“Democratic Socialism and Electoral Politics”

Democratic Socialism and Electoral Politics

A Primer by the Louisville DSA Political Education Committee

I. Why Electoral Politics?

Why do democratic socialists engage in electoral politics? Are the odds not stacked against us? And won’t the ruling class prevent us from implementing our democratic socialist agenda should we come to power?

As democratic socialists, we envision a society that is governed by and for working people instead of the rich. In American society, politics are often treated as the domain of the wealthy. Our laws are lobbied for and written by corporate special interest groups; our politicians are mostly millionaires; and the political commentary we hear is conducted by a cultural elite on issues that we are told we are too uneducated to have differing opinions on. 

At our jobs, working people have it even worse: there is no semblance of democracy in the workplace. Unorganized workers have no control over how much we are paid, the work we are told to do, the conditions we must work under, and the petty abuse we must endure.

Yet the politics we are excluded from at the ballot box and in our workplaces affect our lives. Politics control access to resources. Whether we have a right to free healthcare, education, housing, food, and water are political questions. Politics control management of resources. Whether we spend trillions on bloated police and military budgets or on robust social programs and combating climate change are political questions. Politics determine rights and liberties. Rights to privacy; to workplace safety; to abortion; and to equal protections regardless of race, gender, or sexual identity are political questions.

So democratic socialists engage in electoral politics because we want to radically expand democracy, such that the management of our society, our economy, our workplaces, and all corporate profit is determined by all working people as opposed to a select few billionaires. 

Democratic socialists engage in electoral politics because electoral politics allow us to win material reforms for working people. Democratic socialists engage in electoral politics because electoral politics help us organize working people into a powerful, working class that can win.

II. Revolutionary Reforms

Yet democratic socialists aren’t the only group that want to win material reforms for working people. Progressives also want to help working people. How are the two groups different?

Progressives and democratic socialists disagree in their analysis of society, impacting how they approach reform. Specifically, the two groups view capitalism differently. 

Progressives support capitalism and simply wish to humanize its worst elements. Progressives believe that particularly egregious or greedy capitalists cause problems for our society, but not capitalism as a whole. Thus, progressives believe that the government can make reforms to selectively intervene where greedy billionaires or the free market hurt people.

Democratic socialists, on the other hand, critique capitalism itself. We believe under capitalism, all capitalist firms or companies are driven by the profit motive, or a desire to generate profit. We believe that a society structured around generating profit above all else leads to the inherent exploitation of working people and the poor management of society. This democratic socialist analysis is also known as a class analysis.

These disagreements between progressives and democratic socialists lead to two major differences in how the two groups approach reform. The democratic socialist understanding of capitalism leads us to (1) support more radical reforms and (2) grow the working class power needed to consolidate and build on reforms once we win them.

Democratic socialists are more radical, insofar as we want to get at the “radix,” or root, of the problem. Take climate change under capitalism. Companies are structured around generating profits each financial quarter, which incentivizes them to generate profit in the short term. As rapid decarbonization is unprofitable, these companies refuse to decarbonize at a pace fast enough to sustain human life. 

The root of the problem is the profit motive; the solution is for these companies to be publicly managed to ensure a just ecological transition. But while the decisions these companies collectively make are a matter of life and death, only democratic socialists believe that this management should be democratically decided by working people.

Democratic socialists, unlike progressives, also understand that the working class and the owning class have opposing interests. A progressive tends to think that the merits of a good reform will cause it to win and stay in place. Socialists, however, believe that good reforms only pass if we organize millions of people around a good reform which represents working people’s material interests. As such, democratic socialists understand that to win and keep reforms, we need to build and maintain working class power.

For example, the reason so many good reforms took place in the 1930s and 1940s during the New Deal Era was that there was a strong socialist movement and a strong labor movement pushing for reforms. Without a strong socialist and labor movement, the capitalist class was able to whittle away at these won reforms: by the 1980s, they were strong enough to totally upend many of these reforms with a neoliberal shock doctrine under Reagan. So even if we only believed that capitalism needs minor reforms, only a democratic socialist class analysis and approach to organizing can ensure these reforms are permanently retained.

So while progressives fight for piecemeal reforms in stand-alone fights, democratic socialists fight for revolutionary reforms. Revolutionary reforms not only protect or improve the rights and material well-being of working people; revolutionary reforms build working class power as a bulwark to protect these gains and as an army to win further gains in the future.

III. What Makes A Socialist Party?

How do we build working class power? Our task as democratic socialists is to organize working people into a working class. Our vehicle to do so is a socialist party: the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA).

Working people are atomized, or isolated and disempowered, under capitalism. Our public school system fails to give a deep civic education to less rich kids. Our jobs underpay us and overwork us, leaving us exhausted and scrambling to take care of ourselves and our families as opposed to getting involved in politics. Money dominates the political landscape. Our election cycles are populated by trained specialists often working as guns for hire, migrating from campaign to campaign for cash rather than out of consistent political allegiance.

The way we can beat the rich in these election cycles and organize individual working people is by building a socialist party. Our socialist party, DSA, is a place where working people can organize together and leverage their power as a class towards a collective goal. 

Many Americans think of a political party as something that appears on a ballot on election day. But a political party is so much more than that. A party has a political platform, which unites the candidates it runs around a shared political vision and program for changing society. A political party is the infrastructure which runs its candidates: the campaign managers, the treasurers, the communication teams, the field leaders, and the armies of canvassers. A political party is the pool of funders it can consistently fundraise from. A political party is a machine which can select and push candidates from its own ranks.

So while a lot of democratic socialists currently run on a Democratic ballot line, appearing as Democrats on the ballot, they aren’t really Democrats because the party they belong to is DSA. 

DSA has its own socialist platform, which represents the interests of the multiracial working class. DSA chapters are places where working people learn the socialist theory to strategize our campaigns and the technical skills to become skilled campaign managers, fundraisers, comms leaders, field organizers, and canvassers. DSA has a base of dues paying members, which allows the organization political independence from wealthy donors and provides a built-in donor base during election cycles. DSA runs cadre socialists, or dedicated working class socialist organizers who have worked within our own ranks for years to ensure our candidates will be loyal to the socialist movement after they are elected.

Finally, the democratic structures of DSA allow for working people to truly make collective strategic decisions in our fight for liberation. DSA, as a socialist party, gives working people the opportunity to organize to improve our lives.

IV. The Dirty Break Strategy

While a party is much more than just a ballot, it is confusing to have socialists run on a ballot with a (D) next to their name. With the exception of DSA candidates who have run and won as Democrats, the vast majority of Democrats are capitalists and the party as a whole represents the interests of the capitalist class as opposed to working people. The dirty break strategy is a strategy designed to navigate the contradictions of running as a Democrat while a socialist and building the long-term power to develop a functioning, strong working class third party in the US.

The Democratic Party as a whole cannot be taken over by socialists, because its funders and its campaign specialists are not democratically determined by the members of the party. Its top funders are billionaires, who spend millions of dollars to influence the party agenda to favor the interests of corporations and the rich; its campaign specialists are highly paid members of a professional managerial class who look down upon people who are not elite political operatives. Both groups are impediments to democratic reform of the party; both groups would immediately exit the party should socialists take it over, hollowing out the infrastructure of the machine.

The Democratic Party is also not above putting its finger on the scale should democratic socialists come too close to taking the party over. The 2020 presidential primary of Bernie Sanders shows countless cases of him getting screwed over, like the election irregularities in Iowa, Obama coming out of retirement to throw his weight behind Biden in South Carolina, or the consolidation of the capitalist class around Biden before Super Tuesday when every capitalist candidate dropped out (except Warren, who served as an excellent spoiler).

The dirty break strategy states that where viable progressive third parties don’t exist, democratic socialist candidates should run class struggle elections to competitively primary corporate Democrats. In some places, like in Richmond, CA or the state of Vermont, a viable progressive party does exist. There are also non-partisan races in some election cycles. In these instances, democratic socialists should simply run on the most progressive party or as DSA members. But in races with only two viable parties, democratic socialists run class struggle elections to build DSA chapters up to eventually become the third party.

The principles of class struggle elections are as follows. Class struggle elections run class struggle candidates, who are dedicated DSA members. Class struggle elections articulate class struggle, where the candidate uses their campaign as a platform to educate about the class struggle between workers and the rich, to advance a positive socialist vision, and to build public support for socialism. Class struggle candidates are not only legislators on the campaign trail and in office, but also organizers who will fight to build working class power and DSA. Finally, class struggle campaigns build DSA members’ skills and the organization strength of DSA chapters as the vehicle of working class power.

Each DSA campaign brings us closer to the day where we will no longer see socialists with a (D) and a picture of an ass next to them on the ballot, but instead see a (DSA) and a picture of a rose, the budding hope of humanity.