I separate this section from §2 - Structural Limitations on Socialist Electeds because these are pitfalls and considerations which are internal to our organizing. That is, we have significant control in our organizing process over how these play out.
The guiding questions of this section are:
What situations divert socialist electeds away from a strategy that directly prioritizes building a mass working class movement?
What situations would justify socialist electeds to temporarily divert away from actions that directly prioritize building a working class movement?
How do we determine when we’re in situations which require one of those temporary diversions?
The bulk of these questions are dealt with in the following section 1:
1. Self-moderating for re-election prospects, since staying in office seems like a potentially powerful tool to positively help the working class
“The best way I can do good is if I stay in office, which means, to a degree, staying relatively silent on certain issues, or mimicking the rhetoric and policies of bourgeois economic concerns and reactionary social concerns.”
In §2, we discussed economic and social limitations on socialist elected officials. Socialist electeds are often faced with pressure to support capitalist economic circuits and reactionary social beliefs, or at least, pressure to not push back against those things too much. Otherwise, they risk getting recalled or voted out in the next election, and replaced by a more conservative politician. And, if the socialist elected is no longer in office, then they can’t do even the small progressive things.
This seems to prompt a calculation in which we weigh what progressive policies are worth giving up or putting on the backburner, to make it electorally easier to support the rest of their progressive policies. And it might be the case that a degree of such self-moderation is strategically useful. However, if we believe that socialist policies are in the interest of the mass majority that is the working class, then it seems like lack of class consciousness among the broad working class would be the only reason we would be making these self-moderations or focusing on some socialist things rather than others.
Therefore, when we see a socialist elected in a position like this, we shouldn’t quickly jump to self-moderation, and instead should explore the possibilities of increasing class consciousness and making it materially easier for the working class to support the policy without feeling like they are making too big of sacrifices. Socialist electeds can use the powers of their position to organize with other socialists (like those in the DSA) to raise class consciousness in favor of socialist policies.
There is only so much capacity a single elected official and their office will have. This is why it is useful to have multiple socialist electeds, so each can focus and champion some policies while other socialist electeds focus on others. Conversations between electeds and organizers can keep electeds more informed of the on-the-ground conditions. On a related note, given the limited capacity of elected offices, socialist organizers must have strategies to increase working class power and raise class consciousness without the involvement of socialist electeds.
It will be necessary for socialist electeds and organizers to communicate and coordinate in the interests of empowering the mass democratic working class movement. This means things like electeds communicating to extra-governmental organizers about what things they think they can win politically without endangering their electoral prospects, and how far they think they can push each socialist policy without getting recalled or heavily increasing the risk of them getting voted out by their constituents. Then, organizers and electeds can better coordinate around how to build working class consciousness, economic security, and social solidarity. They can work together to set their principled limits of how far they think the specific socialist electeds should self-moderate, given the current state of those sorts of revolutionary factors.
This collaboration helps prevent organizers from getting annoyed about “Why aren’t our electeds advocating and legislatively pushing for these socialist policies?” It also helps prevent elected socialists from getting annoyed about “Why don’t these socialist organizers understand the realistic limits of legislating within a bourgeois system?” Without this sort of communication, socialist organizers and socialist electeds are more likely to view each other antagonistically. Antagonism (or at least, agonism) is fine with conservative and liberal politicians and organizers—but when we feel that way with people who should be our comrades, we should carefully review for breakdowns in communication and coordination which lead us to become distrustful and antagonistic.
It is useful to have socialist electeds in office, and to organize (within and outside of government) to expand their practical capacity to pass progressive policies. The power of socialist electeds will be a reflection of the power of the working class, with some minor variance due to the particular structure of the bureaucracy. This is why it is important to view direct organization of the working class as the driving force of socialist revolution, not the superficial number of ostensibly socialist electeds in office.
Even if we had socialists as a majority of the legislative body, if the level of working class organization and class consciousness isn’t there to support their views, those socialists will have to massively self-moderate into relatively bourgeois policies and positions if they are going to remain in office or avoid facing massive disciplinary action imposed on their constituents from other sections of the bourgeois state. If they act as socialists without the necessary mass working class movement to support them, it will quickly be revealed how much their “socialist capture of the state” was simply nominal, and the government may quickly revert to the reality of the balance of the class struggle. (Or, it might turn into a minority rule government of socialist technocrats who only maintain their power through discipline, domination, and idealist rhetoric imposed on the mass working class—as these socialist technocrats attempt to make working class organization catch up to reflect the level of socialist capture of the state. I do not think this is an effective, viable, or desirable strategy.)
So what I’m advocating for here is not an all-out rejection of socialist electeds’ self-moderation. However, my criticism of contemporary DSA electoral strategy—similar to the German Social Democrats Party of the early 1900s—is that socialist electeds often self-moderate far more than necessary, due to ‘lack of coordination between socialist electeds and on-the-ground organizers’ and due to ‘under-use of the powers of elected positions to both organize the working class and shift power from the state into working class institutions’. When we (as a coordinated group of socialist organizers and socialist electeds) actually begin coordinating the best we can to organize the working class and tip the balance of class struggle to the proletariat—only then we can consider whether some self-moderation in socialist elected positions is actually strategically useful.
Crucially, the self-moderation that I believe is acceptable would simply be the temporary self-moderation of socialist electeds as we continue building working class power, class consciousness, and socialist legislative possibilities through grassroots organizing. We need to be very explicit about how we consider something to be ‘temporary’—it could be possible to put something off forever while giving it the ‘temporary’ lip-service.
‘Socialist Self-Moderation’ should also never mean the self-moderation of our grassroots organizing that is aimed at building up the power of the working class. The only sort of “self-moderation” of our direct working-class organizing will likely have to do with the capacity of the community of organizers and the likelihood of achieving one goal over another given our capacity. The realm of on-the-ground organizing clearly has different practical considerations around capacity and self-restraint than the realm of socialist elected governance.
I’ve said that some self-moderation of action for socialist electeds might be strategically useful. Here are some things we might consider while deciding on the precise nature of this balance between taking actions and self-moderation. First, we would benefit from an inclusive deliberation among socialist organizers, electeds, and some members of the working class who participate in organizing even if they aren’t the most active organizers. Through this, we can come to an idea of how bold we want to be, and the level of boldness that we think will be most fruitful in the long-term.
As a matter of setting principled boundaries, I think that our socialist electeds should never promote capitalist or reactionary ideas. Instead, they might try to explicitly, publicly recognize people’s discontentment, and refocus the conversation to the underlying unmet material needs that drive working class people toward those individualist economic and social views within a capitalist system. Then, they may agree to disagree with their working class constituents who might hold pro-capitalist or reactionary views. At most, maybe they avoid making a comment.
We would have to look at the situation to see if / how much it would help for an elected official to speak on the issue with a socialist view. If it’s merely a performative act which significantly endangers reelection prospects, then we might consider avoiding comment. But if speaking and raising awareness can actually get more of the working class organized, then clearly it would be useful. Even a performative act in legislature, pushing for a policy which is ultimately doomed in a majority bourgeois government, can be effective for activating the working class towards socialism.
Even if an act would be both purely performative and electorally harmful for a socialist elected, we might nevertheless believe it is worth taking a performative stand. At best, we might argue that it is for organizers’ morale, or to protect the image of socialism for future generations. But before we choose to take that mostly-moral/idealistic stance, we should first exhaust all discussion of the ways we might materially and productively organize around that issue. In almost every situation, I believe we will find a route which meaningfully emphasizes materially useful organizing.
2. Self-moderating to stay in office to defend existing progressive policies
This is very similar to the previous section about wanting to stay in office to create new and better policies, except instead of worries about positive developments, we’re interested in protecting existing policies from being degraded by conservative and bourgeois politicians. Already, we’re seeing attacks on the few worker protections we have—even the legalization of child labor in one state.
It is clearly understandable that people would want to protect these basic working class protections. These things can sometimes seem like basic prerequisites for further grassroots working class organizing.
But I would want to point out that always playing defense is not a way to build power. If we aren’t organized enough as a working class to defend these basic laws from bourgeois politicians—if it seems like we must rely on elected socialist officials to protect these laws—then clearly there is a larger problem that we need to focus on. Our organizing ought to focus on building up a working class movement, because that is what will ultimately maintain and expand legislation in the interests of the working class. If we focused mainly on getting electoral wins, we risk allowing our movment organizing to continue to erode. It is likely better to focus more on that sort of non-electoral organizing than putting so much of our effort into electoral politics.
In situations like these, we cannot let our strategy become short-sighted and dictated merely by the very real—but immediate-term—pain, immiseration, and deaths of our fellow members of the working class; and certainly not insofar as these immediate concerns get funneled into the realm of electoral politics. If we want to defend ourselves and win, we must focus on building a mass working class movement. Electoral politics might appear at first-glance to be the most reasonable place to go to address the sharpest life-or-death concerns for the working class, but I ask you to take some time and think through the problem. We might be surprised with how quickly we can build up that mass movement power, especially if the situation is as dire as it seems.
Additionally, focusing on non-electoral organizing does not mean we have to resign ourselves to the life-shortening, life-obstructing policies of the capitalist class and reactionaries (as those policies are enacted through the bourgeois state). We can, for example, protect each other through practices of non-electoral direct mutual aid and working class solidarity. Admittedly, this can be incredibly difficult to pull off when the state is explicitly against you and willing to mobilize their capacity for state violence, so there is clearly an argument for harm-reducing legislative strategies. But these should not come at the expense of the long-term process of building up the working class power that might be necessary to effectively get around or confront the state’s capacity for oppression.
3. Self-moderation to stay in office might occur in part because they or their staff depend on those positions for their livelihoods
This might be less of an issue in electoral politics, but it’s a possibility worth bringing up, if only to emphasize how minor of a concern this usually is for socialist electeds. I usually think that people enter into politics for political reasons, particularly socialist politicians. But if there are folks who are economically hurting, or who view politics as the best way for them to make a living, or who don’t want to go through the hassle of shifting to a new job, they might be biased to self-moderate to make it easier to get re-elected, for those purposes. They might also feel like they owe their staffers some level of job security. But I think people go into electoral politics with the knowledge that politics is often not the best in terms of job stability.
Economic pitfalls that move people away from socialist practices might even be more prominent in normal grassroots organizing. Some people are more likely to be at the margins, possibly without a job or in situations where they’re not taking in enough money to support themselves or the people they care about. This can move people to anti-social actions like taking bribes to become informants, or embezzling money. We should speak frankly about the issues we go through, and look out for each other materially while we organize. This is about more than simply preventing bribes or embezzlement—it is how we ought to take care of each other, and these principled practices strengthen our solidarity, trust in each other, and organizing capacity.
4. Embedding oneself in a game of bureaucratic maneuvers can lead to disconnection from working class interests
The Las Vegas DSA statement on electoral politics points out that the establishment is not afraid of using bureaucratic maneuvering and undemocratic methods to legislate in the favor of establishment and bourgeois interests. This can tempt socialist electeds to play a similar game of bureaucratic maneuvering, to try to get socialist policies passed. While this can pass some socialist policies, if this were our primary legislative practice, it would not be helpful for building up a mass working class movement. The inside-baseball nature of bureaucratic maneuvers are usually a barrier for much of the working class to get politically involved. Some things can help, which I’ve mentioned in my post about the LVDSA statement:
Their working class constituency can be made aware, through information campaigns, why socialist electeds feel that bureaucratic maneuvers are necessary to pass each specific working class reform for which these maneuvers are being used.
Then, socialists can explain what bureaucratic maneuvers they’re doing.
Next, we can show how we believe that these bureaucratic maneuvers will be made unnecessary and obsolete by building up a movement of an empowered working class, which is the goal of socialists in and out of the legislature.
Finally, we can emphasize to everyone how these socialist policies open doors for more, and more empowered, working class organizing. We can work with each other to use those new opportunities to build up the working class, so that bureaucratic maneuvers are no longer the necessary or the most strategic way to protect those legislative gains or get more of our needs met.
Alternatively, if there is enough trust between constituents and electeds, and they are aware that the socialist electeds might use this tactic; then we might be able to get away with explaining all of these things after-the-fact. This could be helpful if the bureaucratic maneuver requires some secrecy to carry out. But the more secrecy, and the larger the maneuver / legislation, then the more trust that we will need to have built up over time, and the more confident we will need to be that the policy will not harm the working class. There’s only so much that we can get done responsibly with this technocratic state practice, in which policy is not formed by an inclusive deliberative democracy. (Read Hélène Landemore!)
5. Unconscious self-moderation by socialist electeds can lead them to justify further disconnection from socialist theory
If socialist electeds don’t speak frankly about how and why they are self-moderating in the ways described above, then, as humans, they might begin to come up with reasons to justify these “unconscious” behaviors. They might develop theories, as Kautsky and the German SPD did, to justify their reformist methods, even to cast their self-moderation as the true inheritors of socialist and Marxist theory. Clearly, this can lead to further theoretical rot, which can open the door for even more unconscious self-moderation.
We need to remain theoretically rigorous, and focused on building a mass working class socialist revolution. We should speak frankly about the decisions we make, speak in the context of building mass working class organizing and revolutionary power, and not have too short-sighted of a focus on what legislation can immediately achieve or protect. Beyond justifying over-self-moderation, getting too wrapped up in tactics of bureaucratic maneuvers can also contribute to this short-sightedness. We ought to be thinking about the bigger picture of how we build up working class power outside of the practices of “rules-lawyering and parliamentary sleight-of-hand” which the Las Vegas DSA raises alarm bells about.
6. If socialist organizers see significant benefits from associating with these socialist electeds (for example, if the politician is nationally popular and brings more people into DSA), then on-the-ground socialist organizers themselves might accommodate or justify socialist electeds’ unnecessary self-moderation, to the detriment of building socialism.
This seems to me to be a problem of not having an established, nuanced way of saying, “We disagree with the socialist elected’s actions and statements, and are working to understand why they aren’t advancing the socialist view on this point. We likely still see significant and promising organizing potential with them, and believe the other actions and statements they give are in line with socialism.”
The answer to this sort of problem is in communication and deliberation with the socialist elected. Then, socialist organizers and the elected can reason out whether and why self-moderation might be desirable for the socialist elected, even while DSA organizers continue to advocate and organize for a staunchly socialist line. If they are aligned on their socialist beliefs but feel constrained by the electoral environment, they might then choose to collaborate to organize with DSA to move the opinions of the unorganized working class towards a more socialist line, so that the socialist elected feels freer to make statements and pass legislation which was previously judged in organizer-elected deliberations to be bad strategy.
The question would still arise in this situation about whether DSA should re-endorse, campaign for, or censure the socialist elected. We might want to invent a new category to represent this sort of nuanced situation—maybe something like “Strategically Aligned”. Then, we might decide whether it is more strategically effective to campaign directly for the Strategically Aligned elected, or to use our energy to spread our socialist position and organize the working class. I imagine that we could use the campaign season to talk about our socialist positions, and state how our DSA chapter judges how each candidate falls with regards to our socialist positions. This is not about giving an endorsement—it’s simply about giving the working class an accurate representation of the situation.
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Hopefully this section has pointed out a few of the most common pitfalls that socialist electeds fall into which unnecessarily moderate the positions and actions they take.
Is it often strategically useful for organizers to criticize socialist elected officials?
Of course we should engage in deliberation and frank conversation about strategy—that sort of “criticism” is not in question. But here’s what I think this question essentially boils down to:
Does it serve a strategic use for grassroots organizers to use public-facing criticisms of our socialist electeds as a way to signal to the rest of the working class that, “We organizers believe in a broader and deeper version of socialism than what you see in the self-moderated policies of socialist electeds”?
I think this kind of behavior might be a quick shortcut to sway some people over to our socialist beliefs in the short term. However, it’s not exactly an accurate representation of the situation, and therefore puts up a barrier between organizers and the working class folks they’re trying to organize. If our stance is that we think it’s strategically useful for socialist electeds to self-moderate to some degree, while the mass working class gets organized and class conscious; then we should simply say that that is our strategy, and that the socialist electeds are following it. We must trust the mass working class with the truth of our strategy, otherwise we will not have a truly mass working class movement.
Some other considerations about “criticism” of people who ought to be our comrades:
Does the style of criticism breed an environment of solidarity and collaboration between people who ought to be comrades?
“Criticism” of actions and how we weigh the situation is fine, but we have to be conscious and careful that it doesn’t get interpreted as a criticism of people’s character. We need to deliberate plainly about strategy, and if we ultimately have a disagreement, we must trust in the majority to predict the correct choice between the tactics/policies which we’ve narrowed a particular question down to. (See Hélène Landemore’s Democratic Reason)
We have to be careful to ‘call in’ and ‘listen in’—to try not to phrase things in ways which impute someone’s actions to inherent character flaws; and to try to listen to criticism to ignore language which is pointed and accusative, and to find out the underlying needs and wants which a person is asking to be met.
In this sense, “criticism” of elected officials within strategic and organizing planning is obviously necessary. But that kind of “criticism” which amounts to inclusive, democratic deliberation about strategy is trivially assumed in socialist organizing.
Isn’t the problem more of lack of coordination and communication between organizers and electeds? How much of this is intentional refusal to coordinate on the part of socialist electeds?
Finally, if there is a policy or strategy which organizers believe is worthy of criticism, then we should first look at how much this disconnect between organizers and electeds is potentially rooted in a failure for the two groups to communicate and coordinate. This coordination and communication is a two-way street—organizers cannot simply assume the disconnect is entirely because of inaction from elected officials.
First, we should attempt to clarify methods of communication and coordination, and only after that good-faith effort might we discover if the criticism of elected officials is warranted. Is the apparent movement away from socialist policies a willful decision of the elected officials? What seem to be the other motivations that moved them away from a socialist position? This can warrant more organizing around eliminating those pitfalls, or can warrant socialist electoral organizing to replace or distance from that elected official.