his constancy and apparent authenticity, which made him a natural leader for a country hungry for a break from politics as usual. Sanders was the right guy in the right place at the right time, but he also took advantage of that confluence to make a profound impact on American political culture.
Sanders’s open identification as a democratic socialist gave people a new vocabulary to match their evolving political understanding. Most people who supported Sanders in the 2016 Democratic Party primary and plenty who didn’t but warmed to him over the coming months and years became more amenable to the idea of socialism, loosely defined. It helped that Fox News and the right-wing establishment, resting on their laurels after the twentieth-century collapse of the Soviet Union, began to slander everything as “socialism” that didn’t fit their aggressive conservative agenda, unwittingly inoculating millions of people and vacating the term of the ugly associations it had adopted during the Cold War era.
Luckily for those of us who are younger than Sanders, we don’t have to endure the same isolation that he has throughout his career. There’s a rising socialist movement in this country. And for the first time in decades, working people are no longer resigned to suffering passively. They are searching, listening, and increasingly they are fighting back. What that fight might look like in the decades to come is the subject of the rest of this book.
Class Struggle at the Ballot Box
The potential for socialists to use elections to spread our message and build our movement should be obvious to anyone paying attention. Sanders’s 2016 presidential run showed that socialism actually had mainstream resonance. Two years later Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, inspired by Bernie Sanders, ran for Congress and won, along with Rashida Tlaib and dozens of other democratic socialists at all levels of government. Without these and other successful national, state, and local campaigns around the country, we wouldn’t have the rejuvenated Left that we have today.
Some socialists are uninterested in electoral politics, especially ones that have anything to do with the Democratic Party. The argument is that the party is a “graveyard” for the kinds of self-organized working-class movements we need to build in order to change the world, because the party isn’t actually a workers’ party—it’s a party that has included organized labor, African Americans, feminists, environmentalists, and others with progressive ideas over the years, but those groups are stuck in an uncomfortable electoral alliance with capitalists. The Democratic Party is very adept at absorbing the energy from vibrant, disruptive working-class movements, bringing some of the leaders of those movements into the halls of power and conservatizing them, and completely squashing the transformative potential of organized challenges to the status quo.
These arguments aren’t totally wrong. There are numerous possible pitfalls to using elections to change the world under capitalism, pitfalls that well-meaning socialists around the world have fallen into over the last century. And the Democratic Party is a fundamentally capitalist party, not a workers’ party. In the long term, if we’re going to win the kind of world we want, we’ll need to ditch the Democrats and start a party of our own—one that isn’t predicated on an alliance with the capitalist class.
But we can and should use elections to overcome the very real problems that detractors of electoral politics are identifying. Yes, the capitalist state is arranged against our project. And, yes, it is powerful—so powerful, in fact, that the only way to prevent annihilation at its hands is to give our movement a mass character that can fight the forces that seek to bury it.
Small groups of self-organized socialists and emboldened workers can play a very important role in changing the world. But without millions in our corner, we’re no match for the United States’ entrenched political machinery (not to mention its armies, police, and surveillance apparatuses). The only way we’re going to build a durable movement to change the world is by building a very big movement to change the world. The socialist electoral campaigns that have played out over the last several years show us how we might go about solving this puzzle.
An Uneven Playing Field
We shouldn’t have any illusions that the capitalist state will be easy to transform toward socialist ends. That’s because the state isn’t neutral territory: under capitalism, the state is fundamentally biased toward capitalists and pro-capitalist policies. For one thing, elected politicians and unelected high-ranking officeholders in government are often capitalists or beneficiaries of the capitalist order themselves. The average member of Congress, for example, is worth over a million dollars. More importantly, because capitalists have power over the means of production, they have power over what average people need in order to survive—and that power bleeds over into the electoral sphere, where capitalists have an outsized and undemocratic ability to influence what elected officials do and don’t do, and shape political outcomes.
Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited and abused by your boss is not being exploited and abused by your boss, because that means you don’t have a job and thus can’t support yourself and your family. And just as capitalists can fire workers and leave them without the means to survive, capitalists can also withdraw their investments from entire regions or countries, leaving those countries high and dry without jobs and income. This is what’s called capital flight, or in its most retaliatory form, a “capital strike.” Workers can strike by withholding their labor, but capital can also strike by pulling investments.
Because the vast majority of us are dependent on those investments, capitalists have us over a barrel. They can punish governments that enact policies they don’t like, for whatever reason. Did a pro-worker government pass high taxes on corporations to fund social welfare programs, or tell a factory owner to pay workers higher wages and stop poisoning the air and water with noxious emissions? Those corporations can simply pull their investments from that city, state, or country. Capitalists can always take their ball and go play somewhere else; workers and governments can’t.
The result for that government will then almost certainly be a crisis, because without those investments, workers who worked for that corporation could lose their jobs, all the secondary economic markets that were stimulated by that company’s investments will suffer, and the government will lose much-needed tax revenue from those investments. It’s a trump card that capitalists can play against governments whose policies aren’t to their liking. It’s not insurmountable— leftist governments have options open to them like capital controls, which can prevent capitalists from pulling their money out of a given territory. But it makes life for any left party trying to antagonize capitalists very, very tough.
Because of these structural constraints, we can’t simply vote the new world into being. However, socialists can engage in electoral politics in a way that democratically builds the working class’s capacity for self-organization. There are status quo electoral politics—in which social change is entrusted exclusively to elected politicians, left to their own devices after victory—and then there are class-struggle electoral politics.
Class-Struggle Electoral Politics
Class-struggle electoral politics are about using elections to popularize socialist ideas, clarify class lines, energize people to fight on their own, and build movements beyond elections. Running class-struggle electoral campaigns is about empowering the working-class movements that are necessary to remake society.
There’s usually little point in running for office if you’re not trying to win—especially now, when socialist ideas are popular and winning is a real possibility. But class-struggle electoral politics aim to use elections to do three things beyond simply trying to win: raise the expectations of ordinary working people, unite them against a common capitalist enemy, and promote mass working-class movements outside the state.
A class-struggle politician is someone who refuses to accept prevailing ideas about society and insists that a different world is actually possible. All people deserve a good education, a safe and comfortable home, quality health care, clean air and water, and