thing, elected politicians and unelected high-ranking officeholders in government are often capitalists or beneficiaries of the capitalist order themselves. The average member of Congress, for example, is worth over a million dollars. More importantly, because capitalists have power over the means of production, they have power over what average people need in order to survive—and that power bleeds over into the electoral sphere, where capitalists have an outsized and undemocratic ability to influence what elected officials do and don’t do, and shape political outcomes.
Under capitalism, the only thing worse than being exploited and abused by your boss is not being exploited and abused by your boss, because that means you don’t have a job and thus can’t support yourself and your family. And just as capitalists can fire workers and leave them without the means to survive, capitalists can also withdraw their investments from entire regions or countries, leaving those countries high and dry without jobs and income. This is what’s called capital flight, or in its most retaliatory form, a “capital strike.” Workers can strike by withholding their labor, but capital can also strike by pulling investments.
Because the vast majority of us are dependent on those investments, capitalists have us over a barrel. They can punish governments that enact policies they don’t like, for whatever reason. Did a pro-worker government pass high taxes on corporations to fund social welfare programs, or tell a factory owner to pay workers higher wages and stop poisoning the air and water with noxious emissions? Those corporations can simply pull their investments from that city, state, or country. Capitalists can always take their ball and go play somewhere else; workers and governments can’t.
The result for that government will then almost certainly be a crisis, because without those investments, workers who worked for that corporation could lose their jobs, all the secondary economic markets that were stimulated by that company’s investments will suffer, and the government will lose much-needed tax revenue from those investments. It’s a trump card that capitalists can play against governments whose policies aren’t to their liking. It’s not insurmountable— leftist governments have options open to them like capital controls, which can prevent capitalists from pulling their money out of a given territory. But it makes life for any left party trying to antagonize capitalists very, very tough.
Because of these structural constraints, we can’t simply vote the new world into being. However, socialists can engage in electoral politics in a way that democratically builds the working class’s capacity for self-organization. There are status quo electoral politics—in which social change is entrusted exclusively to elected politicians, left to their own devices after victory—and then there are class-struggle electoral politics.
Class-Struggle Electoral Politics
Class-struggle electoral politics are about using elections to popularize socialist ideas, clarify class lines, energize people to fight on their own, and build movements beyond elections. Running class-struggle electoral campaigns is about empowering the working-class movements that are necessary to remake society.
There’s usually little point in running for office if you’re not trying to win—especially now, when socialist ideas are popular and winning is a real possibility. But class-struggle electoral politics aim to use elections to do three things beyond simply trying to win: raise the expectations of ordinary working people, unite them against a common capitalist enemy, and promote mass working-class movements outside the state.
A class-struggle politician is someone who refuses to accept prevailing ideas about society and insists that a different world is actually possible. All people deserve a good education, a safe and comfortable home, quality health care, clean air and water, and free time to enjoy their lives. But in our society, these things are often luxuries enjoyed only by the rich. Most politicians tell working-class people that it’s impossible for the government to provide these things in full to all people, but that fortunately we can look to the market to fill the gaps. Even those who claim to be sympathetic to achieving a better world often argue that the resources just aren’t there, even as the wealthy make record profits and get huge tax breaks.
Others pay lip service to much-needed reforms as good ideas but claim they are politically impossible, without even fighting for them. This group, to which many liberal American politicians today belong, might say they support some social welfare programs. But they typically insist on complicated, divisive, and often degrading means testing to ensure that only those who “deserve” the benefits get them—all for programs that are woefully insufficient even for those who do receive the benefits. They write off universal social programs as a fantasy. Rahm Emanuel, the Democratic former Chicago mayor and chief of staff for presidents Clinton and Obama who champions the party’s pro-corporate, rightward turn every opportunity he gets, wrote in an October 2019 op-ed against Medicare for All, “Our approach to health care needs to be centered on political reality, not a pipe dream.” After the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton famously denigrated Bernie Sanders’s argument for Medicare for All or free college tuition for all as akin to a promise of giving every American a pony.
With so many politicians dismissing transformative political change in this way, it’s no surprise that many working-class people are resigned to a diminished quality of life. A class-struggle politician aims to turn that resignation into hope and determination. This is what we mean by “raising the expectations of the working class.”
A good example of this in recent decades is the fight for single-payer health care. When Sanders first introduced his version of a single-payer bill to Congress in 1993, he said, “The American people believe that health care must be a right of all citizens and not just the privilege of the wealthy.” He supported the policy before introducing the bill and has supported it since, throughout entire decades during which it was written off as a fantasy. On the campaign trail in 2016, he used his massive platform to convince people that working-class Americans deserve Medicare for All, and that it is completely politically possible to achieve it, as long as ordinary people and politicians alike are prepared to fight for it.
We haven’t won Medicare for All yet, but as overwhelming numbers of Americans now support it—recent polls have regularly found that majorities of people and even occasional majorities of Republicans back a universal public health insurance program—Sanders’s approach has been vindicated.
There’s no better personal example of this transformation in action than the rise of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, the millennial socialist who seemingly out of nowhere won a race for the House of Representatives in 2018. At an October 2019 Sanders rally in Queens, New York, in front of twenty-six thousand people gathered on a sunny day in front of the East River, the Manhattan skyline in the background, Ocasio-Cortez told a story:
Last February I was working as a waitress in downtown Manhattan … I didn’t have health care, I wasn’t being paid a living wage, and I didn’t think that I deserved any of those things. Because that is the script that we tell working people here and all over this country, that your inherent worth and value as a human being is dependent on an income that another person decided to underpay us. But what we’re here to do is to turn around that very basic logic.
It wasn’t until I heard of a man by the name of Bernie Sanders that I began to question and assert and recognize my inherent value as a human being that deserves health care, housing, education, and a living wage.
Sanders did not wait until the idea for Medicare for All had been fully poll-tested and trial-ballooned before beginning to agitate for it. Instead, he stepped out ahead of the populace. He made demands that were ambitious and struck a chord with people and spoke to their suffering—spoke to, for example, the hardship of underpaid young workers like Ocasio-Cortez. In the process, he expanded the horizon of people’s political imaginations.
Still, it’s not enough to make ambitious demands. A class-struggle politician also has to explain why those
