Biden/Harris 2020: The Futility of Electoral Politics
Socialists spend a lot of time denouncing participation in electoral politics, but the vast majority of Americans think of “politics” as beginning and ending with elections. In the wake of Joe Biden announcing Kamala Harris as his running mate, I would like to explain, both in theory and in practice, why electoral politics are not the path to a better world.
In Theory: Lenin, DuBois, & McConville (paraphrased for legibility by yours truly)
The history of socialist participation in electoral politics is a helpful foundation on which to build this discussion. Let’s start with the big one: Lenin. Lenin wrote about socialist participation in “bourgeois parliaments” in State and Revolution, as well as in“Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder*.
In State and Revolution, Lenin reformulates what it means for a socialist to vote in a bourgeois parliament. This reformulation is still an extremely helpful tool for socialists today. What is a bourgeois parliament? What is Congress? It’s a collection of members of the capitalist class who are chosen to represent the very people that they exploit and oppress. That doesn’t make any sense. If your representative cared about you, they’d step down and let you (or at the very least, someone like you) join Congress. Because Congress, like any bourgeois parliament, is made up of members of the capitalist class, it functions as a tool to preserve the power of the capitalist class; the capitalists are self-interested above all else.
Further, since every member of Congress wants to maintain their status as the dominant class, the false divide between the parties is just a smokescreen to hide their true goal of continuing our exploitation. The Democrats and Republicans are one and the same. They want the same thing. Their differences are mostly aesthetic. As Lenin put it:
“To decide once every few years which members of the ruling class is to repress and crush the people through parliament — this is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism, not only in parliamentary-constitutional monarchies, but also in the most democratic republics.”
Members of Congress will never act to enable a socialist revolution in the United States, because a socialist revolution would impact their bottom lines. Congress is and always has been a body which represents the interests of the capitalist class, and those interests sometimes coincide with the interests of the oppressed insofar as the capitalist class needs to prevent the oppressed from becoming so desperate that we revolt. This is why we have seen welfare reforms, including FDR’s massive New Deal in the ’30s — they’re reforms intended to prevent the oppressed from seeing through the lie that they represent us. It’s also worth noting that it took a complete economic collapse for our “representative” body to give us even the most basic forms of social welfare, which have since been gutted. Our bourgeois parliament is not on our side.
Voting is not a way to make your voice heard, nor is it a way for you to effect real change. Voting is the decision we can make once every so often to decide which members of the capitalist class will continue our exploitation, and the fact that the American education system has worked so hard to convince all of us that we have a civic duty to vote — rather than a civic duty to do literally anything that would be in our best interests — should scare you. It scares me.
In “Left-Wing” Communism, Lenin takes a more nuanced approach. There is an exception to the uselessness of bourgeois parliaments, he says — if you can get real revolutionary sympathizers in parliament, their voices can be an immensely helpful tool for agitation.
“We Bolsheviks participated in the most counterrevolutionary parliaments, and experience has shown that this participation was not only useful but indispensable to the party of the revolutionary proletariat….the experience of many, if not all, revolutions… shows the great usefulness, during a revolution, of a combination of mass action outside a reactionary parliament with an opposition sympathetic to (or, better still, directly supporting) the revolution within it.”
The Democratic party is not a revolutionary party, and I cannot imagine any Democrats directly supporting a revolution. So, yes, socialists should participate in bourgeois parliaments when there are voices within them sympathetic to the revolution, as their support can be indispensable when combined with mass external action, but we don’t have any sympathetic voices in the U.S. I was as excited for Sanders as anyone, but at the end of the day, he’s still an imperialist social-democrat** at best. So Lenin is not entirely opposed to socialists taking an interest in voting, but he does urge us to do so only when there are politicians worth supporting, and our country has none. Maybe A.O.C. or Ilhan Omar will become radicalized — they’re closer to socialists than most, not that that’s saying much — but I am not holding my breath, and nor should you.
So, Lenin says that bourgeois parliaments (like Congress) are nothing more than a collection of capitalists coming together to provide us the illusion of choice while they continue our exploitation, and I am inclined to agree with him. Lenin isn’t the only person to have written about this issue, though!
W.E.B. DuBois, who was awarded the Lenin Peace Prize for his support of the Soviet Union and communist causes more generally, published “Why I Won’t Vote” in 1956. This is a useful document for Americans who want to better understand Lenin’s reformulation of the way we should view Congress. For four decades, he voted in the interest of harm reduction when possible, choosing the “lesser of two evils” except for the occasional third-party vote when a third-party candidate seemed promising. But by 1956, he acknowledged that Congress is not comprised of two opposing parties — it’s just members of the capitalist class, and all of them want to exploit the rest of us:
“I believe that democracy has so far disappeared in the United States that no “two evils” exist. There is but one evil party with two names, and it will be elected despite all I can do or say.”
But DuBois was not a nihilist — never a nihilist, he held on to hope until his death. He explained that his refusal to vote was not a surrender, but rather, an action in and of itself. Abstention is a choice, and it is heard loud and clear when the percentage of voting Americans is made public every few years. Please keep this notion of abstention as action in mind; it will come up again and again before this article is finished.
So sure, maybe abstention is a third choice, and maybe you can accept that it is a form of action, but I understand that you might still be feeling uncomfortable with not voting for the “harm reduction” candidate. In 1970, Sean McConville published an article titled “Marxism-Leninism and Parliamentarism,” which expands on the false notion of the “lesser evil” candidate. McConville points out that when Lenin encouraged socialists to participate in bourgeois parliaments, the parliaments themselves looked a lot different than they do today. A century ago, Russia had just had a successful revolution, the British Labour Party looked like it might become a genuine revolutionary body, and support for communism in the United States was the highest it had ever been. In other words, the idea of elected officials directly supporting a socialist revolution was much more tangible than it is today, and there likely was a “lesser evil” worth voting for.
The most enlightening part of McConville’s piece comes in the section titled “The Lesser Evil?” Many have branded Joe Biden as the lesser of two evils, and have indicated that they are only voting for him in the name of harm reduction. This argument relies on the idea that Trump is a unique evil in American politics, which I disagree with, though I certainly agree that he’s a monster. The problem is that Joe Biden is also a monster. Joe Biden has multiple sexual assault allegations against him; he has a long history of virulent racism; he has spent his entire career defending the capitalist class and gleefully oppressing whatever minority he can. So is voting for Joe Biden really choosing the lesser evil?
Much like DuBois, McConville argues that the choice between two evils is a false one.
“It is not faith in socialist claims and promises that we have to attack, therefore, but perception of the situation as being a choice between two evils, according to the rules of the game. The only way we can do this is by offering an alternative — don’t play the game, don’t be forced into a false and hypocritical ’choice’.”
You have more than two choices. Abstention isn’t the absence of choice — it is a choice itself.
In Practice: Biden/Harris 2020
It is my deeply held belief that revolutionary education is most effective when it can be applied to the modern reality, so I will now take what I said above and relate it directly to the 2020 Presidential election.
That Joe Biden does not represent the oppressed and exploited class is not a hard sell. When confronted with any policies which could even generously be described as socialist during the primary debates by Sanders or Warren, he panicked and emphasized that we must always be practical. “Practicality” is the watchword of the capitalists because they believe that they can make us look like idiotic idealists; what is wrong with being an idealist? The ideals of communism are possible in practice if only we break free of the mentality that the capitalists have forced us all into.
Biden is just like the rest of them — richer than you, more privileged than you, more powerful than you, and desperate to hold onto and increase his power. This is his third presidential run, he was Vice President for eight years, and he was in the Senate for thirty-six years. This man has spent half of his life as one of the most powerful people in the country, and he wants more power, and yet, for all his years of “service,” he has yet to make a meaningful difference in the lives of the oppressed and exploited.
Harris is no better. Biden chose Harris as his running mate in an obvious attempt to reach out to the women and communities of color that he has spent the last four decades damaging. Who is Kamala Harris? A federal prosecutor who consistently took steps to increase the disproportionate incarceration of people of color during her time in office. She refused to fight for the legalization of marijuana (Black people are arrested for marijuana-based offenses at the highest rate), failed to support a mandate for police body cams, opposed legislation to mandate independent responses to police shootings (which means that police departments can conduct their own “investigations” with no oversight), and defended the Three Strikes Law, under which Black people are incarcerated twelve times more often than any other demographic. Kamala Harris is a woman of color, but she does not represent the interests of people of color. Instead, she represents the interests of the carceral state, which is designed to overwhelmingly imprison people of color and use them for slave labor. Further, Biden chose her as his running mate during a period of extreme police violence and when American support for the police is at an all-time low — does that seem like the decision someone on the side of the oppressed would make?
I think that most leftists don’t love Biden, but rather, hate Trump. The great fear is another four years of President Trump, and that fear is enough to make a lot of people “swallow their pride” and vote for Biden. I say “swallow their pride” because many liberals have made this election a moral issue: the repeated claim that not voting for Biden is equivalent to voting for Trump is an attack on morals. Fair enough, politics is a field which includes moral issues. Is it moral to formally and legally claim that you want a monster to run the country? Is it moral to vote for a sexual predator? Is it moral to vote for a racist misogynist? Whether you vote for Biden or Trump, you are voting for someone who is all of those things.
But the hardest argument for most people to refute is the “harm reduction” argument. A leftist might say, “No, I don’t like Biden, and no, I don’t think he’s going to do good things, but god, Trump is evil! I have to vote for Biden to beat Trump, even though I know that Biden will also do evil, because he will do less evil.” This is the age-old lesser of two evils argument, and I want to stress, just as DuBois and McConville have stressed, that you’re not locked into one of two choices. The American education system has spent your entire life convincing you that you are, and more recently the liberals have come out of the woodwork to insist that not voting for the Democrat is the same as voting for the Republican, but it’s simply not true!
Statisticians often use voter participation as a metric by which to measure the “health” of a democracy. The more people participate, it is thought, the healthier a democracy is. I think that this is a fair indicator. The problem is that in America, we don’t really have a democracy. I’m not talking about the constant voter suppression that’s designed to keep poor people and people of color from voting, although that is certainly a concern; I’m talking about the same thing I’ve been talking about, which is to say, the illusion of choice. If you decide to vote, you are voting for one of two capitalists, with the end result being functionally the same — the biggest difference is aesthetic. But if you choose not to vote, you can make the sham of American democracy visible even to the least politically-involved Americans. We have said time and time again that a democracy with low participation is not representative, and since our “democracy” is as far from representative as they come, we should signal that by refusing to participate.
But, you say, Biden is still better than Trump. Sure, abstaining might send a message, but Trump’s re-election would lead to very real and immediate negative consequences for the oppressed. That is true. It is also true for Biden. I cannot see the future, but I can see the past, and Joe Biden is not a leftist, he is not a progressive, he is not anti-racist, and he never has been any of those things. Voting for him during a time of civil unrest more extreme than we’ve seen in decades would be a terrible mistake. To note the elephant in the room, many people have argued that he would have handled COVID-19 better than Trump. Reducing casualties as a result of COVID-19 requires prioritizing people’s lives over profit. Joe Biden is a capitalist. Sure, he might create a nation-wide mask mandate, but would he keep businesses closed? Would he more strictly enforce physical distancing requirements? Would he fight for stimulus packages for Americans so that they don’t have to decide between risking their lives at work or risking their lives in poverty? Would he change the economic conditions which have left most Americans without a savings, which is part of the reason this pandemic has been so fucking terrifying for the majority of us? If your answer to any of these questions is yes, you know a very different Joe Biden than I do.
I would also like to note here that, just as not voting signals the poor health of our democracy, voting signals your active participation in our democracy. A vote is not a thing that should be cast lightly. Democracy is genuinely a beautiful thing, but in the United States we’ve begun to take it for granted. We treat our votes like something we can hold our nose and cast because voting is relatively easy for most of us to do, but we must think of the consequences of our votes. Every vote you give to a Democrat that you don’t like signals your eagerness to support an institution that, let’s be honest, you also don’t like. You can’t vote with an asterisk. You can’t explain your vote when you cast it, and no one reading the percentages of voting-age Americans who voted D or R will care about why you voted. When you vote for a Democrat or a Republican, you are strengthening the illusion of American democracy, which will only help the capitalists continue their oppression.
On the topic of oppression, let’s talk about foreign affairs. We must acknowledge that we are sitting in the crown jewel of the American empire, our land stolen from indigenous peoples and propped up by the exploitation of our many overseas territories and the extortion of people in those countries we haven’t managed to occupy yet. Is Joe Biden going to dissolve our empire? Is he going to fight for oppressed peoples abroad when we can’t even trust him to fight for oppressed peoples at home? I’m not asking if Trump would do those things — he wouldn’t. Nor would Biden.
Another point which is often made in his favor is that people aren’t really voting for Joe Biden — they’re voting for the appointees he’ll make. That way, so the reasoning goes, even if their vote signals their support for a candidate that they don’t actually support, they will make a material difference for the better in the form of his appointees. Well, what appointees? He chose Kamala Harris as his running mate. That does not fill me with confidence for his other choices. Even Barack Obama, hailed by many as the most progressive President in U.S. history (which, if it is true, is only true by an accident of historical circumstance, not because of any actions he took), nominated a moderate for the Supreme Court, and that moderate was seen as too interested in the well-being of the oppressed class to be appointed. Joe Biden is not going to fill the government with socialist or progressive politicians because he, like all others of his ilk, has no interest in assisting in the transition of power from the capitalists to the exploited.
In Conclusion: What Is To Be Done?
I will not be voting for Joe Biden. I do not believe that he will be substantively better than Donald Trump, I do not believe that supporting a man as vile as Biden is acceptable under any circumstances, and I reject the idea that I have to vote for one or the other of them. I believe that the best way to move forward with electoral politics now is to abstain, to abstain loudly and with purpose, and to tear to shreds the veneer of democracy that the capitalists have covered over our government.
Voting for Joe Biden is a worthless gesture. It is making the decision to support one capitalist over another, one sexual predator over another, one racist over another, and so on. This is the case for most elections, since the people who are able to run for office are overwhelmingly proud oppressors and exploiters. The modern American is presented with a false choice in two ways: first, in the sense that the two candidates are in any meaningful way distinct, and second, in the sense that we have to choose one or the other of them. I encourage you to recognize the falsehood that has been forced onto you, and act accordingly. (Acting accordingly, by the by, might include voting third party — some groups, like the Party for Socialism and Liberation, use elections as opportunities to garner publicity for their work outside of electoral politics, and those groups achieving name recognition on a national scale would be very significant. If you intend to vote third party, just do your research and make sure that the candidate in question, along with the group they represent, is worth supporting.)
If electoral politics isn’t the path forward, what is? Direct action. Find a community organization which supports a left wing cause and join it, donate to bail funds, join a union, form a union, write, create art, agitate, submit to a socialist publication (ahem), get out on the streets if you can stomach it, support those who can if you can’t, and most of all, be like DuBois: never lose hope, comrades. Never stop fighting for the better world that we can create together, without the assistance of the oppressors.
*Note that this work was written in response to those revolutionary groups in Germany who explicitly branded themselves as further left than the Bolsheviks, and as such the scornful quotation marks around “Left-Wing” are not intended to indicate that Lenin’s communists were somehow right wing.
**Note also that “social-democrat” is not a compliment — what does Lenin have to say about the social-democrats? “…the present-day “Social-Democrat” (i.e., present-day traitor to socialism)…”
Sources & Recommended Reading:
https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1920/lwc/ch07.htm
https://www.marxists.org/ebooks/lenin/state-and-revolution.pdf
https://www.marxists.org/history/erol/uk.firstwave/marxist-15.htm
http://www.hartford-hwp.com/archives/45a/298.html
https://afropunk.com/2019/01/kamala-harris-has-been-tough-on-black-people-not-crime/
