A Short, Preliminary, and Incomplete Critique of American Leftist Political Organizations

We have finally come close to the close of the spectacle of the American bourgeois election, the vote count is being tallied, and by the end of this week, we may know which white fascist will head our imperial machine, who will man our concentration camps, who will send in the blackshirts to “restore law and order”, whether they will simply idle around as the world burns with crocodile tears in their eyes every so often to keep the hippies quiet or whether they will gleefully do so as they personally bleed the earth of petroleum. Any fantasy that the Democrats have of a trifecta and a blowout for Biden is washed away immediately last night, Biden don’t look to win Georgia or North Carolina, Biden lost Florida, Biden lost Ohio, the Democrats are currently bleeding seats in the house, and the margins of the rust belt, with their magical “white working class” that we need to pretend to give a shit about, and which Biden supposedly appeals to, are looking pretty awful, barely enough, probably, to secure an uneasy win. It is easy to critique the Democrats, and no doubt we will be hearing a lot of it in the coming days, where, even if Biden is able to clinch, just barely, the presidency, the deluge of commentary will tell us that going forward, the Democrats must stand for something (and presumably, they mean something social democratic), rather than the bland nothing of not being Trump or the Republicans, they should have reached out to Latinx voters, et cetera, et cetera. Yet, where was the left in all this?

I have always held firm to the abstentionist line, I don’t think that any socialist organization worth its salt should even bother with engaging in parliamentary cretinism, and even the act of engaging with the bourgeois electoral system is inherently counter-revolutionary. It serves only to validate the bourgeois election, and by the bye, the bourgeois state, when we know that the state is nothing but “the mobilization of force for one class to oppress another”. When presented with the myriad of arguments against parliamentary cretinism, however, many Marxist Leninist simply quote- or rather, mis-quote, Marx, Engels, and Lenin on the matter of elections, most prominently, Marx’ famous quote in his “Address to the Central Committee of the Communist League”, where he says:

Even when there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to bring before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint. In this connection they must not allow themselves to be seduced by such arguments of the democrats as, for example, that by so doing they are splitting the democratic party and making it possible for the reactionaries to win. The ultimate intention of all such phrases is to dupe the proletariat. The advance which the proletarian party is bound to make by such independent action is indefinitely more important than the disadvantage that might be incurred by the presence of a few reactionaries in the representative body.

I am, however, not here to debate whether we should engage in electioneering or not, only to note a few specifics in this passage, namely, the conditions by which a revolutionary party ought to enter into an election- i.e. to preserve the revolutionary socialist perspective’s independence vis-a-vis the liberals, to count our numbers, and to propagandize. By these metrics, our own leftist parties and organizations, like the DSA, PSL,Greens, SAlt, et cetera, all fail miserably, failing to get, even, a fraction of a fraction of the vote (if those really are our numbers, we definitely are fucked), having no presence outside of already left spaces and spreading its message to no one but the already converted, and often times not even preserving our independence (witness the shameful display of DSA, and supposedly revolutionary organizations like the so called Revolutionary Communist Party-USA, endorsing the Democrats, and many Leftist organizations simply organizing around feeling the Bern). We expect the mass to come over to us, with no reason why they ought to, simply because we have presented them with a high sounding platform that we have not bothered to advertize, and which, no matter how good it sounds, we and they know will never happen, we sink money election after elections on simply getting a name in the ballot, make a few speeches, perhaps, in small venues, to about a couple of dozen people (or broadcast online to a slightly larger crowd on Zoom), and then inevitably come back unsurprised but sadden that the various sectlets managed to garnered about 3*10^(-19) percent of the vote altogether.

If one is serious about the electoral strategy, instead of perfunctorily running Gloria La Riva’s eighteenth or so hopeless campaign, then these parties should, at least, try and cultivate a base. By this, I mean build institutions that, on the ground, materially benefit the mass, allow them to see “socialism in action” as it were, and, by and by, build the beginning of a socialist voting bloc. Third Parties in America will never win except in the most local of elections, and because of that, they can promise anything so long as they never have to deliver on it. Especially in this time of pandemic, we need a mass party, with, apparently, enough funds to finance an election, to do more than have renter’s strike every so often, and get three people to hold signs with slogans to walk in a circle in front of some dipshit landlord, but organize relief efforts for those most hurt by the pandemic, organize resistance to eviction, organize childcare, community gardens, etc. In short, to create mutual aid networks and step in where the state clearly has failed, instead of promising to fix the state in the sweet by and by. In addition, this allows for us to build organs of political propaganda as well as bring our party members to the masses. Instead of getting bogged down by ceaseless debates over the Socialist status of China or whatever people online think are important, we are not only actually meeting people’s need, but, through the dialectical interaction with the masses, actually refining theory instead of telling other to read it.

Additionally, for the electoral path to have any success, there needs to be an entire revamping of our electoral system. To my knowledge, no Leftist organization running in elections have offered a robust critique of our First Past the Post system, even though it is systemically designed to keep anything but the two parties of capital out, never mind offer some sort of alternative. For any leftist party to even have a chance at getting into national legislature as a proletarian party, and not simply try Democratic Party entryism, there needs to be some sort of proportional representative system, preferably the sort of Party List system that is widespread in most bourgeois democracies, which nicely takes care of the issue of gerrymandering that the Democrats like to complain about but never take any action to address. This system, of course, will probably only be applicable to the House, since it is the only body within our government that resembles anything at all democratic, in the sense that there is some sort of relationship between popular will and legislative representation. It also removes the threat of the “wasted votes”, and will allow these parties, so long as they wish to pursue their failed electoralist line, a way to meaningfully “count their forces” and to bring, before the legislature, “their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint”.

There are, of course, a myriad of other criticisms of Leftist Political Organizing in America, and the west in general, which merit more attention than I am currently able to muster, such as the bourgeois individualist obsession with the character and personality of the individual candidate (probably abetted by the system we live in), the sort of cult of personality around people like Bernie Sanders, or Gloria La Riva, or Kshama Sawant, and taken to absurd extremes with Chairman Bob.