| Ideas
Can Electoralism Help the American Left?
While internal debates rage on about whether or not to work inside the existing political framework continue among leftists in the United States, understanding the past of socialist electoral movements can help formulate a wide range of strategies to advance the movement.
By Hector Miranda Plaza, 29 April, 2022
Image Credit: Chicago Tribune
Electoralism in the United States, land of first-past-the-poll voting and home of a grand total of (two) parties represented at nearly every level, witnessed at the state and municipal levels something seldom seen: socialists winning office. Most notably, 27 of the 39 endorsed by the DSA won elections.
In a country which still feels the scars of a century-long Red Scare, a 67% win rate is impressive to say the least. These races didn’t just happen in decidedly left-wing areas like New York City as one might expect; to cite a few examples, city council offices were won by Danny Nowell in North Carolina, and Richie Floyd in Florida.
No one has any pretenses of these victories leading to monumental scale change any time soon. Rather, as the DSA themselves describe it, “Local wins provide tactical dexterity for the organized working class to take control of public resources.” Such wins, more than anything, show just how far the socialist movement in the United States has come along.
The beginnings of leftism in America were seen in the middle of the 19th century. While utopian socialists had been forming experimental communes since a few decades earlier, the first scientific socialists were around as early as the 1840s.
As immigration to the US began to ramp up, German immigrants in particular began to bring with them more than sauerkraut and bratwursts. Many were Marxists who established the first socialist publications and organizations, such as the National Labor Union. While not particularly influential, they created organizational standards and set the foundations for other organizations to come.
A second boom of German immigrants came in the 1870s and 80s, and along with them more socialists. From the new arrivals arose the Socialist Labor Party in 1876, the first socialist political party to be formed in the country.
As their membership expanded, so did their press operations; more than 20 unique publications were eventually sustained by the SLP. Most of these, as well as most of their operations, were exclusively in German. Their membership was by no means unified in opinion.
Some, known as Lasellians, saw electoral and political action as the primary means by which to establish socialism. Others, Marxists and Anarchists, wished to use direct action and labor militancy to achieve this goal. Despite their differences, both factions and other socialist tendencies managed to cooperate to achieve victories for some time. Most notably in Chicago and Illinois in 1878, they ran and won seats in the state senate, legislature, and city council.
As the socialist movement began to gain traction, it began to be labelled as “traitorous” by many in the press and government. Library of Congress
Ideological differences and economic troubles, however, would lead to splits early on and a decline in membership. Little in the way of labor action was actually coordinated, as any attempts at militancy or direct action were blocked by the electoralist wing of the party.
Membership would eventually recover through the later half of the 1880s, though, and the SLP would keep a similar course until Daniel de Leon rose to prominence.
An immigrant from Curaçao, de León joined the party in 1890 and quickly rose through the ranks. Through his charisma, fiery rhetoric, and control over the party press apparatus, he managed to take de facto control of the party despite not occupying the office of National Secretary.
He exercised outsized influence and became a deeply divisive figure in the party. Advocating for a unique brand of Marxism which placed emphasis on union militancy as the primary means of achieving socialism, the party became polarized between his uncompromising supporters, and everyone else. You were either with him or against him, and anyone that wasn’t with him would have no place in the new SLP.
By 1899, the anti-de Leon factions of the SLP split to merge with Eugene V. Deb’s Social Democratic Party and formed the Socialist Party of America.
While the SLP would go on to slowly fizzle out, the new Socialist Party went on to achieve national successes. From 1901 to 1918, the party pushed to power multiple senators and representatives at the federal level, 79 city mayors, more than 30 representatives at the state level, and many other smaller offices amounting to more than 1200 offices occupied. Eugene Debs himself ran for President on multiple occasions, garnering his largest share of the vote in 1912 with more than 6% nationwide.
The party itself ranged ideologically, from social democrats and reformists to revolutionary socialists and syndicalists, which allowed for broad overlap and cooperation with radical trade unions such as the IWW and even the AFL in some cases. This cooperation between labor and the party allows for greater mobilizations in both areas which would have otherwise been impossible.
Unfortunately, this high water mark for the party would not last forever. When World War I began, the Socialist Party adopted a staunchly anti-war stance, opposing any intervention on the United States’ part. This, combined with the Postmaster General halting all deliveries of Socialist Party press media, led to a crash in membership and an exodus of radical elements into the IWW¹ and the Communist Party.
While the Communist Party would go on to have fringe success until the beginning of the Cold War, and the IWW would see a crackdown by the government, the Socialist Party continued on in a diminished capacity. By 1972, the party was no longer running candidates. As the term “socialism” had grown to be associated with Soviet Marxism-Leninism, the Socialist Party was renamed Social Democrats, USA.
Michael Harrington, who held the position of Co-chairman of the party, resigned this same year due to disagreements on the direction the party should take; as a devout civil rights and anti-war activist, he advocated for a greater focus on social issues as a means to galvanize a mass movement, while other elements of the organization wished for a more labor-centric approach. He took with him a large chunk of members, forming the Democratic Socialist Organizing Committee. The SDUSA, for its part, would eventually fragment and decline in influence.
Eventually, the DSOC would merge with the New America Movement, a feminist socialist organization made up of mostly students, to form the Democratic Socialists of America we know and love today.
Any attempt to construct socialism must incorporate organized labor, as it represents a presence where the central contradictions of capitalism occur: the workplace. Asheville DSA
The DSA today has many strengths that the parties from which we draw our heritage could only dream of. An exploding membership count nearly in the six digits, hundreds of chapters operating nationwide, and new forms of media give much needed flexibility in ways to organize.
However, we should not be content to feel too safe in this fact. As history has shown, keeping a united front is hard, divisions can be easily formed, and anti-socialist sentiment still abounds as it did even back then. The unfortunate reality is that what can take decades in organizing and grassroots action can fall apart in a matter of years or months if a sense of common solidarity cannot be maintained.
Despite these challenges, however, the DSA is in a position no other socialist organization has been in this country. In our hands we have the potential to build a grassroots mass movement whose base of power is beyond the political oligarchy, and the demand for socialist thought is steadily growing.
It’s the case already that most people recognize the inherent contradictions of our current economy, and a recognition of this in all facets is essential.
Progressive and straightforward bread-and-butter rhetoric has already been proven to be the most effective messaging across the board, especially outside solidly blue areas. Even the Republicans have embraced a bizarre perversion of the left’s own economic rhetoric embodied through Trump-esque populism. The fact that it has been the rightmost party in the United States that has embraced class politics should be ringing alarm bells in even the most moderate liberal’s mind.
This rhetoric is something that, before all else comes, we must reclaim from the right.
This newfound emphasis on class, however, does not and should not come at the expense of solidarity with those marginalized by race, gender, sexuality, or any other feature.
It’s the left that fights for equality across all divisions of society, and emphasizing class is not a zero sum game.
While we should be aware of the way in which “activist language” is seen as a turn-off in talking about things such as LGBTQ+ rights, the all-encompassing impact systemic racism has, and many other social hierarchies, doing so should not detract or water down this struggle. Liberation for some means liberation for all, and undoing capitalist power structures also means undoing the stratification of race, gender, legal status, and many more.
The revolutionary potential of rural and, on the surface level, conservative communities, should not be discarded entirely. Not even a century ago, laborers in places such as West Virginia’s Blair Mountain took up arms in a strike to defend their labor. Slate
As for the who, organized labor is one of the most important groups in furthering the struggle. This should be no surprise; is it not, after all, the workplace which is the epicenter of the contradictions in capitalism?
Already support for unions has reached an all time high, and yet less than 15% of Americans are a part of one. Empowering and organizing workers means extracting concessions not just in the workplace, but in other parts of society.
A failure to do this can be detrimental for nascent sections of the movement. Last year in Buffalo, NY, for example, socialist India Walton lost the mayoral race by a 9-point margin despite gaining the Democratic Party nomination, in no small part because of her campaign’s failure to align organized labor in the city to her favor.
Instead, the large unions backed a gargantuan write-in effort by establishment candidate Byron Brown, going as far as to distribute stamps with his name voters could use in the polls to avoid misspellings and vote invalidations. Labor must come first and foremost.
Is it likely that the DSA will bring socialism to this country? No, at least not on its own. The network of global capital has its fingers in every honeypot in the world, and they all converge in the United States, its shelled underbelly.
Here it is that monied interests will fight tooth and nail to ensure that any progress made towards a more just organization of society, as they have been doing for more than a century. There is some good news, though: the battle against capitalism in this country, in terms of a global strategy for socialism, does not need to be a battle to the death at home.
The global nature of capitalist exploitation makes it so those most exploited, and consequently those who have the greatest propensity to actively engage in class struggle, live in the global south. The problem?
Powers backed by capitalist interests, be it in the form of Western governments or corporations themselves, constantly meddle extrajudicially to halt efforts at mobilizing swathes of working class people abroad. For proof, look no further than Operation Condor in the US, or the litany of interventions in West Africa by France to uphold their “Francafrique”.
If it is these people that have the greatest potential to set off the dominoes of revolution, the job of Western socialists should be to eliminate any barriers that stop them. In practice, this means pushing our country left in every regard.
And, of course, doing so should be motivated by more than a belief in some grand six-dimensional chess strategy to achieve socialism; the policies we push for that pull the country leftwards should result in massive gains in material conditions for the average person. We don’t need to establish socialism in the short term to achieve it in the long term; all we need is to get out of the way of the people that will.
Breaking the hard belly of the capitalist beast will require ten times the effort we have put in so far. If we continue to walk the path we have so far, we just might succeed in doing it.
Appendix 1: While some former members did join the IWW, it is worth noting that IWW membership itself was never constant, oftentimes booming during the leadup and undertaking of a general strike, only to see just as sharp a decline soon after.