For a Third Party, Against Realignment
When the era of capitalism comes to an end, and it will, it will not be because we socialists engaged in utopian methods of organizing based on blind guesswork. Instead capitalism will be overthrown because we engaged with the theory of scientific socialism and converted our theory into practice. The struggle against capitalism has a long history. The benefit of this is our ability to learn from socialists of the past. It’s from these observations and analysis that I argue the path forward does not lie inside the Democratic Party. It lies in the creation of a workers’ party dedicated to the interests of the working class.
Third Party Viability
I don’t suspect many will disagree with the eventual necessity for a workers’ party, instead disagreeing with the current viability of one. There is currently no viable workers’ party, or third party of any sort, in the United States. However, it would be fallacious to then say third parties can never be viable in the US. Two examples of third parties breaking through the established two party system come to us from Latin American, Uruguay and Venezuela. Regardless of opinion on the actions taken by these third parties, their success serves as a positive indicator in support of future third party viability in our own country.
The third party prospect is only further enhanced by the fact that more than half of all Americans are dissatisfied with both Democrats and Republicans. America’s own history shows us examples of third parties coming into power when a large enough gulf exists between goals of politicians and desires of voters. Some will argue American third parties are a thing of the past, that the period of possibility has ended. This line of thinking falls prey to the same fallacy committed by Francis Fukuyama when he said we are at the end of history. Today only seems like a finality because we have not seen what comes next. DSA’s slogan “a better world is possible” isn’t something we say because it feels good; it’s something we say because it is true, and it can only be achieved if we demand it.
Moving Democrats Left
The strategy of electing better Democrats, putting socialists in office, is often cited as the route by which socialists will be able to drag Democrats left. Recent victories of DSA-endorsed figures like Mayor Zohran Mamdani have renewed enthusiasm for this approach, but how has the Democratic Party changed for the better following the election of such candidates? Regarding Mamdani, the entire Democratic establishment organized itself to shut Mamdani out, most notably House and Senate minority leaders Hakim Jefferies and Chuck Schumer. This is reminiscent of how the Democrats organized internally to prevent Bernie Sanders from winning the 2016 presidential nomination, or how they held a closed-door secret ballot to elect then 74 year old Gerry Connoly to the House Oversight Committee instead of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, one of the most popular Democrats in recent history. Maybe those candidates just weren’t socialist enough, maybe a strong socialist slate could make the changes we need.
Luckily for us, this also happened recently. The Las Vegas DSA chapter won on a progressive slate in 2021. They received no communication from the Nevada State Democratic Party, no support, nothing except a vote from the state representatives to condemn the “horrors of socialism”.. We understand that individual action alone cannot overcome systemic injustices. Similarly, we should not expect individual personalities within the Democratic Party to be capable of completely changing the party’s direction.
The 2024 US presidential election is the most glaring example of the Democrats’ unwillingness to shift left. In the face of a second Trump term, which was correctly identified as a fascist movement and touted by the Democrats as the greatest threat American “democracy” has ever seen, how far did they move to the left to garner our support for this critical election? Not a single step. Instead of hosting a free and open primary, Democratic Party officials unilaterally selected Kamala Harris, the spineless, genocide-enabling, right wing establishment plant who threw trans people under the bus, only ever grew more unpopular the longer she remained in the public eye, and said the only way she would differ from Biden is by putting more Republicans in her cabinet. The Democrats have shown us time and time again that they would rather hand Republicans victory on a silver platter than move an inch to the left. It’s time we stop pretending we can build an effective socialist platform within the party.
Some point to the Tea Party’s success in moving the Republican Party further right as evidence of our potential ability to move the Democratic Party left through mass popular support, but a class analysis shows this is not as analogous as it may seem. The Republicans and Democrats are both bourgeois parties dedicated to the service of the ruling class. The Tea Party movement was also a bourgeois movement attempting to move the Republicans further right; the Republican Party was already racist, already chauvinist, already dedicated to increasing working class exploitation to benefit the capitalist class; the Tea Party simply wanted them to be more explicit and more extreme in these regards. The Democratic Party is also racist, also chauvinist, also dedicated to increasing working class exploitation to benefit the capitalist class. Any attempt to move them left is in direct opposition to their goals and to the class interests of those they serve. This is an exercise in opportunism, the false belief that working with capitalist interests will produce results favorable to the working class. History has demonstrated that any cooperation with the ruling class necessitates the working class must subjugate itself, as cooperation requires the continuation of class relations.
Minimizing harm, voting for the lesser evil
This is the primary argument for supporting the Democratic Party among leftists. However, evidence has shown this is not effective as a strategy. The general argument is that Democrats, however bad they may be, will be less harmful in office than Republicans. If people who would have voted Democrat instead vote third party, this takes votes from the Democrats and makes it more likely Republicans will win elections. Therefore, voting Democrat is the preferable option because it minimizes harm from politicians.
For my response, it’s important to reiterate that the Republicans and Democrats are both bourgeois parties, they both exist to serve the interests of the ruling class. The role elections play in our society can be analogized to instances of imperialism and US intervention. From the Revolutionary Communist Party’s publication, The Communist, we have this observation of imperialist action:
However, the horrors of imperialism are not due to bad people or bad policies. They flow from the class divisions endemic to capitalism, the market economy, and the nation-state. They cannot be understood in the abstract or done away with in isolation. Moreover, an analysis not rooted in class leads inevitably to class collaboration and illusions in the trap of lesser evilism.
As socialists who stand against imperialism, conversations regarding the recent indefensible aggression from the American capitalist class toward Venezuela and Iran has brought renewed discussions. We understand that no act of imperialism can be analyzed in isolation because they do not exist in isolation; they exist within a broader system of global exploitation wherein any success achieved by imperialist powers serves to bolster future interventions. Similarly, elections are not isolated events that happen every however-many years. Elections exist within the broader context of the political struggle. It is misguided to look only at the short term regarding harms stemming from elections.
The Democratic Party capitalizes on people’s tendency toward short term harm mitigation. We see this in the rhetoric they employ. Every new election is the most important election of our lifetime, the selling point for almost every Democrat is they’re not Republican. In some ways these arguments are true; every election we face is against a Republican Party farther right and more openly fascistic than the one before. What’s left out of Democratic messaging is that the Democrats are also farther right and more fascistic than before. Democrats who are called radicals today, people like Mamdani, AOC, Bernie, not too long ago would have been called mainstream progressives. Free buses, universal healthcare, higher taxes on the wealthy: these were mainstream Democratic positions a few short decades ago. In many cases these policies that existed in the past have been repealed to the detriment of the people. The reason these ideas are considered radical now is because the Republican Party has been dragging our country further and further right, year after year, and the Democrats have been complicit. The trend of Republicans and Democrats moving further right every year will only continue in the years to come. We know the Democrats won’t change; they’ve made that very clear. Continuing the trend of minimizing harm in the short term will change nothing. The goal of socialists should not be to elect Democrats, it should not be to elect better Democrats; that’s the job of the Democratic Party. Our goal must be to overthrow capitalism and establish socialism, and that goal will not be achieved by voting for politicians in a bourgeois party.
Effect on Socialist Organizing
A foundational concept of socialism is that of dialectical materialism: no two forces can act on each other and come out unchanged. When analyzing the effects socialist organizing within the Democratic Party has on the party, we would be doing ourselves a disservice to not also analyze the effects the party has on socialist organizers and candidates.
Too often do I see self-identified leftists bending over backwards to defend candidates whose actions are very deserving of criticism. Two examples come to mind. Bernie Sanders has shown imperialist tendencies in his support for the bombing of Yugoslavia, Kosovo, and Libya under Clinton and Obama while condemning US withdrawal from Syria. AOC voted in favor of providing Iron Dome funding to Israel, freeing up their pocketbooks to continue the genocide in Palestine. These actions don’t undo the good they’ve done, but to say the good they’ve done ought to shield them from criticism would be ridiculous. We do not support socialist politicians for clout, we must not engage in politician worship as others do. Critical support for politicians must be just that, critical of the politician. To defend politicians or candidates when they act contrary to the socialist project is necessary to prevent ourselves from being co-opted and absorbed into the “kinder version” of the neoliberal movement. We learn through practice; if we practice defending concessions to capital then the only thing we learn will be how to concede to capital, leaving us unable to meet the revolutionary moment when it arises.
Conclusion
The Democratic Party is a dead end for the socialist project. We cannot expect to realign a bourgeois party to proletarian interests; we cannot allow the Democrat’s strategy of focusing on the short term to blind us to the long term results; and above all we cannot allow ourselves to believe this—the Democratic Party—is the best we can hope for. The process of building a working class party will be difficult; it will take time; but we can’t afford to continue in the status quo much longer. In working to build a workers’ party today we are making things easier for ourselves tomorrow. It’s regrettable that we have to start from almost nothing, but that’s no reason to avoid starting now. The best time to plant a tree was 40 years ago, but the second best time is today.
The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles, and the same is true for all future societies. Our future will not be written by any ruling class or their parties. Our future will be formed by the will of the masses—by the proletarian class who possesses revolutionary potential—and we are not powerless in this formation because we are them.