Estimated reading time: 47 minutes
Editor’s Note: With the recent news of the electoral sweep of the DSA candidates in New York City, we found it important to highlight the limitations of electoralism, alongside what historical instances this tool has been effectively used to benefit the communist movement and if it could have that same effect today. While we broadly agree with the author’s conclusions, we encourage our readers to review the recent publicized letters of individuals leaving the PSL, and for readers to disregard the notion that the PSL was ever Marxist-Leninist. Aside from minor copy-edits, we removed the quotes at the very end of the article as we felt that it disturbed an already striking conclusion. The original can be read here.
“Even if only a fairly large minority of the industrial workers, and not “millions” and “legions”, follow the lead of the Catholic clergy—and a similar minority of rural workers follow the landowners and kulaks (Grossbauern)—it undoubtedly signifies that parliamentarianism in Germany has not yet politically outlived itself, that participation in parliamentary elections and in the struggle on the parliamentary rostrum is obligatory on the party of the revolutionary proletariat specifically for the purpose of educating the backward strata of its own class, and for the purpose of awakening and enlightening the undeveloped, downtrodden and ignorant rural masses. Whilst you lack the strength to do away with bourgeois parliaments and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work within them because it is there that you will still find workers who are duped by the priests and stultified by the conditions of rural life; otherwise you risk turning into nothing but windbags.” (V.I. Lenin, Left Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder, emphasis added)
The question of whether Marxists should participate in bourgeois elections has been a topic of significant debate, particularly in the last ten or so years. There has been a surprisingly wide spectrum of ideas presented within this debate, such as advocacy for voting for a Democrat, abstaining from electoral participation entirely, or running third-party candidates through an independent workers’ party.
This piece will use another essay titled, “Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism” as a reference, expanding upon its arguments and offering additional insight. As that essay has already put in the theoretical work for why the first strategy should be discarded outright, we will not revisit that position here. We will, instead, approach this discussion from an adjacent angle, and it is recommended to read through that essay before engaging with this one.
In the United States, there are quite a few Marxist-Leninist parties, and throughout the years, these parties have used participation in bourgeois elections as one of several strategies to advance their party’s program, ideally toward revolution. They base this participation in the works of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.
Lenin’s most unambiguous advocacy is laid out in the opening quote of this essay, but it is worthwhile to share aspects of Marx’s view as well, which is that, even when there is “no prospect of achieving their election,” the working class must put forward candidates in bourgeois elections “to preserve their independence, to gauge their own strength and to bring their revolutionary position and party standpoint to public attention.” Workers, further, must not “be led astray by the empty phrases of the democrats, who will maintain that the workers’ candidates will split the democratic party and offer the forces of reaction the chance of victory” (Karl Marx, Address of the Central Committee to the Communist League).
As such, these parties justify their participation on a few additional grounds. First, that elections draw out a significant number of working-class people, and our participation is theoretically justified in Lenin’s own words as a means of meeting the masses where they are. Second, that these elections present us with an opportunity to agitate and propagandize the masses around the limits of reform and to expose the bourgeois character of the two-party system.
Third, ballot lines build name recognition and recruitment infrastructure for the party itself. Fourth, running candidates is necessary to maintain political independence from the Democratic Party. Fifth, electoral cycles concentrate mass political attention in ways that other arenas do not, rendering them strategic moments for us to intervene, regardless of vote totals.
Lenin himself was one of the strongest advocates for participation in bourgeois elections, as the Bolsheviks themselves participated in them, and he also criticized parties on the European left for their conclusion that bourgeois elections were “obsolete,” arguing that if there were masses of workers still engaged in these elections, then it became obligatory upon communist parties to use them as a means for agitation. Simply because these arenas are reactionary or saturated with bourgeois ideology does not mean that we should refuse to participate in them, and even the significant hurdles that would need to be overcome in order to participate do not mean we should not at least try.
If we graze the surface of the theoretical implications of Lenin’s critique of the European left, we would conclude, as these parties in the US have, that our participation is equally obligatory. This, however, represents a vulgar reading of theory that does little more than recite Lenin’s words and uncritically apply them to one’s own current reality. This reflects the kind of dogmatic application of Marxism-Leninism critiqued by Lenin, Mao, and other theorists.
For this purpose, before we can take this conversation any further, we must contextualize the historical climate in which Left-Wing Communism was written in order to fully understand Lenin’s critiques and to determine whether they remain applicable today.
Contextualizing Left-Wing Communism
In the wake of the success of the Russian Revolution, many of the European communist parties had taken to adopting Lenin’s strategies and applying them, uncritically, to their own circumstances. Lenin found this uncritical application to be rather childish, as it reflected a failure on their part to analyze their own material conditions to determine which, if any, of these strategies would be of use to them.
One such critique was directed at the German and Dutch communists, namely the Communist Workers’ Party of Germany (the KAPD, which had split from the KPD in April 1920), who argued that bourgeois parliaments were “historically obsolete” and that revolutionaries should refuse to participate in elections altogether. The important context here is that the KAPD and its allies were operating in a country where the SPD had been a mass workers’ party for decades, with millions of German workers still voting for social-democratic and Catholic Center parties.
There was already a massive proletarian movement within these political arenas, meaning that the German and Dutch left were operating among a working class with a considerable degree of existing political consciousness. This was particularly true in Germany, which already had one failed attempt at revolution resulting in the deaths of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. So, importantly, these were not your average undifferentiated voters, these were voters who were already operating within an organized system of labor from trade unions to worker cooperatives, maintaining an entire ecosystem that prioritized labor as a political entity.
The KAPD’s decision to boycott participation in bourgeois parliament was short-sighted because it was primarily aesthetic in purpose; that is, it had little to do with an analysis of the masses, and instead rested on the perspective that because the elections were bourgeois in character, any revolutionary party should boycott them on principle alone.
This is what Lenin referred to as infantile.
He agreed that, in principle, bourgeois elections were obsolete insofar as they could not serve as a means to obtain socialism, but he disagreed that they were historically obsolete, particularly when the masses still participated in them in large numbers. Lenin argued that their illusions about parliament were structured around a false consciousness in which these worker parties would somehow lead to socialism.
The task of Marxists was to participate within these elections because the German left held significant influence over the workers, and that influence could be utilized to redirect their consciousness away from bourgeois elections and toward revolution as the only viable path to socialism.
The same was also somewhat true for Lenin and his party. It is important, however, to focus on the structural function of their participation in these elections, as it speaks significantly to their strategy. The six Bolshevik deputies who were elected to the Fourth Duma in 1912 had legal parliamentary immunity for any speeches given inside the chamber.
They could make revolutionary declarations from the rostrum that would have been criminally prosecutable if delivered anywhere else in Russia, and this, in turn, legally permitted their press networks to publish these speeches and distribute them to the masses.
These declarations included speeches written by Lenin from his exile, in which they openly denounced the tsar, called for his overthrow, and urged the public toward revolutionary socialism. The deputies also received worker delegations in the Duma building, used their parliamentary salaries and travel allowances to fund underground party work, and used their immunity to facilitate communication between legal and illegal party activity.
Further, the structural elements of the Duma and the German Reichstag were wholly, functionally different from the electoral systems of today. The Russian Duma was a legislative body created by the tsar in 1905, after mass revolutionary pressure forced him to concede limited representative government, with seats divided among four separate voting classes that weighted landowners far above workers. The Weimar Reichstag was the central legislature of Germany after the 1918 revolution overthrew the monarchy, and it allocated seats through proportional representation, meaning that roughly 60,000 votes was enough to acquire a seat for the party.
The Bolsheviks were a faction inside the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, which was already a recognized party in the Duma system, and recognized parties needed only to put forward candidates directly within each voting class without needing to overcome additional barriers to appear before the electorate. In the Reichstag, any recognized party could submit a ranked list of candidates, and if that list received the votes necessary for a single seat, the first candidate on the list took office, meaning that a party with even minimal working-class support could send representatives to parliament!
The political climate in which Lenin released Left-Wing Communism was one of immense revolutionary potential. It was a climate that had just emerged from the First World War, a moment in which socialism, communism, Marxism, and “democratic socialism” were dominating the political sphere among the working class. So while the workers themselves still harbored “parliamentary illusions,” the broader political climate was ripe for revolution and necessitated the participation of communists in order to quickly dispel these illusions and harness the revolutionary potential of the (already organized) working class.
The Road to Hell is Paved with Liberal Intentions
Now, we hope that it is becoming more apparent why this historical context is relevant and why it would seem that it doesn’t map clearly onto our present conditions in the United States. Before we elaborate on that point, we should also make clear that there are a number of contingencies that have been laid out for us to understand not only if our participation in bourgeois elections is justified, but what our primary objectives as Marxists should be in the first place.
Foundational to Lenin’s classic polemics is the insistence on a clear division between communists and the opportunistic, social-chauvinists who had co-opted the term “socialism,” and on the corresponding necessity that communists clearly identify themselves as such. Lenin had observed that socialism was already being captured by those who wished to steer revolutionary politics into that of reform, thereby betraying the working class. In a piece written on the 25th anniversary of Marx’s death, Lenin wrote about how Marxism had emerged as such a revolutionary ideology that it completely transformed the political landscape and captured the hearts and minds of the working class.
He observed that the “dialectics of history were such that the theoretical victory of Marxism compels its enemies to disguise themselves as Marxists. Liberalism, rotten within, tried to revive itself in the form of socialist opportunism” (V.I. Lenin, Marxism and Revisionism). Lenin argues that this is due to capitalism reproducing itself in the form of the petite bourgeois, that is, those who have yet to challenge the capitalist hegemonic mentality into which they have been indoctrinated.
Mao Zedong similarly wrote about the difficulties of overcoming liberalism, stating that liberals “approve of Marxism, but are not prepared to practise it or to practise it in full… they talk Marxism but practise liberalism” (Mao Zedong, Combat Liberalism), and that whether wittingly or unwittingly, they serve as enemies of Marxism and push the party toward reform.
This would be proven correct in August 1914, when the parties of the Second International (most notably the SPD in Germany) voted to approve war credits for their respective national bourgeoisies at the outbreak of the First World War, betraying the international working class in the crisis where their support was most needed.
Lenin identified this betrayal as the co-optation of the communist movement by opportunists, those who represent “a section of the petty bourgeoisie and of a certain strata of the working class who have been bribed out of imperialist superprofits and converted to watchdogs of capitalism and corruptors of the labour movement,” what Lenin would call the “labor aristocracy.” These opportunists would infiltrate the communist parties, achieving ranks high enough that “the proletariat allows itself to be led by men bought by, or at least paid by, the bourgeoisie” (V.I. Lenin, Imperialism and the Split in Socialism)
Lenin wrote in his foundational work What Is to Be Done? that we should judge these people by their actions and by what they actually advocate for through their words. In doing this, we will very quickly realize who is interested in introducing “bourgeois ideas and bourgeois elements into socialism.” And in another of Lenin’s foundational works, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he explains in the preface how, due to the success of Marxism, the bourgeoisie had moved to turn Marx and Engels into “harmless icons” while also “robbing the revolutionary theory of its substance, blunting its revolutionary edge and vulgarizing it.”
The reason we call all of this to the reader’s attention is that there are within these passages an implicit yet obvious conclusion, which is that those of us who identify as Marxist-Leninists must ensure that our revolutionary platforms are not compromised by opportunists or social-chauvinists who seek to flatten the revolutionary character of our message. This requires us drawing a clear line of demarcation between our message and that of the social chauvinists and opportunists. We must clearly identify as communists, and our agitprop must be overtly revolutionary in character.
This is also stated rather explicitly in the conditions for entrance into the Third Communist International, and although these are rather lengthy, we should like to provide several of them below, as they are of the utmost importance for the formulation of our argument:
“1. Day-by-day propaganda and agitation must be genuinely communist in character. All press organs belonging to the parties must be edited by reliable Communists who have given proof of their devotion to the cause of the proletarian revolution. The dictatorship of the proletariat should not be discussed merely as a stock phrase to be learned by rote; it should be popularised in such a way that the practical facts systematically dealt with in our press day by day will drive home to every rank-and-file working man and working woman, every soldier and peasant, that it is indispensable to them.
2. Any organisation that wishes to join the Communist International must consistently and systematically dismiss reformists and “Centrists” from positions of any responsibility in the working-class movement (party organisations, editorial boards, trade unions, parliamentary groups, co-operative societies, municipal councils, etc.), replacing them by reliable Communists. The fact that in some cases rank-and-file workers may at first have to replace “experienced” leaders should be no deterrent.
3. In countries where a state of siege or emergency legislation makes it impossible for Communists to conduct their activities legally, it is absolutely essential that legal and illegal work should be combined. In almost all the countries of Europe and America, the class struggle is entering the phase of civil war. In these conditions, Communists can place no trust in bourgeois legality. They must everywhere build up a parallel illegal organisation, which, at the decisive moment, will be in a position to help the Party fulfil its duty to the revolution.
5. Regular and systematic agitation is indispensable in the countryside. The working class cannot consolidate its victory without support from at least a section of the farm labourers and poor peasants, and without neutralising, through its policy, part of the rest of the rural population… To forgo this work or entrust it to unreliable semi-reformist elements is tantamount to renouncing the proletarian revolution.
6. It is the duty of any party wishing to belong to the Third International to expose, not only avowed social-patriotism, but also the falsehood and hypocrisy of social-pacifism. It must systematically demonstrate to the workers that, without the revolutionary overthrow of capitalism, no international arbitration courts, no talk about a reduction of armaments, no “democratic” reorganisation of the League of Nations will save mankind from new imperialist wars.
11. It is the duty of parties wishing to join the Third International to re-examine the composition of their parliamentary groups, eliminate unreliable elements and effectively subordinate these groups to the Party Central Committees. They must demand that every Communist proletarian should subordinate all his activities to the interests of truly revolutionary propaganda and agitation.
18. In view of the foregoing, parties wishing to join the Communist International must change their name. Any party seeking affiliation must call itself the Communist Party of the country in question (Section of the Third, Communist International). The question of a party’s name is not merely a formality, but a matter of major political importance. The Communist International has declared a resolute war on the bourgeois world and all yellow Social-Democratic parties. The difference between the Communist parties and the old and official “Social-Democratic”, or “socialist”, parties, which have betrayed the banner of the working class, must be made absolutely clear to every rank-and-file worker.”
We must understand that this document represents one of the most authoritative texts in Lenin’s entire body of work, including What Is to Be Done?, with even Left-Wing Communism, written the same year, being subordinate to the terms laid out within this piece. The Twenty-One Conditions are the formal institutional codification of how Lenin’s tactical arguments in Left-Wing Communism were supposed to be applied.
Both of these works were written after the success of the October Revolution, after the collapse of the Second International in which the opportunists betrayed the communists, and after Lenin’s ample experience dealing with the social-chauvinists and opportunists who had repeatedly attempted to infiltrate and co-opt his revolutionary program in favor of revisionist bourgeois reformism.
These points represent a formula that was put forward in opposition to a period that sought to completely strip Marxism of its revolutionary character. When we place Left-Wing Communism within the context of these points, it becomes quite clear that any party seeking to participate in bourgeois elections must, at the very least, be overtly communist in name and in message. This includes drawing a clear line of demarcation between the social democrats and the communists, agitating openly toward the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat, and even seeking to expose and purge social democrats from other organizations and replace them with communists.
It also highlights the importance of using elections as one of many tactics rather than a primary one, and emphasizes the importance of pairing legal work with illegal work. Arguably most importantly for our purposes, there is a direct callout from Lenin that acknowledges that America is heading toward civil war (which remains true today), and that in periods of emergency or where the bourgeoisie has made it nearly impossible to conduct our work, we should place no faith in legal mechanisms and should direct most of our efforts toward illegal forms of organization.
It could be argued that our present conditions allow us to conduct considerably more work legally than in Lenin’s time, but regardless, we must understand that electoral participation is incomplete if it is not paired with alternative primary strategies.
Without any of this, and without waging a continual battle against opportunists, without recognizing them as the threat they truly are, we end up in the situation Lenin describes when he writes that “such a mistaken, inconsistent, or spineless attitude towards the opportunist parliamentarians gives rise to ‘Left-wing’ communism, on the one hand, and to a certain extent justifies its existence, on the other.”
In other words, a communist party that participates in elections while tolerating opportunist parliamentarians and softening its communist character almost justifies the left-communist rejection of parliamentarism altogether. Effectively, there is no point in our participation in bourgeois elections unless these contingencies are being met.
The Symptoms of Opportunism
We might have noticed some other contingencies within the points listed above that seem somewhat irrelevant to the discussion of bourgeois elections, which we will revisit momentarily. First, we must understand what opportunism is and why it poses such a significant threat to Marxist-Leninist parties.
It might seem, upon first glance, that an opportunist is someone who knowingly co-opts socialist movements to steer them toward reform. But this is not the case, no, opportunists are often those who are sincerely dedicated to the party. As Lenin put it, the opportunist “does not betray his party, he does not act as a traitor, he does not desert it. He continues to serve it sincerely and zealously. But his typical and characteristic trait is that he yields to the mood of the moment, he is unable to resist what is fashionable, he is politically short-sighted and spineless. Opportunism means sacrificing the permanent and essential interests of the party to momentary, transient and minor interests.”
The opportunist is most dangerous because they appear as dedicated, loyal comrades, and it isn’t their loyalty that we call into question! It is their inconsistent, short-sighted, and unprincipled strategies that sacrifice the long-term project of proletarian revolution by getting lost in reacting to the current moment. While no serious communist would argue against responding to the changing political tide, by Lenin’s own standards this responsiveness is opportunistic if it isn’t grounded in a consistent long-term strategy and vision.
The damage this produces is often irreversible, once the opportunists have unconsciously guided the party toward short-sighted small wins and reforms, Lenin tells us, it is likely impossible to correct course. Those who would be most likely to aid in the change of course have either left, been worn down, or been gradually shaped by the new revisionist norms.
Social-chauvinism is a form of opportunism, but it largely involves prioritizing one’s own bourgeoisie over the interests of the international working class, including support for war, or support for policies put forth by the Democratic Party that do not serve the long-term interests of the working class, or even a refusal to build solidarity internationally with other communist parties. This is the ultimate result of opportunism, that the proletarian movement gets actively mobilized in support of the bourgeoisie’s project, lending its organizational weight and ideological authority to the achievement of their goals.
The symptoms of opportunism appear in the form of tailism, which is characterized by continually tailing after the spontaneous consciousness of the working class without guiding them a step further. The working class will naturally and inevitably diagnose many problems within their society and react to them through spontaneous uprisings such as protests, strikes, and the like.
However, without guidance, these spontaneous uprisings often dwindle into nothing, with everyone returning to their lives as normal. This is because the working class has not yet achieved the political consciousness necessary to turn spontaneity into revolutionary change, and the bourgeoisie’s ideology remains intrinsic to their ability to approach and solve problems.
If we only seek to echo their ideas rather than systematize them into a strategy that elevates their consciousness, we are “meeting them where they’re at,” but only to keep them there. Mao explains the process of this systematization where he says that we should “take the ideas of the masses (scattered and unsystematic ideas) and concentrate them (through study turn them into concentrated and systematic ideas), then go to the masses and propagate and explain these ideas until the masses embrace them as their own” (Mao Zedong, Some Questions Concerning Methods of Leadership).
The masses are not without understanding, and we should have faith in their ability to diagnose problems even if their solutions are disorganized or not yet of an elevated consciousness. Therefore, we should absolutely listen to them. But we should not tail after them and presume that whatever has their attention is where they are at consciously.
Lenin is highly critical of this tailist strategy as well, explaining that remaining subservient to spontaneity “seems to inspire a fear of taking even one step away from what is ‘accessible’ to the masses, a fear of rising too high above mere subservience to the immediate and direct requirements of the masses” (V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?). We should note that Lenin is not making a moralistic claim that tailism is bad because it isn’t “radical enough.”
He is making a structural claim that any deference to spontaneous mass consciousness, due to the character of bourgeois ideological dominance, automatically strengthens bourgeois influence within the proletarian movement. For example, continually using slogans that replace “capitalism” with “billionaires” will reaffirm what the masses already understand, that billionaires are a detriment to working people, rather than pointing to why billionaires exist in the first place and how to wage struggle against them.
Additionally, if a Marxist party allows the masses ebbing consciousness to guide their strategy, they will have to continually pivot and wind up sacrificing longer term strategies for shorter term ones (and in doing so, you also sacrifice the trust of the community by failing to prove your commitment to them long term).
On the other end of the spectrum of symptoms of opportunism, we have commandism, where we ourselves are far ahead of the masses and begin issuing orders, demanding actions, expecting compliance, without doing the patient work of earning the trust of the masses through dialogue, commitment, and meeting their material needs. This characteristic is typical of parties who are ideologically clear but have totally lost their connection to the actual consciousness of the masses they are supposed to be leading.
The danger comes when a party becomes isolated from the class it claims to represent, issuing communiqués nobody is listening to, planning actions nobody will join, becoming a self-enclosed sect rather than the leading detachment of a proletarian class-war. For this, Mao’s solution is to put down the theory and go to the masses as students to learn from them.
All of these things, commandism, tailism, opportunism, and social-chauvinism, ultimately steer the party (and the masses) toward liberalism. We can understand how the short-sighted perspective of voting for the “lesser of two evils” has progressively shifted the entire American political consciousness further to the right. When we continually make short-sighted compromises that do not serve a longer-term strategy, we will ultimately make the same mistake of shifting our own political consciousness further right toward liberalism.
Within this, we have “progressive” liberals and “Social-Democrats” who co-opt revolutionary language entirely to distort what socialism actually is. That is why Communist parties tailing after the working class rather than taking them a step further wind up making our platforms indistinguishable from those of a counter-revolutionary social democrat.
Commandism similarly operates by making top-down commands that are detached from the political consciousness and material needs of the masses, often instructing cadre to adopt strategies that are out of sync with the needs of a community, and this in turn creates confusion and distrust.
We might be inclined to give individual opportunists the benefit of the doubt, and while we certainly should not call someone’s intentions into question without basis, their actions can irreparably harm the proletariat even if unintentionally. Marxism-Leninism is a science, a means of diagnosing the problems in our society and identifying exactly what would need to happen to address them.
We understand that capitalism (and a system built around capitalism) cannot be reformed, must be captured by the proletariat, and that revolutionary consciousness must be actively constructed by a cadre of dedicated revolutionaries to dismantle it. This is what distinguishes Marxism-Leninism from every other kind of leftism.
When we flatten the message into one that is more “palatable” to the masses, we are ultimately betraying the solution to our diagnosis and transforming it into something else entirely. Lenin wrote that there is “no revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory” (V.I. Lenin, What Is To Be Done?), and that theory itself comes from the praxis of previous revolutionaries who took the time to write down the problems they encountered along the way with the solutions to address them.
By studying revolutionary theory and revolutionary history from the perspectives of revolutionaries, we can learn from how they identified and addressed problems. Today Western Marxists experience a proliferation of opportunism that is the result of a nearly century-long project to obfuscate socialism, dilute it, and literally kill revolutionaries and the potential they carried.
The trend toward anti-intellectualism is significant in driving the idea that we, as revolutionaries, do not need theory. We absolutely need theory if we claim to be revolutionaries, and it is our job to turn theory into praxis and bring it to the masses in a way that treats the masses as capable of understanding it. And we have to have confidence in the masses, rather than paternalize them or treat ourselves as heroes who are there to save them.
Why Elections Are a Failed Strategy
Bringing all of this back to our overarching discussion of American Marxist parties’ participation in bourgeois elections, we can pretty clearly see that the historical context in which Lenin advocated for participation in bourgeois elections is entirely different from the political climate today.
The actual structures of the Duma and the German Reichstag were wholly and entirely different from our pseudo-representative “democracy,” and the amount of time, money, and resources that are required just to get past all of the red tape for a chance at participating in elections is drastically different from the relative lack of barriers that the Germans and Russians had to overcome in their time.
American Marxist-Leninist parties must acquire hundreds of thousands of signatures, tens of millions of dollars in funding, and dedicate tens of thousands of hours campaigning within the four-year election cycle just to be able to throw their hat in the ring. The American political system is designed entirely to keep legitimate socialist candidates off of the ballot, and the internal red tape is structured to prevent us from using the system against itself (if we were miraculously able to win an election).
Decades of red-scare propaganda and additional measures to restrict ballot access and voter access (redlining, gerrymandering, etc) add further barriers that need to be overcome that our revolutionary predecessors never encountered. Further, when we look across the actual platforms of the candidates running in these elections, what we notice is that their campaign platforms are indistinguishable from those of any other “progressive” candidate.
Let us take a look at the campaigns of two candidates from the 2026 Gubernatorial Election in California. The two explicitly socialist candidates are Ramsey Robinson, running through the Peace and Freedom Party, and Butch Ware, running through the Green Party. Ramsey Robinson is a member of the Party for Socialism and Liberation, which is a Marxist-Leninist party that believes the “only solution to the deepening crisis of capitalism is the socialist transformation of society.” (PSL website)
Butch Ware is an independent running through the Green Party but describes himself as a “movement builder, an activist, educator, and organizer.” Ware is obviously further left than many demsocs but he is certainly not a Marxist-Leninist. Robinson, being a PSL member, upholds the values of his party as laid out in their party program.
When we look at each candidate’s platform on their campaign websites, we notice an astounding similarity between the two. Robinson’s campaign slogan is “A California for the people, not the billionaires,” while Ware’s slogan is “We’re fighting for a California that serves you, not the corporations.”
Already, we notice their slogans are effectively the exact same. When we dive into the actual platform each candidate is running on, they are nearly identical. Both Robinson and Ware are advocating to end California’s housing crisis, single-payer CalCare, free education, protection of immigrant rights, and divestment from “israel,” among other similar points.
Each platform is structured around reforming capitalism and disciplining it through taxation, minimum wage increases, outlawing corporate bribes, and similar measures. Every single thing within these campaign points operates within the capitalist system, rather than putting forward any real solution to challenge or dismantle it.
Ware, at least, acknowledges this by explaining that his campaign’s reforms are a form of “direct action” aimed at meeting the needs of working-class people, though we disagree with this perspective entirely. Robinson’s platform, however, doesn’t even explain the pandering toward systems of reform, with the closest thing to agitation being an option to “get involved,” which states that it’s “going to take more than one election to fight the billionaire agenda. Join us in building a socialist movement: together we can make a California for all of us.”
What is concerning here is that one of these candidates is a Marxist-Leninist who should be advocating for the complete abolition of the bourgeois state instead of lightly disciplining the capitalists within it. Yet, in order to even ascertain that this candidate is a communist would require significat digging, and his platform certainly is not revolutionary or even explicitly socialist in anything other than name.
After sitting through dozens of interviews and social media reels, it can be concluded that while Ware’s politics are somewhat inconsistent depending on who he’s talking to, it cannot be denied that his language is more overtly socialist (even when his platform is not) than that of the Marxist-Leninist candidate.
Now, when we compare both of these candidates’ platforms to that of Bernie Sanders (a liberal zionist from the DSA) in 2020, his campaign similarly advocated for universal single-payer healthcare, free education, immigrant reform, and other similar issues, with the most notably absent being divestment from “israel.” Ware and Robinson’s platforms are very subtly but noticeably further left than Sanders, but the undeniable overlap in similarity is extremely alarming, and not recognizable by the general public. The platform of the Marxist-Leninist is indistinguishable from those of two other non-ML candidates.
We should recall that Lenin, rightfully, stated that we should analyze someone based on what they advocate for and what they actually do, not on what they say in interviews and on social media. Sanders exposed himself as a zionist shill of the bourgeoisie repeatedly by voting in favor of arming the apartheid state, voting for pro-war measures, and similar betrayals. While Robinson and Ware have not yet achieved an electoral position that we can measure against, we should understand that their platforms neither challenge the capitalist system nor advocate for dismantling it entirely.
It can certainly be argued that calling for the overthrow of the government as a slogan for governor would indeed likely alienate many working-class people who are not quite ready for such “extreme” revolutionary language, and could also pose legal consequences. However, there are a great many ways to elevate the consciousness of the masses within these confines without pandering to outright reformism!
There is a congressional candidate in Texas who called for converting ICE detention centers into prisons for zionists, which is hilarious and outlandish in a way that quickly revealed the reactionary nature of AOC and other politicians, and is suprisingly a more effective way of exposing the cracks in the capitalist duopoly.
Now, the defense from most Marxist-Leninist parties is that they don’t run in elections to win, but to forward their platform, recruit candidates, etc. Our criticisms would not change regardless of if they sought to win or lose these elections, and arguably their participation makes significantly less sense if the objective isn’t to win.
To campaign on a platform without intending to act on it is to lie to the general public, who (according to the duopoly) is already “wasting” their vote by putting confidence in a communist candidate, and it is a betrayal to that confidence by running on platforms that give no indication of this strategy. The masses need to trust us, and this doesn’t build trust.
These parties are also wasting significant amounts of resources on these campaigns just to lose them. And the individuals they do manage to recruit into their party will likely not understand the difference between scientific socialism and Bernie Sanders’ distortion of “socialism,” which isn’t to say that they cannot learn, but recruiting them on false pretenses is not the way to attract the dedicated, professional revolutionaries of Lenin’s vanguard party.
And just as a side note, Lenin did not lose elections. In fact, the Bolsheviks won six seats in the Fourth Duma in 1912, and as we’ve discussed, despite living under the tsar, openly called for his violent overthrow.
Communist parties in the United States have been participating in elections at the local and federal level for over a century. When we analyze the statistics on what portion of the working-class vote we are able to win and how often we win, the results are genuinely depressing. Eugene Debs’ 1912 Socialist Party run remains the most successful at roughly 900,000 votes (about 6% of all votes), and CPUSA candidate William Z. Foster managed only 102,991 votes (0.26%) in 1932 in the midst of the Great Depression, when conditions for socialist win should have been perfect.
While the PSL’s 2024 presidential campaign did secure the most votes for a socialist candidate in nearly a century (roughly 167,000 votes, or 0.11% of the total), as we have explained, assuming that this correlates to a genuine interest in revolutionary socialism is short-sighted and opportunistic. The material conditions of the 2024 election had significantly more to do with that number of voters than any actual interest in socialism or communism itself.
The most damning aspect of our participation, however, is what “Towards a Marxist Stance on Electoralism” pointed out. Those who participate in elections at the local and federal level are typically those who belong to the labor aristocracy.
According to this article, while the average voter turnout from the 2020 presidential elections was about 63%, “turnout among households with a family income of 75 thousand to 99 thousand dollars per year, 100 thousand to 149 thousand dollars per year, and 150+ thousand dollars per year turned out at rates that were well above the average (72%, 77%, and 80% respectively) and in much greater numbers than lower income brackets.” The article continues, explaining that these “upper income brackets should correlate roughly with the Labor Aristocracy, the Petty-Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie proper.” Their conclusion, which we wholeheartedly agree with, is outlined below:
“Firstly, the kinds of people who are likely to turn out for elections in the US are unlikely to support Communism barring a massive decrease in the living standards of most of these people. As stated earlier in this essay, most likely voters in the US come from the American Labor Aristocracy, Petty-Bourgeoisie, and Bourgeoisie. These groups do not have any natural inclinations to support Communism. They have either carved out a precarious yet comfortable place for themselves within the Capitalist system, as in the case of the Labor Aristocracy, benefit directly from the Capitalist system, as in the case of the Bourgeoisie or Capitalist Class, or fall somewhere between these two poles, as in the case of the Petty-Bourgeoisie. Meanwhile, the most exploited, and therefore more inclined to support Communism, segments of American society turn out not only in lower percentages than the more Bourgeois classes, but also in lower overall numbers. This is especially telling since the more exploited classes represent a far larger segment of American society… When taken with the fact that the social classes of Capitalist society tend to be segregated into separate communities, making concrete efforts at targeted community outreach, going to the Proletariat and trying to meet its needs while also educating and organizing it, is a far more concrete strategy than running a political campaign and hoping that you catch the attention of some portion of the Proletariat. In this regard, the “survival programs” of the Black Panthers should be taken as a model for any political group organizing towards Proletarian Revolution in the US.” (emphasis added)
Again, we might encounter pushback from someone who would insist that the Black Panther Party also participated in electoral politics. And indeed, they participated in bourgeois elections, specifically Bobby Seale’s 1973 mayoral campaign and Elaine Brown’s 1975 city council campaign.
However, before running campaigns, the Black Panthers spent almost a decade engaging in mass organizing initiatives through their survival programs and self-defense programs, and had garnered the attention of mainstream media, which granted them national name recognition in addition to the respect and trust they had cultivated within their own communities.
Their participation also came after the FBI spent years systematically crushing their movement and momentum, reducing their ability to engage in self-defense programs and their survival programs, and had already assassinated much of their leadership. Electoralism for the Black Panthers was one of their last legal forms of party work that they could engage in. In addition, these elections were used as organizing platforms for their survival programs (sickle cell testing happened during Seale’s campaign), and were subordinated to the rest of the mass work that constituted the actual base of the party’s politics.
While the Black Panthers contain many lessons for us to draw from, their evolution as a party took time to form and was not always explicitly Marxist-Leninist. One thing they correctly identified, which we should take time to discuss, is the group of people in the United States with the most revolutionary potential, the lumpenproletariat. First, let us break down some statistics expanding upon the figures above.
The author correctly pointed out the correlation between those who actually turn up to vote and having a higher income, but let us put this figure into more context. Out of the roughly 183 million U.S. workers, about 42.3 million (23.1%) made at least $100,000 in 2024, which means roughly 140 million individual workers, about 77%, earned less than $100,000 per year (both figures from the 2024 U.S. Census). Over 90% of employed workers earn their living through wage labor (BLS, 2025).
There are almost 800,000 people experiencing homelessness on a single night according to the HUD 2024 Annual Homelessness Assessment Report. There are roughly 23 million non-citizen adults living in the United States, with 14 million of those being undocumented immigrants (Pew Research Center, July 2023), and 4 million formerly incarcerated people with felonies (The Sentencing Project, “Locked Out 2024”), representing 27 million people who are legally barred from voting in the United States.
When we look at the voting statistics from 2024, we can see that voters earning under $100,000 make up only 42% of voter turnout, with that number decreasing to 16% for voters earning under $50,000 (PRRI, “Breaking Down the Differences Between Voters and Non-Voters in the 2024 Election,” May 2025). Roughly half of all adults earning under $50,000 did not vote in 2024, and half of all adults earning under $100,000 did not vote in 2024. That is over 100 million eligible voters who did not vote. For comparison, only about 22% of adults earning $100,000 or more did not vote.
These numbers are quite staggering, and their complexity gets even worse when we factor in other demographics such as age, ethnicity, and location. It should be incredibly obvious that the Marxist-Leninist parties, who claim to represent the interests of the Proletariat (those who have nothing to sell but their labor power), are spending millions of dollars and thousands of hours to platform watered-down socialism to predominantly white voters aged 45 and over who earn $100,000 or more annually, the labor aristocracy, historically the least likely to give a communist the time of day let alone join in their “movement.” The Proletariat and lumpenproletariat, roughly 65% and 8% of the U.S. population respectively, are indeed the least likely to turn up to the polls whether it comes to local or federal elections.
Frantz Fanon, in The Wretched of the Earth, explained that “it is among these masses, in the people of the shanty towns and in the lumpenproletariat that the insurrection will find its urban spearhead. The lumpenproletariat, this cohort of starving men, divorced from tribe and clan, constitutes one of the most spontaneously and radically revolutionary forces of a colonized people.”
He also explained that these factions of people, who have already been pushed to the outskirts of society, systematically excluded from participating in the system and often abused by it, already understand how broken the system is and are willing to challenge it. “So the pimps, the hooligans, the unemployed, and the petty criminals, urged on from behind, throw themselves into the struggle for liberation like stout working men.” Further, it is of the utmost importance that revolutionaries get to the lumpenproletariat first, because the bourgeoisie “will also find in the lumpenproletariat a considerable space for manoeuvring.”
In Sum, Put Away the Fucking Ballots
In conclusion, it is evident that after over a century of participation in bourgeois elections, they have not produced any meaningful results, by any possible metric, at urging the working class toward political consciousness. In fact, by taking more than a superficial glance into the justifications these parties make for their participation in bourgeois elections, we find that they have neither a theoretical nor a material leg to stand on to justify their continual use.
By every possible metric, our participation is a failure, an astounding misappropriation of passionate revolutionaries’ time, money, and energy that is drilled into a completely feckless endeavor. When we look into the amount of money that these campaigns require, it becomes more than just a silly oversight of party leadership to continue this failed strategy, and becomes a deliberate, opportunistic strategy to thwart any revolutionary change.
More concerning, revolutionary language, to this day, is flattened into that of reformism and revisionism, despite Lenin’s diagnosis over 100 years ago. While many (though not all) Marxist-Leninist parties take the “correct” geopolitical stances, and have astute material analysis in their publications, when we look at their actual organizational efforts and what they advocate for, it becomes evident that these are not serious revolutionary parties.
This should not discourage any revolutionaries within these parties, or those who have considered joining them, but these revolutionary Marxists should take up reading theory as a preventative measure against allowing their hearts and minds to be corrupted by opportunism, and understand that it is their duty to fight opportunism!
What we can also take from this long-winded critique that there is a clear path forward. But we simply do not have the time to continue to recycle failed strategies and to tiptoe around the sensitivities of the comrades or leaders who have engaged in these strategies. It is time to stop organizing the labor aristocracy, the liberals who show up to No Kings protests, the engineers who work from home, and the suburban neo-liberals who love to “two things can be true at once” us into war.
While these groups are always welcome to prove themselves as comrades to the struggle and to join in our efforts toward revolution, it is evident that our primary focus should be foremost on the lumpenproletariat and the proletariat, those who are disengaged from elections and left behind by society.
Given the bloody century of feckless endeavors by American Marxists, a good place to start is by going to these communities and learning from them, and gradually working to earn their trust by meeting their needs (using the Panther’s as a template, forging it’l solidarity along the way) and being consistently devout to the proletarian struggle. It is our job to have faith in these comrades’ ability to intrinsically understand their own exploitation, and to present them with a means to become the tools of their own liberation.
Further, we MUST distance ourselves from the progressive liberals, the social democrats, the pseudo “socialists,” and all other social-chauvinists and opportunists who have co-opted the term socialism to obfuscate and confuse the true nature of it. This clear line of demarcation is necessary to ensure that our solution to the diagnosis of capitalism (and the proletariat’s clear understanding of such) stands in stark contrast to the feckless measures that will reproduce systems of suffering.
There is only one solution.
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