ruling-class political consensus. But they and other voters don’t have faith in the potential of politics to change their lives; they don’t turn out to vote, and they’re less active in parties, unions, and civic organizations than they once were. This “crisis of politics” is principally a crisis of the Left. The European center-right doesn’t need a conscious, active base of supporters to carry out their program; they can manage capitalism in the interests of capitalists with the help of just a dozen EU technocrats. In the United States, the Right is very effective at seizing and wielding power as a minority, through its institutions, gerrymandering, and the court system. Yet the Left has always depended on mass mobilization, not only to win elections, but to enact change.
So how do we make elections work for us? Class-struggle social democracy through the ballot box is exceedingly difficult, because candidates face both incentives to compromise and structural pressure: administering a capitalist state requires maintaining business confidence and corporate profits. This was the dilemma that Mitterrand’s government ran into. The solution is through creating some pressure of our own. Street protests and strike actions can discipline wayward candidates for not going along with a redistributive agenda and can force businesses to make concessions to reformers once they are elected.
Still, one dilemma is unresolved: we need a mass base to win reforms but struggle to rally that base without giving people proof that politics can change their lives for the better.
Donald Trump’s early days in office were a good lesson in Marxist state theory. He brought with him a contradictory set of politics: a right-populist challenge to both NATO and the network of US-led free trade deals, on the one hand, and more traditional pro-business Republican pledges, on the other. The parts that got through, not surprisingly, were those that capital found more acceptable. Paul Ryan–backed tax cuts have been passed, but Trump’s more extreme protectionist plans have gotten stymied, and gone is Steve Bannon, along with his dreams of a massive jobs program built around deficit-financed infrastructure construction.
If these are the pressures that rabidly pro-capitalist Trump was under, we can only imagine the forces that could be brought to bear on a President Sanders in 2021. For one thing, he would have to contend with a vicious media offensive—each new policy or proposal would be systematically smeared, with eager help from corporate Democrats.
The example of Jeremy Corbyn’s first years as Labour leader might offer an instructive preview. By the end of his first term, Corbyn had faced smear attempts from both Conservative and establishment Labour voices, a move from inside his own party to purge many of his supporters from the voting rolls, and many other challenges. From claims of anti-Semitism and sexism, to criticism of his opposition to a second Brexit vote, the internal opposition to Corbyn has taken on a progressive guise to undermine his leadership.
More significant will be the role of capital strikes—businesses choosing to withhold investment until more “favorable conditions” prevail, blackmailing left-voting workers in the process.5 Some of these threats will be less dramatic than others. Labour parliamentarian Tony Benn highlighted the mundane coercion that came with power: do what we want, and we’ll make you look good; try pursuing your own agenda, and we’ll make your life impossible.
Social democracy’s dilemma is impossible to resolve: even when nominally anticapitalist, it is reliant on the continued profitability of private capitalist firms. Aspirations to usher in an alternative political economy haven’t been pursued since the interwar nationalization commissions. Similarly, attempts to imagine a more gradual socialization from the starting point of an existing welfare state have been dropped since the late 1970s neutering of the Meidner Plan in Sweden.
But that’s not to say that there isn’t space for us to win reforms in the here and now. Consider the United States, a country not even close to bumping up against the limits of social democracy. Medicare for All, or the decommodification of a sixth of the most important economy in the world, does not seem beyond reach. We can also guarantee access to nutritious food, safe and secure housing, free child care, and public education at all levels. Other demands should center around allowing people to freely organize unions and collectively bargain, helping to rebuild the political agency necessary to sustain and deepen reforms.
Luckily, the United States doesn’t have to contend with antidemocratic supranational organizations like the eurozone, and it has immense resources to work with. We ultimately have larger ambitions than “socialism in one country,” but if it’s possible anywhere, it’s possible here.
Cobbling together the legislative power to achieve these reforms will not be easy. But it is possible to achieve certain socialist goals within capitalism. As we’ve seen in the history of social democracy, any achievements will be vulnerable to crises and resisted at every step, but they are morally and politically necessary nonetheless.
Any social democrat, no matter their intentions, will always find it easier to move to the right than to the left. On one side lie guarantees of stability from powerful interests, on the other capital strikes and stubborn resistance. Today, even more so than in the twentieth century, democratic socialists face not only the problem of how to win power but the problem of how to fend off capital’s attempt to undermine their program.
In other words, the social-democratic compromise is inherently unstable, and we thus need to figure a way to advance rather than retreat in the face of that instability. Social democracy faces challenges in two directions. Capital seeks to control it from the outset, but if initial reforms are successful, workers have more leverage to strike, and the increased bargaining power of labor can make unsustainable inroads into firm profitability. The welfare state of the ’60s and ’70s didn’t placate workers; it made them bolder. “Transitional demands” such as a jobs guarantee could do the same in our own time. We need to understand, though, that when the crisis comes, the next step isn’t retreat but to press on further.
In many other ways, we face a much different environment than did the social democrats of the postwar era. Capital has been internationalized, growth rates have slowed in the advanced capitalist world, and automation threatens core areas of working-class strength. All this means that we probably don’t have thirty years to make reforms the way social democrats did in the postwar period.
In this shorter cycle, we have to imagine that the limits of reform will be reached much sooner, but that the route to a more radical socialism will come from the crisis of social democracy our very success initiates. Class-struggle social democracy, then, isn’t a foe of democratic socialism—the road to the latter runs through the former.
The question is, How do we make sure that any left government can actually stick around long enough to win some victories (and not just immediately retreat like Greece’s Syriza did)? In particular, how do we win the “nonreformist reforms” that not only benefit workers in the short term but can empower them to win the battles that enacting them will provoke?
Our task is formidable. Democratic socialists must secure decisive majorities in legislatures while winning hegemony in the unions. Then our organizations must be willing to flex their social power in the form of mass mobilizations and political strikes to counter the structural power of capital and ensure that our leaders choose confrontation over accommodation with elites. This is the sole way we’ll not only make our reforms durable but break with capitalism entirely and bring about a world that values people over profit.
Clusters of ideological socialists by themselves can’t usher in socialism—and even if we could, we certainly don’t want to repeat the last century’s attempts, whether in Russia or in China, to impose “socialism from above.” But we do play an irreplaceable role in the battles to win reforms and make those reforms durable and cumulative.
Better than others, we can perceive class relations and how they offer common avenues of struggle. However, we can’t isolate ourselves from broader currents of progressive change that may not yet be socialist. These movements have the potential to win material improvements for workers. Without constant engagement with them, we will slide into sectarian irrelevance much like the Socialist Labor Party of Daniel De Leon’s day.
The challenge is to do this while building our organizational strength and ability to operate as an independent political force. We must be capable of resisting the transactional approach to politics often practiced by trade union leaders and the professional middle-class stewards of advocacy groups.
Even a relatively small organization like the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), something far short of a mass party with working-class roots, shows the disruptive role we can play if we embed our efforts within the class. DSA today has over fifty thousand members—that’s forty-five thousand more than it did a few years ago. Buoyed by the rise of Sanders, youth disillusionment with the politics of the Democratic center, and outrage over Trump’s actions, DSA has quickly garnered widespread attention and its share of local victories.
It’s fifty thousand people in a country of three hundred thirty million. But the mobilization capacities of political parties, of trade unions, and of civic organizations have been hollowed out. Tens of thousands of people, if organized in common campaigns, if trained to speak and connect with people and assist them in their struggles, can indeed have a national impact. Many fewer than that can swing local races and bring new ideas and demands into popular consciousness.
That’s why training a new generation of nonsectarian socialist organizers is so important. We need democratic socialists who are skilled speakers, effective writers, and sharp thinkers—who are humble enough to learn but bold enough to inspire confidence. Our organizations depend on a disciplined core of such people if we hope to rebuild working-class power that can exert an alternative pressure to that of capital. Even though their efforts won’t be enough in and of themselves, we can’t achieve socialism without them.
Socialists won’t be effective if we exist solely on college campuses or spend our time attacking one another on social media. For the last century and a half, the working class has been at the center of socialist politics for a reason. Marxists didn’t romanticize workers because they were oppressed, ripped from their land, and suffering in crowded factories and squalid slums. They paid attention to the working class because workers were more powerful than any other dominated group: capitalists depend on their labor for profits, and, when organized, workers can withhold that labor to win reforms.6
Some things have changed since Marx published Capital a hundred fifty years ago, or even since powerful parties of the Left ruled from Kingston, Jamaica, to Stockholm, Sweden, in the 1960s and 1970s. There was a time when one could immediately identify a working-class neighborhood in a place like Turin, Italy. A few industries would have been the key source of employment for the area. People lived densely packed together, forced by capitalism into, if not solidarity, then at least commonality. True to this shared condition, workers voted in the main for parties of the broad Left. The job of the revolutionary was to convince workers committed to a politics of reform to embrace a politics of rupture.
Today you might find pockets of organized, class-conscious working-class people across the advanced capitalist world, but these are the exception, not the rule. The twenty-first-century working class is fragmented. William Morris wrote in 1885 that while workers are a class, socialists must convince them “they ought to be Society.” Now we have to convince them about the class part, too.
Though the working class has changed, the shifts are overstated by those who proclaim this to be the era of the “precariat.” There’s nothing new about workers suffering through precarious, low-wage employment. After all, Karl Kautsky confronted the question of working-class heterogeneity in the 1880s, the “golden age” of the industrial proletariat, as did Engels when he studied 1840s Manchester. Whatever semblance of security existed in the past was not due to the inherent nature of “pre-neoliberal” capitalism but the result of successful class struggle and organization. Auto workers, for example, weren’t inherently militant trade unionists. Up until the 1930s Renault and Ford and other big manufacturers were just as union hostile as Walmart is today.7
While the percentage of workers employed in industrial manufacturing has declined in recent decades, the trend lines go back to the late nineteenth century. The workers still left in those sectors (who, in raw numbers, are actually more numerous than ever) can still exert significant economic power. However, to build a majoritarian coalition, socialists need to think more broadly.
Our conception of a working class today goes beyond formally employed workers to the labor and political agency found in households and neighborhoods. But the traditional workplace should still be central to our vision. That means putting special emphasis on workers in growing sectors, such as education and health care, as well as those working in supply and logistics. It also means developing connections between the unemployed and the employed and pursuing a broad practice of social justice unionism—union organizing that goes beyond typical workplace demands—capable of marshaling broader popular support for strikes and left-wing policy initiatives.
How many people are we talking about in all? In most developed societies around 60 percent of the population still has to rely on wages to survive and possesses little to no net wealth. Those working people are as different and divided as ever, yet they still have the potential to rattle the system and win real gains. We simply cannot have an emancipatory politics within capitalism that doesn’t revolve around the class whose labor makes the system run. Socialists need to arise from, try to create a political culture around, and organize within this class, not find substitutes for it.
In 2018, the United States witnessed a wave of public sector strikes, the most significant labor upsurge in the country since the 1970s. These weren’t spontaneous outbursts—they were sparked by both intolerable conditions and the efforts of small groups of organizers.8
Consider the dynamics in the teacher strike in 2018 West Virginia: Bernie Sanders campaigned extensively in the state, and his supporters built up enough of an infrastructure to win every county in the 2016 Democratic primary. Some young recruits eager to continue the “political revolution” after Sanders’s loss to Hillary Clinton flocked to the Democratic Socialists of America. They went from being isolated progressives in a red state to an organized network of like-minded socialists capable of helping initiate and lead the historic nine-day strike. Those who were teachers were able to connect and organize with coworkers from across the political spectrum, all with the goal of improving working conditions and ultimately transforming the state’s politics.9
Similar actions by underpaid teachers in Arizona, Kentucky, and Oklahoma mobilized tens of thousands of people. Like West Virginia, these were relatively conservative states with weak union bureaucracies. The strike wave caught the media and politicians off guard. Only those who understood that a “militant minority” could foster mass mobilization—and how once in motion those workers could have their consciousness and sense of political possibility transformed—could have anticipated the size and fervor of the strikes.
These strikes won national attention and public sympathy. After Arizona teachers joined the strike wave in April 2018, a national poll conducted by the Associated Press showed that a vast majority sided with the teachers: 78 percent of the country thought teacher salaries were too low (only 6 percent thought they were too high). This sentiment cuts across party lines: sizable majorities of Democratic (90 percent), independent (78 percent), and Republican (66 percent) voters believe teachers should make more money. And 52 percent of Americans support teachers’ right to strike for better pay—despite union-busting laws that make such actions illegal in many states.10
By going on strike, educators not only demonstrated their own strength as political actors but developed a political consciousness and a grassroots infrastructure. It’s a sign of what needs to happen, though on a much larger scale, in the years to come.
Further organizing efforts by committed and effective socialists will be key to building on the gains of the 2018 teacher strikes. But young socialists should not see themselves solely as outside organizers: we should also encourage one another to take rank-and-file jobs in a range of growing sectors. Socialists once consciously avoided middle-class jobs in order to “industrialize” in strategic sectors, and for good reason. Our last major attempt in the United States—the effort to organize heavy industry in the 1970s—required immense sacrifice among those who pursued it and suffered from bad timing, as those sectors were entering a period of brutal neoliberal restructuring. But that doesn’t mean we should abandon the strategy of joining the fight on the shop floor.
This is not only good organizing advice; it’s good career advice! In today’s economy, young socialists, despite their relatively high levels of education, can’t get the kind of professional jobs afforded to their 1970s counterparts. They might actually have better economic prospects if they were to enter strategic sectors such as nursing and education rather than stitching together part-time or temporary work in the professional world.
Unions are important. They might not be revolutionary organizations, but they are labor’s primary vehicle in the battle with capital over the spoils of production. Today, despite organizing just 11 percent of the US workforce, unions are still the only institutions capable of exerting political pressure at the scale required to push back against national elites. Importantly, they also look less like the industrial workforce of the nineteenth century and more like the diverse working class of the twenty-first. Though their image in the popular mind hasn’t caught up, unions today disproportionately represent black, Latino, and women workers.
Unions serve a purpose beyond collective bargaining: namely, that they can prompt workers to become more class-conscious and learn political skills. A nurse active in her union can become an educator and an organizer.
But unions can only be effective at fighting for member interests and developing these capacities if the rank and file are allowed to play an active role within them. Beyond obvious cases of corruption, US unions are often extremely hierarchical and bureaucratic. They’re dominated by full-time staff and salaried officials. Members are trained to see their unions as service organizations. Workers’ interactions with their unions are often limited to automatic dues deductions and brief consultations over wage bargaining or political endorsements. They have little reason to go to a union meeting.11
Union staff occupy an intermediary position between company management and regular workers. The stability they offer sometimes works to everyone’s benefit, but while workers can make progress through strikes, the labor bureaucracy usually prefers stability. An analogy could be drawn to the structure of political parties, in which the leadership often prefers caution to bold action.
Some degree of specialization is no doubt necessary, and ordinary workers don’t want to be subjected to endless meetings, but without avenues to membership participation and oversight, the gap between union “professionals” and the rank and file will continue to grow, and workers will feel less and less tied to their unions.
In short: we need to do more than defend existing unions from attacks from the Right. Our goal must be to transform them into vehicles of a more expansive, democratic unionism through facilitating membership engagement and creating structures that make leaderships more accountable. Yet we can’t just be content to democratize a dwindling movement—a key task today is also finding ways to organize in the twenty-first-century economy to restore union density.
When we talk about a Left political party today, some recall the drab, monolithic parties of the old Stalinist and social-democratic lefts. But we should also recall that these parties coordinated the work of disparate activists and deepened the analysis and vision of generations of working-class militants.
Because of the peculiar structure of the British political system, Labour’s long-standing left wing was able to win control of the party in 2015. In general, we shouldn’t try to capture discredited social-democratic parties but rather work within the left-wing ones that have appeared in recent years. Parties like Die Linke in Germany, the Left Bloc in Portugal, and Podemos in Spain bring together forces from across the Left, radical and reformist alike. They face a litany of challenges but represent a real opening to build a politics that’s left of social democracy.
For democratic socialists, it makes sense to organize within these formations. Not as infiltrators seeking to opportunistically capture their membership and resources, but as members genuinely trying to both build these parties and maintain an independent profile—challenging leaderships as necessary. There is much to learn on this count from the history of social democracy: parties that were forces for working-class reform became capital’s junior partners. The presence of organized socialists is a necessary brake on the inevitable move away from class-struggle politics and toward bureaucratization and political moderation.
Developing new parties involves challenges, too. Though we have seen recent successes in Europe and elsewhere, not all of the examples are positive. Many of the new parties in Europe are built on the shaky ground of social movements, on the premise that we can build a “movement of movements” in which the workers’ movement is one element but not necessarily the decisive one. Moreover, an overemphasis on ideological heterogeneity—in an attempt to reunite a divided and fractured Left—has weakened those parties’ ability to articulate a clear political program and unified strategy.
The experience of the last two decades, starting with Portugal’s Left Bloc in 1999, shows the hopelessness of an approach that doesn’t foreground the disruptive capacity of labor but instead tries to haphazardly build a defensive electoral coalition, while rallying people into the streets for what amounts to little more than political theater. Instead, a political party should be the decisive link between explicitly socialist currents and a wider workers’ movement. If things go right one day, we’ll be able to speak of the two as one and the same—a socialist workers’ movement.
Building a socialist movement in the United States will require a distinct approach—not for cultural reasons but for structural ones.
As Jacobin editor Seth Ackerman has explained, the United States has not only “winner-take-all” elections but a uniquely antidemocratic election law. The two-party system in American politics didn’t arise naturally. Rather, it was constructed piecemeal as the Democratic and Republican parties consolidated power around the turn of the twentieth century. Politicians on both sides used their positions inside state legislatures to enact laws designed to prevent third-party challenges. The restrictive system of election laws that developed in the United States is unique among advanced capitalist democracies.12
Both Democratic and Republican elites have an interest in maintaining the two-party system—and it requires a lot of maintenance. The political scientist Theodore Lowi compared it to a patient on life support that would “collapse in an instant if the tubes were pulled.” But the two ruling parties continue to keep those tubes firmly in place—for example, by passing laws like the 1971 Federal Elections Campaign Act, which grants large amounts of “public” campaign financing to the major parties while leaving smaller parties to fend for themselves.13
Things were difficult during the era of Eugene V. Debs’s Socialist Party, where despite having a presence in much of the country, socialists never cracked 6 percent of the national popular vote. Today, every state requires third parties to collect thousands of signatures just to appear on the ballot in a single race, a practice unheard of in democratic countries. The GOP and the Democrats are even governed differently from most political parties: individual members don’t vote on party platforms, nor are they held to political lines. These are not democratic institutions but antidemocratic machines that provide well-oiled pathways to political power while stymieing challenges from below.
As Ackerman puts it, we’re facing a set of challenges more similar to those facing opposition parties in “soft-authoritarian” countries like Russia or Singapore than those in Britain or Canada.
It will come as no surprise that I’ve been a registered Democrat since my eighteenth birthday—the same day I joined the Democratic Socialists of America. I joined the latter because the DSA reflected my actual political beliefs, the former because I lived in New York and wanted to participate in the only meaningful elections in my area, which were closed Democratic Party primaries.
As a registered Democrat, I don’t have the power to influence the party’s politics in any meaningful way: like most registered voters in this country, I don’t get a vote when it comes to my own party’s political platform. But on the flip side, there’s no way for the Democrats to expel me or hold me to a political program. I can spend most of my waking hours attacking the Clintons and other corporate Democrats, and I can’t be disciplined in any way. I can only lose my ability to vote in Democratic primaries in New York if I change my registration or commit a felony and am incarcerated or on parole. Precisely because it is so undemocratic, the Democratic Party may actually be vulnerable to what Ackerman calls “the electoral equivalent of a guerilla insurgency.”
Which is not to say that the Democratic Party is just a ballot line that can be taken over by socialists. The fragmentation of the party—the fact that it’s more like a thousand parties at local, state, and national levels than a single, coherent organization—means that it’s not clear which barricades we should be storming. This diffusion is a source of strength for the business interests that shape the Democratic Party.
What we need is to create the first traditional mass-membership party in the United States, an organization based on the delegate model of representation. Imagine a workers’ party created outside the Democratic Party that runs hundreds if not thousands of candidates and that is composed of various factions that debate one another and put together a democratically decided-on program. In the short term, it might run some candidates as independents, others as Democrats. But all these candidates would subscribe to the basic principles of the program and have to draw their funding from the party membership and its allied unions and organizations. They would also be accountable to the party rank and file. The immediate goal would be to create an independent ideological and political profile for democratic socialism.
Such a party would need to be a flexible organization merging electoral campaigns with shop floor mobilization. In time, the party could make the leap to a completely independent, democratic socialist ballot line.
Consider a few facts: Donald Trump is in the White House, despite winning almost three million fewer votes than Hillary Clinton. The Senate, the country’s most powerful legislative chamber, grants the same representation to Wyoming’s 579,315 residents as it does to 39,536,653 Californians. Key voting rights are denied to citizens in the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, and other US territories. The American government is structured by an eighteenth-century text that is almost impossible to change.
These ills didn’t come about by accident; the subversion of democracy was the explicit intent of the Constitution’s framers. For James Madison, writing in Federalist No. 10, “Democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention” incompatible with the rights of property owners. The byzantine Constitution he helped create serves as the foundation for a system of government that rules over people, rather than an evolving tool for popular self-government.14
While preserving and expanding the Bill of Rights’ incomplete safeguards of individual freedoms, we need to start working toward the establishment of a new political system that truly represents Americans. Our ideal should be a strong federal government powered by a proportionally elected unicameral legislature. But intermediary steps toward that vision can be taken by abolishing the filibuster, establishing federal control over elections, and developing a simpler way to amend the Constitution through national referendum.
More generally, these changes could challenge a federalism that fragments power and allows for antidemocratic regional and local control. As the late labor journalist Robert Fitch put it, “The aim of the Right is always to restrict the scope of class conflict—to bring it down to as low a level as possible. The smaller and more local the political unit, the easier it is to run it oligarchically.”15
Abolishing the Electoral College and pushing toward more proportional voting systems that encourage participation must be immediate demands. Other reforms such as Bernie Sanders’s Workplace Democracy Act could help encourage working-class militancy by making it easier to form unions, protect workers from employer retaliation, roll back “right to work” measures, and expand the scope of legal workplace actions. (Not that labor activists should refrain from breaking these laws in the meantime—often, that’s exactly what it takes for the labor movement to be successful.) In other countries, the battle for democracy will center on civil service reforms, eliminating undemocratic upper houses of parliament, or eroding the power of corporate media interests.
Racism has existed for centuries, sexual oppression for even longer. Both were present at the beginning of the modern working class, and we shouldn’t count on interpersonal bigotry simply disappearing through socialist revolution, much less through socialist reforms.
The socialist record on oppression is uneven but still better than that of any other political tradition. Most of history’s Marxists have actually been people of color: one need only recall the proliferation of Marxist-led national liberation movements in the twentieth century to appreciate this fact. Socialists have also long been at the forefront of the struggle against women’s oppression and for sexual liberation. They’ve been animated by the idea that any struggle for justice needs to address basic questions about the distribution of power and resources.
However, since the broader defeat of class-based movements in the 1970s and ’80s, narrower, identity-based struggles to address injustice have filled the void. These movements have won some significant gains in the realm of culture and representation, improving millions of lives. (I’m glad I grew up in 1990s America, not the 1950s version.) But many of those advances have succeeded mainly in diversifying our elites, not in bettering the lives of the most oppressed. A world where half the Fortune 500 CEOs are women and fewer of them are white would be better than our world today, but still doesn’t mean much if there are just as many poor kids experiencing the same oppression they are now. Without the bedrock of a class politics, identity politics has become an agenda of inclusionary neoliberalism in which individual qualms can be addressed but structural inequalities cannot.
Of course, we still have a long way to go before we even equalize opportunity within the current neoliberal system. Socialists shouldn’t reject people’s experiences, but if we want to tackle oppression at its root, we need to ask questions about the redistribution of power and wealth—that is, questions rooted in class. As Martin Luther King Jr. put it in 1967, “We aren’t merely struggling to integrate a lunch counter now. We’re struggling to get some money to be able to buy a hamburger or a steak when we get to the counter.”16
Socialists also need to argue against the idea that racism and sexism are innate and that people’s consciousness won’t change through struggle. Racism has taken on an almost metaphysical role in liberal politics—it is somehow the cause of, explanation for, and consequence of most social phenomena. The reality is people can overcome their prejudices in the process of mass struggle over shared interests, but that requires getting people involved in those common struggles to begin with.
Socialists don’t reject fights against oppression but instead try to bring them into a broader workers’ movement. We should strive for the elimination of bigotry, chauvinism, and any form of prejudice within our organizations. That means taking equality seriously, not as a goal for the distant future but as a practice in the here and now. But it also entails avoiding a narrow “call-out culture” along with the kind of identity politics that, taken to its extreme, will lead us down the path to a hyper-individualized and antisolidaristic politics. Hyperbole and the politics of personal shaming are a recipe for demoralization, paranoia, and defeat.
The socialist premise is clear: at their core people want dignity, respect, and a fair shot at a good life. A democratic class politics is the best way to unite people against our common opponent and win the type of change that will help the most marginalized, all while engaging in a far longer campaign against oppression rooted in race, gender, sexuality, and more.
If nothing else, that’s what this book has aimed to show. While the excitement around socialism today feels new and fresh to many people outside the movement (and many within it, too), we have little hope of realizing our aims if we don’t learn from those who marched and organized and dreamed before us.
The lessons and analysis that socialists offer—along with the Marxist framework—are vital for plotting a way out of today’s extreme inequality and into a just society. It’s also vital that we have a tradition that people can refer to. In this era of atomization and alienation, that tradition can provide us with a sense of our place in history and a meaning to our work. That’s not to say that a popular class movement for redistributive policies needs to be explicitly socialist to win reforms, but socialists are needed within such a movement to provide vision and push things forward.
Naturally, there are also lessons from the Communist movements’ time in power: the difficulties of central planning, the importance of civil rights and freedoms, what happens when socialism is transformed from a democratic movement from below into an authoritarian collectivism. But pluralism and democracy are ingrained not only in civil societies in the advanced capitalist world but within the socialist movement itself. What seems most relevant are the lessons of social democracy, namely that the antidemocratic power of capital will overwhelm democratically backed pro-worker reforms.
But what about the end goal of socialism—extending democracy radically into our communities and workplaces, ending the exploitation of humans by other humans? Fundamentally, political strategy for the Left has to put these more radical questions, one by one, on the table, all the while struggling to stay mobilized. And while we defend newly won gains, we must fight to avoid the crippling bureaucratization that pushed the great social-democratic movements of the early twentieth century into a self-defeating accommodation with the system. It won’t be easy, but we still have a world to win.