Ben Grove responds to Brad C. of Collective Power Network,1 arguing that the time for independent politics is now. 
Why run independents?
They usually lose. They get blamed for splitting the vote. Our electoral system has been stacked against them for centuries. Right now, America’s two-party system is as hard as concrete.
It’s easier to run socialist candidates in Democratic primaries. There is no formal mechanism for the Democrats to keep us off the ballot. Legally, we could run ski-masked Antifa Democrats in every primary election and Joe Biden could do nothing to stop it without changing the law.
All of these statements are true. But we should still run independents.
Does that sound delusional? It certainly would to Brad C. of Collective Power Network, a growing caucus in the Democratic Socialists of America. In a boorish, pedantic, and cynical piece, he browbeats Jacobin-aligned DSA members for their “obsession with an independent workers’ party.” In two-party America, he dismisses this end goal as “laughable.”
Brad argues that party primaries are a neutral arena of struggle because they are managed by the state. Why waste energy creating a socialist party when liberals could still hijack the new party’s primaries? To win elections and deliver material victories to the working class, we should continue to run on the Democratic ballot line, probably forever. As socialists, we can maintain our independence and build DSA institutions that mimic a party—but actually declaring ourselves a party is out of the question. CPN calls this model a “party surrogate.”
What would this party surrogate actually look like? An earlier CPN piece offers some broad outlines. On one hand, it calls for DSA to build a professional, independent campaign apparatus. Yet the article also displays a conservative spirit that rejects all forms of political risk-taking. To avoid the “disastrous” impact of electoral defeats, endorsements would be strictly limited to candidates with a “clear and compelling” path to victory. Candidates would not be subject to any formal discipline by DSA. Instead, DSA would join broad “labor and progressive coalitions” and try to extract concessions from them.
Brad C. and CPN are good DSA comrades who want “socialism in our lifetime.” But their strategy is too narrow-minded in its conception of victory to achieve that monumental goal. It would trap us with the Democrats forever.
Why run independents? Here are five good reasons.
Brand Name
Coca-Cola is a terrible company. They steal drinking water and murder union leaders. Vile brand.
Humor me and imagine you went out to protest Coca-Cola, joining a big rally at their headquarters in Atlanta. The organizers are quite impressive; they give one thundering speech after another.
There’s just one problem: they’re all wearing Coca-Cola t-shirts. The more you look, the more it rattles you. “Why are you wearing that?”, you implore them.
“Why shouldn’t I?” a leader snaps back. “It’s the only shirt that fits me.”
“But I thought we were protesting Coca-Cola!” you say.
“Of course we are,” they reply. “But read the law books. We can wear any shirt we like at a protest. Coca-Cola can’t stop us, so it’s not a problem.”
***
Too on the nose? No matter. When it comes to electoral work, this is the level of discourse that socialists have fallen to. We miss the mountain for the trees; we think like lawyers when we should be thinking about the bystanders watching us from the sidewalk.
Just like Coca-Cola, the Democratic Party is a brand. It has logos, t-shirts, and leaders. Comrade Brad reminds us that the Democratic leadership is mostly informal, controlling the party with money and “soft power.” But that really doesn’t matter: informal leadership is still leadership and soft power is still power. When Joe Biden told Trump “I am the Democratic Party,” he wasn’t lying. Right now, the Democrats are the party of Biden, Pelosi, and Schumer, and the whole country knows it. As “Democratic” socialists, we will inevitably be associated with them, especially when our national leaders in Congress hesitate to confront them openly and consistently. Voters overwhelmingly pick candidates based on their party ballot line, and on the ballot we are just one more “D” on the list.
Our fortune is tied to the Democrats; it will rise and fall with theirs. Right now, Democrats are doing quite well in the polls, and Biden has proven a more energetic reformer than expected. But will the honeymoon last? None of us know and none of us have any say in the matter. Biden will make the decisions and we will suffer the consequences.
Yes, our fate is tied to them—but they will not help us! Just look at the recent spectacle in Nevada. When DSA members successfully won control of the official state Democratic Party, the old leadership bailed. They snatched $450,000 from the party’s bank accounts, had all the party’s consulting contracts cancelled, and took the entire state party staff with them. The progressive insurgents now control a set of social media accounts and an impotent party apparatus that does not even select political candidates. If Nevada Democrats suffer at the polls in the future, you know exactly who will take the blame.
How is this a “show of strength” for the Left? Nevada DSA members are our comrades; their choices are the choices of our movement. That is why we must be brutally honest: we’ve been made; we’ve been used; we’ve been had. After a protracted fight, Nevada DSA came out holding an empty blue bag, the brand name of a party that conned them out of $450,000.
If we want to determine our own destiny, we will need our own logos, our own branding, and eventually, our own Socialist Party ballot line. Yes, liberals could try to hijack our primaries, but we would simply denounce them as SINOS and refuse all assistance to their campaigns. They would be marginal gadflies who seldom win, just as progressives currently are to the Democratic Party.
More importantly, it’s absurd that the law dictates party structures and forces parties to accept state-run primaries. America’s archaic electoral system deserves a head-on challenge. With electoral reform initiatives, our movement could fight to deregulate political parties while also making it easier for new parties to get on the ballot and win.
Far-fetched? Perhaps, but it’s still better than playing nice with the liberals who conned us out of $450,000.
Hard support
As socialists, we often speak of the need to “win material victories” and build popular support for our movement. This is all well and good, but it’s important to remember that there are different kinds of winning and there are different kinds of support.
There’s soft support and there’s hard support. There’s support that is mild and unreliable, and support that is ferociously committed to the cause.
In February 2020, there was a moment when Bernie seemed to be approaching majority support in the Democratic primaries. He pulled ahead of all his competitors in head-to-head polls—Warren, Buttigieg, even Biden. Weeks later, our glory melted away. What happened?
He lost his soft support. Millions of Democratic voters supported Bernie’s ideas conceptually, but they supported Trump losing more. We delude ourselves when we pretend that Bernie “almost” gained the nomination. When Biden proved that the party apparatus was behind him, that he was the “safe” choice, the game was over. It was rock beats scissors.
Compare that outcome to the Republican primary in 2016. No poll is necessary to prove that Trump had boatloads of hard support. That fanatical fury bubbled up at every polling station, Facebook wall, and dinner table in America. Do you think that Trump’s primary voters worried about their man’s ability to win the general election? Did they consider switching to Jeb to get a safer deal?
Of course not. Safety was never the goal for them. Only Trump could win, because only Trump deserved to win, and they were ready to put everything on the line to make sure Trump won. Trump supporters are not our role models, but they embody the difference between hard and soft support.
Socialists need hard support. The political culture is hostile to us; our people will always face outrageous slander and abuse. It takes a certain kind of supporter to endure that public stigma, to back socialist candidates despite constant negative media coverage.
What does this have to do with running independents? Everything. When our electoral efforts focus on Democratic primaries, our audience is Democratic primary voters. Most Democratic primary voters are loyal Democrats, and their top priority is beating Republicans. That is not an insult, it is simply a fact of our political culture.
This audience gives us a powerful incentive to seek soft, conditional support. We frame our candidates as the most sensible, the most competent, the best prepared to unite liberals against the Right. Yet the unity never happens in practice, not in America and not anywhere. Never forget what happened when Jeremy Corbyn became leader of the Labour Party: the Labour Right actively sabotaged their own party and helped Boris Johnson sweep the polls. Then they blamed Corbyn, purged his supporters, and stomped the Labour Left into the mud. Liberals will never submit to the Left like GOP operatives did for Trump. They are capitalists, and our mission poses an existential threat to capitalist interests. They will fight us to the bitter end.
When we run candidates on an independent ballot line, there are no more hopeless dreams of “unity,” and our task becomes much clearer. To win popular support, we must convince people to become socialist voters, to back us in our own right as the best fighters for their interests. That’s a difficult project in this two-party regime, but it will build us a slander-proof constituency that can’t be shattered by a few phone calls from Barack Obama.
Conscious support
Throughout the United States, DSA members are winning elected offices. One common trend has emerged across the board: low turnout. Cori Bush won her primary with roughly 70,000 votes in a district of 740,000 people. Jamaal Bowman won his primary with 50,000 in a district of 720,000. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez won her first primary with just 17,000 votes.
The pattern is the same: a progressive candidate wins a Democratic primary in a deep blue district with a small, cheap pool of dedicated voters. Then they cruise through the general election with minimal effort, their victory assured by an overwhelmingly Democratic voter base. Why is this a problem? Isn’t it good to seek cheap victories for maximum return on investment?
Certainly, if you’re thinking like a capitalist. From a socialist perspective there is more cause for concern. We understand that colossal forces stand against us, that it will take a movement of millions to sweep those forces away. When our victories rely on hundreds of thousands of voters who support us solely for the “D” in front of our name, we are failing to bring those voters into a conscious political movement. They may help us at the ballot box, but they will not be able to fight for socialism at their workplaces and in the street.
These limitations may be inevitable in the short term, but in the coming years, we will have to strive for a greater awakening of mass politics. An isolated niche movement harms all of its participants; it seesaws between grinding despair and delusions of grandeur. Socialists may be a minority for the time being, but we should always strive to be an outward-facing minority, with broad appeal and steady growth. The Bernie movement inspired its supporters because it promised a nationwide political revolution. Now we must ask ourselves how we can revive and improve on that grand vision.
Running on an independent or Socialist ballot line will help us to cultivate a conscious support base. When we examine our vote count, we will be able to determine precisely how many people support our political movement. We will know that all of our supporters chose us because they support the socialists, not because they saw a “D” on the ballot. Even when we lose, we will emerge with a clearer measure of our support base than our candidates who appeared as Democrats in the general election. And when we win despite all the obstacles, we will electrify our movement and shake this country to the core.
Broad-based support
In a country consumed by pettiness and black-hearted amorality, an independent movement commands tremendous moral power. An independent movement puts its candidates on offer to everyone. It refuses to respect the old alignments of urban and rural America, of Red Team and Blue Team, of Republican and Democrat. It strives to represent the interests of the entire working class, even sections that are currently hostile to the Socialist Movement.
Comrade Brad claims that trying to build a workers’ party is a purely “rhetorical” exercise. But it isn’t rhetoric, it’s a fact: a movement that exclusively runs in Democratic primaries is a movement that refuses to fully engage with audiences outside the Democratic electorate. Its candidates wear the blue shirt; it targets voters who are already wearing blue shirts, and to vote for the movement’s candidates in primary elections, you have to put on a blue shirt yourself.
It’s worth remembering that Bernie Sanders commands respect in part for his long service as an independent—first as Mayor of Burlington and then as a member of Congress. Even some conservatives privately respect him as a man of convictions. As socialists, we will need to cultivate the same kind of “quiet respect.” In ordinary times, secret admirers are useless. But when a revolutionary crisis arrives, they may come over to our side and tip the scales in our favor.
Bernie’s story also contradicts the “run to win” mantra promoted by many in DSA. His past is riddled with unsuccessful third party campaigns, some with single-digit results. When he finally won his House seat in 1990, it was only after a divisive three-way race in 1988 that split the vote and helped the Republican nominee win.
Isn’t it embarrassing that DSA, an explicitly socialist organization, has a more conservative temperament than Bernie Sanders, a cranky reformist politician? We should become sharper and more independent than even he could imagine. There is no excuse: whatever our weaknesses, socialists are better off now than we were in the 1980s.
Red victory
Eager to prove his theoretical credentials, Brad claims that supporters of an independent ballot line are “fundamentally un-Marxist” for prioritizing symbolic victories over “material outcomes” for working class voters. Yet this reveals a jarring ignorance of history on his own part. Marxism has never been a project for quick-fix philanthropists. It does not define victory as “anything that makes the working class more comfortable.” For Marxists, victory is anything that helps the working class organize on its own terms. As the famous theorist Karl Kautsky once put it:
“Socialist theory is by no means the fruitless gimmickry of some parlor scholars, but a very practical thing for the struggling proletariat … Its main weapon is the concentration of its totality in vast, independent organizations, free from all bourgeois influences.”2
When DSA tendencies like Bread and Roses pursue a break with the Democratic Party, they are not being symbolic performers. They are trying to free working people from bourgeois influences, just like the early (non-renegade) Kautsky. They are beginning to imagine a militant struggle based on mass working-class organization—not just individual reforms and elected offices.
Now, it’s fair to ask: who cares what Kautsky said over a century ago? What makes him relevant today? After all, he lived in Imperial Germany, a 19th-century hereditary monarchy. Imperial Germany was an emerging power that rose and fell in 47 years, while the United States is an aging superpower in a state of social decay.
Yet Kautsky also lived in a nation where brutal police stood above the law. He lived in a country consumed by militarism, with imperial ventures across the world. He lived in a backwards federal system where regional governments could strip away voting rights on a whim.3 The national government was sliced into three branches, with mutual consent required to pass legislation. Electoral districts were gerrymandered. Urban residents were severely underrepresented.4 Socialists were harassed and demonized as enemies of the nation.5
Does Kautsky sound more relevant now? If so, that is because America is not a “bourgeois democracy” or any kind of democracy at all. It’s an authoritarian, two-party police state, where freedom of speech is the freedom to complain and be ignored. We have more civil liberties than the subjects of Imperial Germany, but our government is almost as distant from the will of the people.
Yet despite our common barriers, the socialists of Kautsky’s era had a breakthrough. They built a powerful socialist party with millions of dedicated members. Because they understood that the German Empire was a gerrymandered sham democracy, their primary goal was not “winning” individual offices. They aimed for more than that: their priority was to build a mass popular mandate for revolution. They ran candidates across the country, appealing for as many votes as they could get. They celebrated every victory, but even a “losing” campaign was worthwhile if it expanded popular support for the movement.
Every election year, their share of the vote increased. And every day, they steeled themselves for a moment of reckoning when the growth of their movement would make something snap. When they finally won a majority mandate to govern, they would smash the German Reich and raise up a new socialist order.
In the end, they fell far short of their promises, as did Kautsky. They were too risk-averse and tactically rigid, and they were eventually domesticated by the German state. Yet this process of cooptation took many decades to complete. In their best days, they forged a “revolutionary social democracy,” a coalition of socialist parties that spanned the whole of Europe. What are some material accomplishments of that movement?
- Forced Imperial Germany to adopt the world’s first public health insurance system
- Trained Russian socialists to overthrow the Tsar and build the world’s first socialist state
- Took a stand against colonialism while the rest of Europe embraced it.
- Fought for gay rights—in 1898!6
- Built a mass working-class counterculture, with fireworks, hiking clubs, and beer.
- Spent decades preparing workers for the earth-shaking German Revolution of 1918 (despite failing them when the hour of reckoning came).
Could American socialists revive this revolutionary approach to electoral politics? It would require us to fundamentally rethink our relationship with elected leaders. Instead of “pressuring” individual politicians, we would need to raise an army of candidates who are willing to act as disciplined representatives of the socialist movement. The goal would be to build a cohesive red bloc in U.S. politics—not a “party-surrogate,” but a party-equivalent.
I do not suggest that DSA should rush to set up its own ballot line without considering the ground conditions in various locales. In many states, setting up a third party would require us to run frivolous presidential campaigns that waste our energy and divert our attention from more important struggles. Nor would I demand that DSA “break” with Democratic primary contests everywhere all at once. That would be like diving into a pool headfirst when we don’t know how to swim.
But we still need to learn how to swim, and we may as well start learning early on. One step is to identify districts where our candidates could win respectable double-digit margins—even if not outright victories—and hit them hard with targeted independent campaigns. If we run socialists who nominally have “no party affiliation,” we can distance ourselves from the Democratic Party while still dodging some of the problems with a third party ballot line. The German socialists used maneuvers like this,7 and so can we. DSA’s Reform and Revolution caucus has drafted an excellent proposal for targeted independent bids, and I encourage all comrades who are members to support it at DSA’s upcoming convention. When we start running independents, our “break” with the Democrats will become a tangible, continuous process that we scale up every year. Right now, “the break” is a distant dream that we await like the Second Coming, and the result has been humiliating paralysis.
When we choose to run candidates in major party primaries, we will need to find new ways to reinforce our political independence. If we’re going to wear the Coca-Cola shirt, we should at least scribble on it a little or turn it inside out. “Socialist Democrats” should be Democrats in Name Only. They should refuse to caucus with neoliberal Democrats, stand in solidarity with our independent candidates, and above all else, complain about the two-party system in front of large crowds of people. They could advance new laws and ballot initiatives for electoral reform and denounce any politician who supports the two-party system as a freedom-hating bootlicker.
But wouldn’t that burn bridges with Pelosi? Wouldn’t mainstream Democrats go all out to marginalize us? Yes, and that’s a good thing! The time has come to build our own infrastructure to run competitive campaigns on our own terms. If we rely on the support of people like Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi, we have failed as a socialist movement. Primary campaigns should be like fishing for bait: an effort to build an initial support base, pending a larger campaign on an independent ballot line.
Another important step forward will be slate campaigns: running groups of candidates who are willing to fight together for a socialist program and vote as a cohesive bloc. We have seen tentative steps towards this approach in places such as Chicago and New York, and Marxist Unity (a DSA caucus with which I am affiliated) has drafted resolutions to harden, formalize, and expand it. One of our tactical proposals is for DSA to run a Socialist Slate for the U.S. House of Representatives.
House elections take place across the country every two years. If we start contesting them as a cohesive bloc, we can use them as a booming nationwide megaphone. An independent Slate candidate from California, a socialist Democrat from Georgia, and a “socialist Republican” from Montana could all stand together at a rally, fists raised to the sky. If our candidates cross-endorse each other in one big slate, they will reinforce each others’ political independence—even if some of them still run in major party primaries. It will also lend a certain moral power to our movement: instead of saying “vote for Julia, vote for John, vote for Jack,” we will be saying: “Join our nationwide struggle for freedom. Sign up to support the Socialist Slate!”
***
Imagine that it’s 2032. The Socialist Slate is running on an independent ballot line for the very first time in Georgia. It has the toughest ballot access laws in the nation, but this time, we’ve found a way to surmount the hurdles.
We hold a massive rally at a park, blasting the Internationale on loudspeakers. Then our local volunteers go out in a caravan of three hundred cars, a sea of red flags on the roadway. They set up miniature block parties in neighborhoods across the city, collecting tens of thousands of signatures to get the socialist candidates on the ballot. Hundreds of local supporters know we’re coming and have RSVP’d to make sure they get a chance to sign.
That’s the kind of vision we should strive for in the coming years. Independent campaigns are not performative gestures, they are the backbone of a self-reliant movement that knows what it fights for and loves what it knows. A DSA member who chooses to run as an independent deserves our praise and relentless encouragement. They are rejecting the quick path to office in favor of the slow, hard work of building a conscious mass constituency. They are sacrificing their short-term career interests to serve the Socialist Movement.
- Since the original version of the article is now offline, a republished version can be found here: https://dsamass.org/2022/04/08/breaking-bad/
- Karl Kautsky, “The Historic Accomplishment of Karl Marx,” translated by Alexander Gallus. https://www.marxists.org/archive/kautsky/1908/histacc/5-wm-soc.html
- Gary Steenson. “Not One Man, Not One Penny!”: German Social Democracy, 1863-1914. Page 104. See https://digital.library.pitt.edu/islandora/object/pitt:31735057897393
- Ibid, 43.
- Ibid, 111-112.
- https://www.marxists.org/archive/bebel/1898/01/13.htm
- Ibid, 32-33.