Do Communists Vote in Capitalist Elections?
“When we participate in elections to win instead of disrupt, we’re lending to the fascist system’s credibility and destroying our own.” — George Jackson, Blood in My Eye
Capitalist elections are a secondary, back-burner topic for communists and for class-conscious workers as a whole. If you’re going to vote, don’t vote for a capitalist party. PSL and the Green Party both are running candidates for office this year, and while valid criticisms exist of both, they’re not cut from the same neoliberal cloth as the Dems, GOP, LOLberts, and whatever other “centrist” (right-wing) dreck the system has coughed up lately***. Read on for more 👇
While a Marxist party may make an electoral campaign part of its struggle at one time or another for tactical reasons like taking a head count, promoting workers’ causes, or, if seats are won, using them as a “bully pulpit” to agitate for demands capitalism cannot fulfill, no communist believes that capitalist elections are a direct path to actual power. Real workers’ power, the kind needed to build socialism, comes through setting up alternative or parallel authorities like workers’ councils (“soviet” means council), which becomes possible through the efforts of militant labor unions acting under communist influence. Then, particularly during times of elevated capitalist crisis, these revolutionary workers’ organizations can launch coordinated actions to challenge the existence of the entire capitalist order and all its institutions, which were set up to maintain capitalism and must be replaced.
By contrast, working-class liberals’ and working-class conservatives’ insistence on the struggles between capitalist political parties as being of central or even major importance is a product of low class consciousness and a defeated labor movement. When workers lose our independent, proletarian class perspective, we can fall prey to capitalist influence, which strives to create false consciousness in us. Workers who fall victim to it start to think that our interests are served by capitalism when, in fact, the exact opposite is true. That’s why the capitalists spend so much money on their media: they have to propagate capitalist ideas 24/7 so that the default messages we receive in the normal course of going about our lives in society (family, school, work, etc.) encourage us to think thoughts and take actions which either strengthen capitalism or at least don’t hurt it too much.
The only thing that can end capitalism is working-class revolution. Therefore, until there is a working-class revolution, the current system of advanced monopoly capitalism, which is also called “imperialism” by Marxist-Leninists, will keep running like a computer program until someone — really, a lot of us, working together — shuts it down. Imperialism always behaves in a certain set of ways due to its basic contradictions and instabilities, and these never can be changed without ending it. In other words, the reformist social-democrats, who tell us that imperialism can be made better a little at a time, or that we can make it behave contrary to its nature on a permanent basis*, are only prolonging its oppression of us.
In August 2024, the US working class is unfortunately too demoralized, disorganized, and disoriented to end imperialism right now. Correcting that is a high priority, and it’s not going to happen by throwing coins down the wishing well of imperialist electoralism. Instead, the workers’ struggle is centered mainly in the industrial conquests of the labor unions, with the political arm of that struggle, or the workers’ quest to conquer state power, being an outgrowth of it and only being able to carry forward in a way that lands those lessons of the class struggle which have been gained and realized by the movement itself**. That is, of course, a two-way relationship, with the party listening to and advising the movement, but the broad masses ultimately are the ones who engage in production, make revolution, and decide history.
So, what do we do now? We agitate, educate, and organize step by step toward our goals as they arise. ✊🚩
source: https://votesocialist2024.com/
source: https://www.jillstein2024.com/
*Marxists do believe in pursuing reforms under capitalism to improve living and working conditions in the short term, but the struggle for these reforms always needs to be planned and executed with a building of class consciousness and an eventual revolutionary end to capitalism in mind. For more, see Luxemburg’s “Reform or Revolution?” here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MVZgtmGmyl4
**Lenin’s What Is to Be Done is all about this, including the specific function of the communist vanguard in relation to the mass workers’ movements: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C-eCCtzsiXY
***EDIT Aug 15 2024: To be clear, this post is intended to give an overall 101 to the discussion about communists and elections, which comes up every 2–4 years in the USA. I don’t explicitly endorse either of the two parties I mentioned in this article and whose graphics I displayed; I am just pointing out left parties who do consistently run candidates, and in so far as neither of them actually stand any real chance of winning major seats in the government (i.e. they are just advertising their existence), there’s absolutely no harm to be had from voting for either of them for those who do want to vote. Ultimately, the question of how to advance the struggle in the US is going to be answered by the masses themselves, and my position at this time is simply encouraging people currently standing on the sidelines to do something rather than nothing — basically whatever level of activity they can be persuaded to take, however simple or small. Overall, I think at this point that even mistaken action and the experience, discussion, and lessons to be gained from it would be preferable to the longstanding inaction that has plagued the US working class movement.
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