With the context of elected officials’ limitations and goals, what strategic options open up when we have socialist electeds?
If we have a tool for achieving revolution, we should use it, and that includes government positions. Socialists should use government positions to:
Establish and spread socialized productive forces.
Materially build up the working class’ revolutionary organizational capacity.
Increase working class consciousness.
Institute harm-reducing reforms, but being careful that our legislative work is not merely instituting harm-reducing reforms which ultimately do not challenge the capitalist mode of production. Points 1 through 3 describe the kinds of “non-reformist / revolutionary reforms” which we should focus on.
We should be consciously specific about what we mean by points 1 through 3. I elaborated on these points in Part 4 of these blog posts.
The ultimate worth of legislative work will come from instituting revolutionary reforms which heighten the socialization of production and realization, which increase the working class’s capacity to direct our available labor power towards revolution, and which develop as much as possible a non-vulgar working class consciousness. Harm reduction genuinely helps people, is often necessary, and can be used to open up opportunities to build class consciousness. But if we only focus on harm reduction and gradual reforms, we will not win.
What powers do socialist elected officials have to achieve those four strategic goals?
After the Introduction, the second part of this series described capitalist restrictions on any socialist legislator, at least in the USA. Part 3 discussed reasons why socialist electeds often overly self-moderate. Part 4 described the broader revolutionary goal of socialists. This part, Part 5, is about the powers socialist elected officials still have, given the externally imposed restrictions of Part 2 and the self-imposed principles of Part 4. How can socialist electeds still be bold and strategically helpful, while recognizing the structural limitations on their position within a bourgeois government?
We might want to look particularly at what socialist electeds can do which helps achieve a mass working class revolution, while probably also what they can do while still getting reelected. We might want to see if there’s a broader socialist strategy which involves engaging with electoral politics and trying to win elections for socialist representatives.
Some Revolutionary Practices for Socialist Electeds Within Government:
Proposing, Passing, and Advocating for policies, government funding, and incentives to promote mass, inclusive, and coordinated working class control over the means of production:
Workplace and Tenant Unions
Workplace, Tenant, and Consumer Cooperatives; and Credit Unions (which, while called ‘credit unions’ might better be called ‘finance cooperatives’)
Democratic planning and action—in government policy and elsewhere
Practices of mathematical fair distribution—such as random selection, rotation, or —in replacement of the normal unfair capitalist market mechanisms of distribution
Public goods and services in economic sectors in which natural monopolies tend to form because of things like high startup costs, large economies of scale, and network effects which discourage competition.
State-owned enterprises and shares, particularly with regards to companies which receive stimulus funding from the government.
Appropriation of capital from capitalists, into the collective democratic control and ownership of the working class.
Generally, the replacement of capitalist economic circuits with socialist economic circuits.
(International) Coordination among working class institutions, particularly beyond local regions.
Resources, education, and practices which boost general consciousness of long-term working class interests
Practical enforcement of pro-working class policies, not simply laws and policies on paper.
Proposing, Passing, and Advocating for policies that reduce capitalist class power:
Reducing the capitalist class’s capacity for organizing and coordinating.
Reducing the capitalist class’s ability to interfere with working class organizing and coordinating.
Reducing the practical enforcement of anti-working class policies, which usually tend to punish the working class for not falling in line with capitalist rule.
Some Revolutionary Practices for Socialist Elected Officials Among Organizing Circles:
Accessing information which grassroots organizers would otherwise lack or underemphasize:
Research: Using the resources and labor they are provided by the state to help research and develop theory alongside organizers about how to promote the interests and organizing power of the working class in the class struggle against the capitalist class.
Bringing information about what is happening in government back to their fellow organizers. This should help us figure out where to organize, what the pressure points are, and what areas in organizing would open up their ability to pass revolutionary reforms and harm-reducing policies.
Acting on that information in a broader socialist strategy:
Coordinating with grassroots organizers to more effectively push for policies—in the government and among the unorganized working class—using legislative and nonlegislative tactics.
Deciding with organizers what the best route is when there’s a situation where the socialist electeds positions aren’t representative of the voters’ stated desires, but are in a position to pass something in their interests.
Aiding the class struggle in confrontations between the organizing working class and the capitalist class:
Putting into effect government policies which increase the amount of self-directed labor power possessed by the working class, and encouraging us to put this newfound capacity toward organizing. This includes things like public goods and services, shorter workweek/hours with same wages help increase our amount of self-directed labor power.
Compelling actions from private entities in particular crisis situations for capitalists, to help tilt the crisis in the favor of the organizing working class.
Some Revolutionary Practices for Socialist Elected Officials Among the Broader, Unorganized Working Class:
Building revolutionary and inclusive working class consciousness:
Using their position, media access, and direct authentic social media engagement to more easily have conversations with constituents and build theoretical understandings with them of their working class interests.
Compelling private entities to open their records to investigations. Revealing internal capitalist class discussions can be used to build working class consciousness.
Solidarity building to dissolve reactionary divisions.
Encouraging active organizing by and for the mass working class
Using their easier media access to encourage the working class to get organized at any possibility, and to spread socialist analysis of economic and political situations.
Using their resources to give organizing guidance and support to constituents who start to get organized. For example, helping a newly-started tenants union figure out how they want to set up their democratic practices without falling into common organizing pitfalls.
Advertising and publicly analyzing our organizing and political successes in the context of the socialist goals of building a mass working class.
Some Harm Reduction Practices for Socialist Elected Officials:
Proposing, Passing, and Advocating for legislation and government practices which reject anti-working class policies:
We can tamper down the harms of pro-capitalist policies. Essentially, regulations in favor of the holistic health and safety of the working class, with particular notice of how capitalism disproportionately harms historically oppressed social groups within the working class.
We can tamper down the harms of socially reactionary policies. As described in §1, these are harmful to the working class, not necessarily even in the interests of capitalists, and nevertheless the result of historical modes of production with class divisions.
Socialist electeds, for their empowered bureaucratic position, have a lower barrier to veto harmful things. As a sidenote, when we see mass political gridlock, it’s sometimes because the class struggle is slightly more even, meaning that representatives of working class interests and representatives of capitalist interests both have the capacity to veto things.
Taking opportunities caused by the variability in personalities of government officials which creates opportunities to shift the government away from the normal pro-capitalist practices. These are points in time we can use to pass legislation which would otherwise not pass. However, we should be cautious that this is not really a way to build a mass movement of the working class.
Maintaining and promoting democratic representation in bourgeois government, against the anti-democratic attacks of the capitalist class and reactionaries.
The line between what is ‘harm reduction’ versus a ‘revolutionary reform’ can get blurry. Generally, however, harm reduction doesn’t have much of a direct effect on the factors which determine the balance of the class struggle (1-3 at the beginning of this section). Harm reducing policies can become more revolutionary if the unorganized working class explicitly understands how those policies fit into our broader socialist goals and the new organizing opportunities it opens up for the working class. If we merely looked to install harm reducing reforms—as I described in my summary of the Las Vegas DSA retrospective—I think we run the risk of encouraging the unorganized working class to view socialist elected officials like service organizations who solve problems for a passive working class—instead of themselves becoming activated into an organized working class.