The Incorrect Tactics of Communists During the 2024 Presidential Election
For communists, the question of the 2024 Presidential election is a question of political education. The primary task of a communist party is to develop a clear political line and to win the support of the masses of the working class to that line. When large events take place, a communist party must clearly explain the class antagonisms which gave rise to that event and illustrate the correct way forward. Instead, the propaganda and tactics of most communists in the US have compounded the confusion, panic, and theatricality of the US presidential election.
Socialist candidates and the zero sum game
Some Marxists take umbrage when they are criticized for expending their energy on futile projects. They gasp and howl and condescend that Marxists can take on many different tasks at the same time. They argue that we can both run socialist presidential campaigns and organize the proletariat at the site of production. But time and energy are finite. Every hour squandered on a vanity campaign is an hour lost on the shop floor.
Imagine an organizing drive at a firm with 100 workers. Competent organizers will want to have conversations with at least 75 of those workers. That’s a minimum of 75 hours of organizing conversations — more likely 150, 300, or even 600 hours — to organize just one shop. At current strength, the cadre of all the major US communist parties could organize thousands of workers — hundreds of thousands of organizing hours. This time is far too precious to burn on a political campaign that has not even a remote chance of gaining national ballot access.
Meanwhile, there are millions of workers who could be unionized, and millions of union workers who could be radicalized. What’s more likely, convincing 1.5 million people to vote for a communist candidate (1 percent of total ballots cast in 2020) or convincing 1.5 million people to go on strike? In spite of the dearth of Marxist-Leninist agitation amongst the working class, 453,000 workers went on strike last year alone. Imagine what the working class could accomplish with strategic leadership.
You can not vote against fascism
To believe that electoral defeat serves as an impediment to fascism is to profess ignorance of both the history of fascist governments as well as the basic economic forces set in motion by capitalism.
Fascism is the consolidation of capital, organized violence, and political hegemony. In all modes of production, the nature of power is to consolidate. The consolidation of organized violence with political and economic power is not unique to fascism or even capitalism generally; after stripping the rebellious nobles of their militias and collecting them as pampered hostages at Versailles, thereby dissolving all competitive centers of power, Louis XIV declared, “le estat es moi” — I am the state.
Capital concentrates because of the pressure that large firms exert on small firms, pushing them out of business, absorbing their share of the market, and further concentrating capital. Organized violence concentrates because of efficiency and because the international working class, which grows larger with the advance of capitalism, and more dangerous with the advance of technology, requires greater and greater force to suppress.
Many liberals, and some Marxists, have put almost exclusive emphasis on the political shell built around economic and military power under fascism. But German Hitlerism and Chilean autocracy have little in the way of ideological overlap. From its beginning, fascism has been noteworthy for its political incoherence, even within individual fascist trends.
The fascism of the US will not look like the fascism of Chile or Germany or Spain — each of which were distinct from the other and were defined by the historical and cultural conditions of those countries. The fascism of the US will take a form unique to the US. It will be characterized primarily by the technologically advanced nature of its violence, by the unrestrained infiltration of capital into every aspect of daily life, and it will be a fascism marked by the cultural and historical traditions of the United States. Such fascism may facilitate the concentration of power within the person of a single dictator, but it is not required to do so. A fascist state, especially one established in a country that so values electoral pageantry, could just as easily be managed by a revolving cast of elected administrators. What is necessary is that those administrators carry out, without deviation, the will of capital.
Harm reduction
The genocide in Gaza perpetrated by the bloodthirsty Biden regime and its unhinged Israeli occupation foot soldiers should have put to bed, once and for all, the argument that voting for a Democratic Party candidate might reduce harm. More than put to bed, this argument has been buried under a hundred thousand innocent dead. And yet liberals (and liberals masquerading as Marxists) still furiously formulate inchoate rebuttals, smashing adjectives and verbs together like a toddler battering their toys. They shout about the rights of the oppressed — rights they would never shed blood to defend — and accuse their opponents of condemning the downtrodden to unnecessary suffering.
But there is no actual evidence that voting for either party reduces harm. It was Bill Clinton’s pen which, “ended welfare as we [knew] it” and signed Biden’s 1994 Crime Bill. On the other hand, the US conceded defeat in Vietnam during the Nixon administration and a Republican congress blocked Trump’s repeal of the Affordable Care Act. Even Roe v Wade was not overturned by Donald Trump but by 40 years of persistent training and promotion of reactionary judges by organizations like the Federalist Society. Attempting to trace the harm of the bourgeois state to one party or politician produces nothing but conflicting data.
The true motive force of history is the working class. We delude ourselves and confuse the masses when we play along with the charade that bourgeois elected officials can protect the rights of workers. The legal erosion or expansion of rights is a post-hoc codification of the already-existing relations of power between the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. The manipulative, half-thought harm reduction argument substitutes speculation for fact.
When should Marxist Leninists participate in bourgeois elections?
Liberals masquerading as Marxists will defend participation in moribund bourgeois elections by accusing their critics of ultra-leftism. They argue that it is necessary to take part in bourgeois elections because that is where the masses have focused their political attention, and it is in this arena where they must be reached.
They state these arguments with a ‘just so’ reassurance completely bereft of theoretical backing. They forget — or choose to ignore — that our responsibility is not just to reach the masses, but to organize them. If there are no alternative centers of political life, then it is incumbent upon Marxists to construct those centers. The development of proletarian organizations, and the politicization of already existing organizations is the fundamental task of building a socialist revolution. Meeting workers where they’re at should never be confused with tailing them as they wander off a cliff.
For decades the purpose of communist election tactics has been obscured. It should never be forgotten that communist participation in bourgeois elections must always serve the purpose of exposing the anti-democratic nature of the bourgeois political system. It is to put forward candidates — not unaccountable charismatics, but delegated representatives of popular working class organizations — who will press the interests of the working class against the obstructionism of the bourgeoisie. It is this frustrated process — the destruction of indisputably popular policies, the blocking of the democratic will of the masses — which proves to the working class beyond any doubt that the political system has been captured by the interests of capital. When the masses understand that this capture has occurred, and that no rescue is possible, they will be ready to replace the bourgeois political system with proletarian democracy.
What workers organizations exist which could put forth such candidates? None. Placing participation in elections ahead of the construction of proletarian organizations is clearly putting the cart before the horse.
The correct path is to explain to the working class that the presidential elections are a masquerade which attempts to legitimize the genocidal imperialist rule of the US capitalist class. Both candidates are our unrelenting class enemies, whose objective is our subjugation and exploitation. The coronation of one or the other will only change the outer form of the violent imperialist machine. Liberation for the working class will not come from desperately clinging to one facet of imperialist power or the other. Liberation can only come from committing our energy to building our own centers of power — working class centers of power and socialist revolution.