This is the final part of a series of three articles that have grappled with the Corbyn & Bernie moment (roughly 2015-2020) and its democratic socialist movement. In particular, the series has thus far argued that this ‘democratic socialism’ – largely represented in practice by the insurgent DSA in the US and Momentum and The World Transformed in Britain – should not be dismissed as a repeat of an old social democratic strategy and that criticisms of it have often failed precisely because they have made this move. In previous articles, we have seen that the strategies of non-reformist reforms and in and against the state, while flawed, are interestingly non-social-democratic, just as they are non-revolutionary. In this final part, we must again take the democratic socialists at their word, investigate their theory and practice in good faith, and turn our arguments to the democratic socialists’ view of elections.

Class-Struggle Elections

The democratic socialists of the period were interested in the limited possibilities of state power – the disruptive reforms it could deliver and the battle to be waged within the institution itself. They were also interested, therefore, in the means by which they might access the state – elections – and how these might be wielded as a disruptive force and a movement-building tool. This orientation became known within the movement as class-struggle elections.

As part of this strategy, socialists engage in electoral campaigns for certain candidates. To be a class-struggle election, the campaign itself, undertaken by activists, and the platform espoused by the candidate should do several things:

1. Polarise and politicise the constituency on a class basis, attacking the capitalist class and their interests, for example, by campaigning for policy against gentrification by real estate companies, against businesses that pay low wages, and against environmental destruction caused by capitalist development. Such active polarisation hopes to have a politically educating effect about the causes of, per our examples, high wages, rents and environmental destruction, as well as linking their solution to a socialist campaign.
2. Raise the working class’s expectations and create a real, imaginable possibility that ordinary people can make political change, namely the possibility of a highly improved standard of life.
3. Create new networks and build upon existing networks of organisers and activists in the constituency, as well as build up their confidence and skills.¹

By doing these things and thereby engaging in electoral politics with a class-struggle orientation, socialists will serve the ultimate goal of the strategy, which is to intensify class struggle. By this, we simply mean to increase the capacity and willingness of people to self-organise at the workplace and community level against the capitalist class or its interests when represented by the state. The strategy aims to relate this struggle to a struggle for the political project of socialism,² a relation sometimes known as the ‘merger formula’. This is a midterm strategy; more than the previous two discussed, which both looked toward some ruptural – albeit hazily formulated – break; class-struggle elections aim to build the socialist forces necessary for any break in the here and now.

Practising Class-Struggle Elections

Like non-reformist reforms and in and against the state, the strategy of class-struggle elections takes from the theoretical foundations of New Left thinkers like Gorz and Poulantzas. The principle of the parliamentary and the extra-parliamentary working harmoniously to polarise and intensify class struggle is found there and put into practice by our democratic socialists.

In the US in 2015-2020, discussions on the strategy can be found in all the usual places: in Jacobin articles,³ books by DSA activists,⁴ debates in DSA caucus publications,⁵ and in motions passed by the DSA National Convention (in particular motion #31 in 2019⁶ which committed the DSA to a “class-struggle electoral strategy” – to “use elections, public offices, and legislation as vehicles to encourage working-class organization”). In Britain, the strategy is less explicit. At times, the question of elections is entirely explained away. Momentum co-founder James Schneider simply states, “a basic and necessary step is winning elections within the current system and balance of forces, so as to be able to make major changes”. Where the question of the relation between parliamentary and extra-parliamentary action is engaged with, however, it follows a broadly class-struggle elections orientation, from discussions of Labour’s Community Organising Unit in Tribune⁷and elsewhere,⁸ to the activism of elements of Momentum,⁹ to the consistent appraisals of the Labour left’s project by Leo Panitch and his collaborators.¹⁰ The relative difference between the two contexts might be explained inversely as we did with “in and against the state”. Because the Labour left saw more definitely on the horizon the possibility of entering the state, the question of the nature of elections themselves could become secondary. The DSA were not in such a position, with no possibility of a government led by DSA-affiliated elected. Therefore, contesting elections became a more realistic arena for advancing their agenda.

Neither Reformism nor Revolutionism (Yes, Again)

For the third time, if we examine the strategy’s substance, we can see that it attempts to strike a middle ground between revolutionary and reformist socialism. Day and Uetricht, in their manifesto-like Bigger than Bernie, highlight the example of Jovanka Beckles’ campaign for California State Assembly as emblematic of the class-struggle strategy.¹¹

Beckles’ campaign had a similar style to Sanders’: calling out her opponent’s corporate funding and demanding policies on a class basis, such as rent controls, higher wages, and universal healthcare. Unlike Sanders, Beckles herself was a DSA member (of its East Bay chapter) and DSA activists and organisers took key roles in her electoral effort while also making use of her radical platform to agitate for (what Beckles herself emphasised) the idea that her electoral opponent was not the central opponent – this was the whole capitalist class and its interests. Though Beckles was electorally unsuccessful, gaining 46% of the vote, the skills and networks built between organisations and the people recruited to DSA could be utilised again immediately as the national wave of teachers’ strikes came to the area. East Bay DSA was thus able to play an important role in acting as a militant minority within the workplace and initiating the strike fund donation drive, raising over $170,000.¹²

This is a dynamic entirely opposed to the social-democratic electoral strategy. For the social democrat, as Przeworski outlines, political leaders are simply “representatives and the struggle for socialism [is] delegated to representatives”.¹³ As such, the aim of an electoral campaign is a victory for the candidate because electing candidates is the means for change. If there is any relationship between the movement and electoral candidacy, it is one of subordination. In the example of the Beckles campaign,¹⁴ the building of the class movement is put in a dynamic relationship to the electing of the candidate. During the campaign, both activities are intentionally enacted to advance the other. The candidates’ role is also not at all the straightforward representative as in the social-democratic model. Sanders’ campaigns for the Democratic nomination were characterised by his self-professed role as an organiser of the class rather than a simple conduit for access to the state.¹⁵ Democratic socialists held these campaigns up as having a class-struggle character because of this ‘organiser’ role of the candidate, pointing to the effect of Sanders’ campaigns to raise expectations across the class and mobilising more concrete action. In 2018, Sanders utilised his platform to attack Disney as workers at Disneyworld fought for $15 an hour. In 2019, he used his campaign’s data infrastructure to mobilise his base to physically attend pickets at a strike at the University of California.¹⁶

It is evident that class-struggle elections are not social-democratic in form and that democratic socialists often advocated for them precisely against the movement/election division of the social-democratic model. But the strategy isn’t a straightforwardly revolutionary one either. We can see this quite clearly if we look at the motives behind, for instance, the work of the Labour Party’s Community Organising Unit (COU). Pledged by the left leadership in 2016 and rolled out in 2018, the Unit was an explicit attempt to counter the neoliberal gutting of collective organisation in communities and organised locally around class-focussed issues such as tenants’ rights, fighting corporate domination of football clubs and campaigns against the closure of NHS facilities.¹⁷ In the archetypal revolutionary strategy, as described by some democratic socialists,¹⁸ it is this building-up of class power that is central. If there is an electoral strategy, it is as propaganda in service of this organising and does not explicitly aim for electoral success. This is the opposite of the social-democratic subordination of the class movement to the electoral victory. In the case of the COU though, Labour MP-commissioned reports make clear that class-based organising and election campaigning should be “complimentary and mutually reinforcing activities”.¹⁹ Echoing Megan Day, left Labour MP Ian Lavery²⁰ describes this mutual reinforcement via the ability of community organising around elections to raise the expectations of ordinary people, both further empowering that organising and making the election of a transformational government a real possibility.

This ability to ‘raise expectations’ through class-struggle elections is also opposed to the revolutionary archetype. Where the revolutionary asserts the illegitimacy of electioneering, primarily by extension of the illegitimacy of the democratic-capitalist state itself, class-struggle elections must begin with the premise that elections hold some legitimacy to those who, up until now, held no hope for political change arising from their class. By organising on a class basis around elections, the strategy proves that the class has the capacity for real political change. However, this strategy is reasonable only with the underlying premise that elections are legitimate and that it is desirable to empower the class through the successes that are voted for. If not, the purported ability to ‘raise expectations’ through the class-struggle elections evaporates. Democratic socialists emphasise, often explicitly against the revolutionary perspective,²¹ that voting should not be treated as illegitimate because this is how the mass of people engage with politics today.²² This question of legitimacy separates the strategies quite clearly.

So, the strategy of class-struggle elections is neither social-democratic nor revolutionary. It neither subordinates the building of a class movement to the winning of elections, as the social-democratic strategy does, nor dismisses elections as illegitimate in themselves and as simple tools to build up a class-based socialist force. Indeed, democratic socialists frequently argue for the strategy of class-struggle elections explicitly against both these perspectives.

Successes and Failures

We can, therefore, once again dismiss critiques from the left of democratic socialism that equate its strategy on elections with the social-democratic one. “CSEs anticipate these [social] movements […] will be obediently subordinated to the initiatives of socialist politicians and parties”²³ is one such claim. “Elections [engaged in by democratic socialists] siphon energy and resources from social movements while simultaneously limiting their power by shifting the terrain of struggle from our daily lives […] to the marble halls of power”²⁴ is another such claim. Such arguments talk right past the strategy’s aims and assume its failure (often on the same grounds that democratic socialists critique the social-democratic election strategy). Any successful critique must begin by acknowledging that this “shifting [of] terrain” is precisely the opposite of what class-struggle elections hope to achieve.

Perhaps the simplest critique that acknowledges the aims of the class-struggle electoral strategy in good faith is made by some democratic socialists themselves. That is, class-struggle elections, while a fine strategy in theory, was not in practice generalised across the movement and, where these types of campaigns were attempted, were not class-struggle enough. Leo Panitch²⁵ makes this argument about Britain, pointing out that though community organising in conjunction with electoral contestation was argued for on the Labour left and was present to some extent, the influx of Momentum and Labour members was mainly at a national level rather than associated with local organs (CLPs, Momentum local branches). As such, with exceptions, activists were not positioned to engage with a class-struggle strategy, which required local action. Instead, activists defaulted to the status of a mobilisable mass, able only to be activated for national elections when they came. Efforts to convert this national activist base into cadres of organisers via the Community Organising Unit and radical Momentum branches largely failed. Even where democratic socialists did engage with CLPs, a common effect was simply their absorption into highly procedural struggle against the right wing of the party, not their conversion into potential organisers of the class.

We might go further than this and ask why a passive national activist base was cultivated. Levenson and Kalisz²⁶ give us one possibility. They argue that, while indeed the electoral campaigns of Corbyn and Sanders (and their allies) generated hope and mobilisation, and while this success is to be ‘cheered’, it is not concrete:

Since the Sanders campaign launched in 2015, socialism has been largely articulated in terms of a strategy that serializes workers, to borrow Sartre’s term. In Critique of Dialectical Reason, [Sartre] describes people who are serialized as “united though not integrated through work, through struggle or through any other activity in an organised group common to them all” – in short, as “reciprocal isolations.” Despite the promise of augmenting working class organizational capacity, a Sartrean “series” is the sort of unity produced by electoralism.

Therefore, even those actions that appear as a development of a class-based movement inspired by the socialist organisation’s class-struggle elections remain ultimately unproductive because of how they were generated – by an electoral attempt. This cannot produce, in a concrete way, a class that “see[s] itself as a class, with interests that are opposite those of the capitalists”²⁷, but only a ‘series’, who are fundamentally aligned as voters even when they begin to engage in collective action outside the electoral arena. This is in contrast to a political project produced by working-class self-activity, i.e., one that begins with organising at the community and workplace level. This serialisation seems to reflect quite well the passivity of the ostensibly radical mass of Momentum members (who came to the party through Corbyn’s electoral success, be it internal to the Party) and the stagnation of DSA membership numbers after Sanders’ loss in the 2020 Democratic primaries.

But perhaps this is unfair. The context of the rise of the democratic socialist movement was that of (partial) unexpected electoral success. The extent to which socialist movements had the capacity, before that success, to choose the means of their rise to prominence was highly limited. Without grassroots class-based organisations, the democratic socialists had to find a way to leverage these electoral gains to create that organisation, however difficult it was. Their answer – class-struggle elections – seems plausible in that context, despite its failure to re-form a mass working-class movement.

However, we can explain this failure further. Against the characterisation of Julia Salazar’s 2018 election for the New York State Senate as having a genuinely class-struggle orientation, the DSA member Charles Post²⁸ points out that the nature of the mobilisation was not straightforward “parliamentary and extra-parliamentary political cross-pollination” as fellow-member Meagan Day describes it. Instead, the organisation that took place in service of Salazar’s win requiredworking with advocacy groups such as the NYC-based Metropolitan Council on Housing and the New York State-wide Tenants & Neighbors. Post argues, quite plausibly, that these kinds of organisations are helpful for elections because they can convert their reach into the mobilisation of working-class people. Still, ultimately, they are not self-organised working-class structures capable of, for example, resisting legal evictions. More generally understood, even class-struggle elections orient the movement toward emphasising purely legal tactics and building capacity through alliances with, albeit extra-parliamentary, legalistic organisations. If the working class is to be reformed as a transformational agent, as democratic socialists aim to do, they (and we) must surely turn to organising the class to act against the law and develop the means to do so. It seems highly unlikely that such a reformation can occur within today’s highly constrained legal limits placed on working-class activity.

Epilogue

In 2020, Sanders failed in his second attempt in the Democratic primaries, and Corbyn and his allies stepped down from the Labour leadership after an election defeat. With Keir Starmer’s subsequent purge of the left from the Labour Party, the role of Momentum, which had largely failed to build up extra-parliamentary relevance, became defensive and, with no possibility of a return of left influence in the Party foreseeable, quickly absurd after that. The DSA, with its lively factional debates and distance from the Democratic machine, remains active, though suffering from a fall in the electoral successes which it seemed to depend on, and with its prominent associated representatives drifting toward a Democratic centre (voting to, variously, block rail strikes and fund the Israeli military). It seems to be at a crossroads.²⁹ Some resurgence in the union movement, which buoyed the DSA in 2018/19 in the form of nationwide teachers strikes, came to Britain too late to support the democratic socialist project of the Labour left. Days lost to strike action in the UK in 2022 were the highest since 1989, while the longed-for invigoration of labour during the Corbyn years produced no such blip on the bar chart.³⁰

In another, greater irony, after half a decade of democratic socialist agitation around the possibility of state power, the George Floyd Uprising sprang up from entirely outside the state – a result of abolitionist organising and spontaneous liberatory rage – and became, by some estimates,³¹ the largest protest in US history as well as spreading across much of the world.³² It is here, perhaps, that we should make our concluding notes on strategy, not by pouring pessimism on the democratic socialist optimism for change, as I fear we have started to do just now, but by reversing that formula and asserting optimism against an underlying democratic socialist cynicism.

We began with the democratic socialist rejection of the duality of reformist and revolutionary socialism, partly because of the unlikelihood of either route in a capitalist democracy. But this founding principle of democratic socialist strategy is ultimately one of pessimism, particularly regarding more revolutionary politics, because of its supposed inherent unlikelihood on the one hand and because, in a polity where a person may vote once every few years to change the government, the revolutionary act appears completely irrational. But, if we glean anything from the George Floyd Uprisings, it is undoubtedly that the boundless hope and rage of the exploited classes, when confronted with our racialised capitalist world system, entirely defies rational deliberation. When things simply cannot continue as they are, those who are most vulnerable to losing their lives and livelihoods can find themselves, against all the political rationality in the world, on the frontlines. And this is not bad hope.³³The hitherto failure of socialist revolution in capitalist democracies, a type of society characterised in any case by its relative youth, is a strange reason to discount the possibility forever – to say, almost, that because capitalism persists, this proves that it will persist. Indeed, it is for the revolutionists as it was for the IRA would-be assassins of Maggie Thatcher: we only have to be lucky once; you have to be lucky always.

But the question remains: if the electoral possibility comes around again, and we are faced with the possibility of galvanising socialist forces by state contestation (in all senses of the word), how ought we to proceed? First, we might consider the critiques I have argued for in this series– the necessity of strategic independence, the importance of centring the coercive, anti-democratic elements of the state, the necessary emphasis on working-class self-organisation over electorally-produced series, etc. Equally, while our democratic socialists failed to access the state executive, should a future movement do so, the dangers of co-optation, fudge, wilful bureaucratic blockage and demoralisation present themselves even more powerfully. Only sticking to its guns and strategically using a failure to adopt non-reformist reforms or remake the state, pointing publicly to the class-systemic reasons for such a failure, could a left government heighten the movement’s momentum toward further transformation.

But crucially, if democratic socialists do return to prominence, we should hope they learn from the best of their influences—New Left thinkers like Gorz and Poulantzas—and keep the real possibility of a rupture with the capitalist system and the building of a socialist one at the forefront of their strategies.

Notes

1 Jeremy Gong, Voting and Class Struggle, New Left Review 116/117, (2019), 119-121.

2 Day and Uetricht, Bigger, 49; Sarah Mason, Challenging Capital, New left Review 116/117, (2019), 122-125.

3 Curt Ries, Our Path Forward After Bernie Must Include Rank-and-File Unionism and Class-Struggle Elections, Jacobin, 2020, https://jacobin.com/2020/08/bernie-sanders-campaign-unions-class-struggle.

4 Day and Uetricht, Bigger.

5 Megan Svoboda, What Are Class-Struggle Elections?, The Call, 2019, https://socialistcall.com/2019/07/16/what-are-class-struggle-elections/.

6 Marianela D et al., Resolution #31 Class Struggle Elections, 2019, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XpW-_ja5RkIszfrZFDXCzdbAu5LJHkkCeWVu_-QcyyU/edit.

7 Ian Lavery, In Defence of Community Organising, Tribune, 2020, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2020/02/in-defence-of-community-organising

8 Ian Lavery, 5 things Labour’s community organising achieved in its first year, LabourList, 2019, https://labourlist.org/2019/09/5-things-labours-community-organising-achieved-in-its-first-year/.

9 Beth Redmond and Isaac Rose, There’s More to Life Than This, Tribune, 2019, https://tribunemag.co.uk/2019/12/theres-more-to-life-than-this.

10 Panitch, Gindin, Maher, Challenge.

11 Day and Uetricht, Bigger, 82-90.

12 Abigail Torre and Keith Brower-Brown, Lessons from the East Bay, The Call, 2019, https://socialistcall.com/2019/05/14/lessons-from-the-east-bay/.

13 Adam Przeworski and John D. Sprague, Paper Stones: A History of Electoral Socialism, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986), 184.

14 Eric Blanc and Jeremy Gong, How Class Should Be Central, Jacobin, 2018, https://jacobin.com/2018/11/democratic-socialism-class-organizing-racism-sexism; Day and Uetricht, Bigger, 82-90; Torre and Brower-Brown, Lessons.

15 Bernie Sanders, I’m not only going to be Commander in Chief. I am going to be Organizer in Chief, Twitter, 2019, https://twitter.com/berniesanders/status/1156920512179818502.

16 Gong, Voting; Jack McShane, Class-Struggle Politicians Are Organizers First, Legislators Second, The Call, 2019, https://socialistcall.com/2019/08/01/class-struggle-politicians-dsa-elections/; Sunkara, Manifesto, 199-206.

17 Labour Together, 2019 Election Review, 2020, https://labourtogether.uk/report/general-election-review-2019, 111;Lavery In Defence; Zarah Sultana, As a former community organiser, here’s why Labour should keep the unit, LabourList, 2021, https://labourlist.org/2021/02/as-a-former-community-organiser-heres-why-labour-should-keep-the-unit/.

18 Blanc, Right Lessons; Stephen Maher and Rafael Khachaturian, Socialist Strategy and the Capitalist Democratic State, Verso, 2019, https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/4320-socialist-strategy-and-the-capitalist-democratic-state.

19 Labour Together, Election Review.

20 Lavery, In Defence.

21 Blanc and Post, Which Way.

22 Sunkara, Manifesto, 218.

23 Dan D., Ditching Class Struggle Elections, East Bay DSA, 2020, https://www.eastbaydsa.org/meetings/statements/2020-09-13/against-class-struggle-elections/.

24 Black Rose Anarchist Federation, Socialist Faces.

25 Panitch, Gindin, Maher, Challenge, 68.

26 Zachary Levenson and Teresa Kalisz, States and Stakes: Relational Theory and the Politics of Class Struggle, Verso, 2019, https://www.versobooks.com/en-gb/blogs/news/4489-states-and-stakes-relational-theory-and-the-politics-of-class-struggle.

27 Day and Uetricht, Bigger, 175.

28 Tithi Bhattacharya, The Interregnum: Spectre Symposium on the Left After Sanders, Spectre, 2020, https://spectrejournal.com/the-interregnum/.

29 Shuvu Bhattarai, Unite the Pro-Party Wing to Revolutionise the DSA!, Cosmonaut, 2023, https://cosmonautmag.com/2023/03/unite-the-pro-party-wing-to-revolutionize-the-dsa/.

30 Sarah Taaffe-Maguire, Number of days lost to strike action in 2022 highest since 1989, Sky News, 2023, https://news.sky.com/story/number-of-days-lost-to-strike-action-in-2022-highest-since-1989-12810216.

31 Larry Buchanan, Quoctrung Bui and Jugal K. Patel, Black Lives Matter May Be the Largest Movement in U.S. History, New York Times, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/07/03/us/george-floyd-protests-crowd-size.html.

32 Of course, this movement came with its own problems, namely the characteristic fleetingness of protest movements, that there isn’t space to explore here.

33 China Miéville, The Limits of Utopia, Salvage, 2015, https://salvage.zone/the-limits-of-utopia/.