The Socialist Party USA has a unique opportunity to reach a consensus on electoral activity that can be translated into a coordinated agenda. Much of the debate in the party right now focuses on extraneous arguments about supporting Democrats (which few in the party actually do) or working within the Green Party. But these are pointless arguments if they do not come in the context of our larger strategy.
The truth is that the Socialist Party is not really a political party. Although we do have a legally recognized “Socialist National Committee” that makes us a party in the federal government’s eyes, we lack ballot lines at any state level. We have fielded only a handful of token candidates across the country each year ever since the Socialist Party of Oregon lost its ballot line in 1998. (The story of the SPO’s temporary, but acrimonious, split belies our lack of clearly defined goals: they had out-sized ambition for our little party, but we didn’t clearly define why we run for office and anyway we lacked the money to support them).
Of course many will point to the draconian election laws in many states which require thousands and thousands of signatures to place a candidate on the ballot for Congress, state assembly or even city council. While these may not be insurmountable obstacles in all cases, often it would come at the cost of sapping a Socialist Party local of all remaining energy and hamper educational and direct action work. Since most members place a higher premium on our activism and educational work, electoral campaigning often takes a back seat.
Since the vast majority of members face a ballot every November that is devoid of Socialist candidates, to establish a litmus test for any comrade’s perceived “support” of Democratic or “other party” candidates is merely a ruse to attack an “ideological enemy.” Worse, it would require that we be political monks at election time. Just why in the heck did we become political activists anyway?
The party’s position of record was adapted 20 years ago, so it hardly qualifies as a consensus agenda. The party’s position is that we seek and will support the creation of a broad, labor-backed, populist social democratic party. Quoted, in relevant part:
The Socialist Party seeks to cooperate with other democratic left organizations in taking practical steps toward independent political action, whether at the local, state or national levels. Such action should involve a clear break with the Democrats, and aspire towards building a movement-based party which is feminist, anti-racist, anti-war, and pro-labor, at a minimum. While the Socialist Party will avoid making a socialistic platform a precondition for participation, it will continue to advocate the adoption of public ownership of the major means of production, distribution, and finance — that is, of big business.
I’m sure many of the comrades who consider themselves hard left revolutionaries (and many such comrades have joined the party in recent years) will initially balk at this position, but if you think about it, it makes sense.
In other words, we don’t want to water down the Socialist Party’s politics to become a mass social democratic party. Even if we wanted it, that ship has sailed. It is not 1913, which was the last year when it seemed that the Socialist Party’s vote count would continue to climb and we would win more and more seats until one day we would displace the Democrats as the “other party” and maybe sweep to power around the middle of the century, like the European parties in the Second International eventually did.
No, it didn’t happen here. We were smashed by the state during the first World War. The Democrats watered down our platform during the New Deal (“They carried it out on a stretcher,” as Norman Thomas bitterly complained). The came another Red Scare and the Cold War, meanwhile the standard of living in the U.S. rose dramatically for millions, effectively obfuscating class politics for the majority. It will be a long time before masses of Americans are ready for revolutionary socialism. We need a strategy for now, and for the next 20 years.
America could really use a period of social democratic politics. Our European comrades have a much sweeter situation than us. Sure, most of them oppose, either internally or in a separate party, the social democratic parties that are the main “left” parties, but they do so in a context where the whole political spectrum and public debate is much farther to the left than ours. They do it in countries where workers have greater freedoms, rights and social support, as well as greater class consciousness fostered by those old relic parties.
We need a broad, inclusive party that encompasses the politics of red, green, black, pink and blue; a party with women and people of color at the forefront, that will struggle for queer liberation, where the major labor unions will have an institutional role. We need a real second party that will flank and surpass the Democrats and smash the far right, take on the banks, reign in the corporations and guarantee food, housing and health for all.
Those of us who are farther left and want to take the revolution farther will maintain our separate identity as the Socialist Party (and other formations) and can become loyal opposition, or even outright opposition.
Now building such a party is going to be long and hard and take lots of difficult coalition- and trust-building. What the Socialist Party can do to advance this agenda is two-fold.
First, we need to build our own party. We need to aggressively raise money for our Socialist National Committee to fund and aid our local campaigns, and we need to run more local campaigns where we can. We need our cadre activists to learn how to run campaigns, handle media relations, petition and handle other legal matters and most importantly, to learn how to effectively communicate the Socialist platform to voters. Such experience will make our party more credible, and our calls for a coalition party more impressive. The more skilled our activists are, the more important role that Socialists will play in the infrastructure and message of any mass coalition party.
Second, we need to continually make coalitions with all allies on the left. That means we don’t make enemies on the left; we don’t issue statements denouncing other organizations or banning dual membership. We seek areas of agreement and work together. Here, the comrades who focus more on direct action and education can make, and already have made, tremendous progress making the Socialist Party a respected and welcome ally.
Now, this agenda is national in scope, and while the Socialist Party USA National Convention and National Committee will have a role in establishing the agenda, as well as raising and disbursing SNC funds for efforts its supports and wants to aid, it will largely fall to our state affiliates to translate how this agenda will work on their local level.
For example, in California, the Socialist Party was instrumental in forming a coalition party in 1968, Peace and Freedom, and remains active in it. Peace and Freedom just may become a key building block of the kind of nation-wide coalition party we wish to see, and the comrades in California continue to work within it. Any Socialist Party candidates for public office will run on the Peace and Freedom line. Now, in New Jersey, there is currently less opportunity for coalition campaigns, so the SPNJ runs candidates in its own name. These have, regrettably, tended to be token campaigns (it does only take about 200 signatures to get on the ballot for a legislative seat). In New York, we recently supported the Green Party’s Senate campaign of our own David McReynolds. The initiative was theirs; they asked Cde. McReynolds to run on an anti-war platform as the Green Party candidate. We worked on the campaign and reaped the benefits of some recognition for our party, as well as closer working relationships with the Green Party and its activists.
All three of these strategies have received criticisms from outside their states (most of the criticism came from Massachusetts, in particular), but, again, it is up to the people on the ground to tailor our agenda to their particular laws and politics. Of course, no state party or local can endorse or “fuse” with the institutional capitalist parties, the Democrats and Republicans. No state party or local has. However, individuals may make strategic decisions to support left or insurgent candidates in the Democratic party. These decisions are personal, but if they are made for the sake of building better relationships with the activists who support such candidates and might later support us, then the party is the better for it. Those who criticize such personal decisions of comrades should have the question put to them: what are the party’s goals and how are you advancing them?