Block, squander, disorganize?

Max Elbaum departed from the norms of comradely debate in “Profiles in Political Cowardice,” in which he attacks Tempest and the DSA leadership for not voting and campaigning for Kamala Harris. Why he stooped to macho posturing about courage, cowardice, and toughness in political strategy and tactics is between him and his comrades.

I could respond by simply calling attention to the betrayal of anti-imperialism, internationalism, and solidarity, i.e. what ought to be fundamental socialist principles, in campaigning for Kamala Harris. After all, the Biden/Harris administration is not just passively “complicit” in Israel’s genocidal slaughter of Palestinians, as Elbaum claims, but is actually an active co-partner in it. If that greatest crime against humanity is not a red line against supporting the lesser evil, nothing ever will be, guaranteeing that the Left will remain hostage to the Democrats from here to eternity.

But I won’t continue down that path of calumny; whatever our disagreements, we have no choice but to collaborate together in a common struggle against the far right, the predatory capitalist class, and its main party, the Democrats. So, we must have debates in a fashion that does not unnecessarily burn bridges as the New Left did in the 1960s and 1970s and impede essential united fronts against our enemies.

Old, corked wine in new bottles

So, I will address the substantive core of the argument Elbaum has laid out in far more temperate articles, which can be summarized in his slogan, “Block and Build.” He contends that the Left must not only vote for Harris but spend our time, money, and energy to elect her, block Trump and the GOP, and then build the Left, class struggle, and social movements against the Democrats in power.

Far from being some bold new strategy, Elbaum’s position is one that has been hegemonic on the Left since the Communist Party abandoned independent working-class politics to support the Democratic Party in the 1930s. For a time, the New Left of the 1960s seemed poised to break from it, only to be led by social democrats like Michael Harrington and former “Marxists-Leninists” in the New Communist Movement on a long march back into the Democratic Party. The Left’s collapse into the Democratic Party compromised the independent organization of class and social struggles, subordinated movements to elections, and forced it to abandon demands it once fought for.

Ever since, the Left has pursued various attempts to transform or use the Democratic Party—realignment, a surrogate party, and an ever-deferred plan for a “dirty break.” Elbaum’s “Block and Build” is only the latest incarnation of the Left’s standard strategy. It is not one developed for this particular election but has been the common sense position of the Left for 90 years. It is at best old, corked wine in a new bottle.

His articles may have won plaudits, likes, and reprints from liberals, NGO executives, union officials, and progressive Democrats—who all too often have a material interest in the pursuit of this strategy— but the path Elbaum advocates has utterly failed in the past and will fail again today. It will not block the right, it will not build the resistance to the Democrats, and it will certainly not lead to the formation of a new socialist party.

Prisoners of two capitalist parties

Elbaum opens his piece by rightly depicting the challenging situation in which socialists in the U.S. find ourselves today. We are small, largely disorganized, and are only just beginning to rebuild our social base in the working class and oppressed groups. We do not have a social democratic party let alone a revolutionary one.

But, if anything, Elbaum’s contention that “our country’s political structures are formidable barriers to radical change” is an understatement. He argues that we face a Republican Party with “an authoritarian MAGA block that incorporates openly fascist elements” and a Democratic Party that offers “an alternative agenda” but has “caved to right-wing fear mongering on immigrants.”

While his characterization of the GOP is basically right, his portrait of the Democrats is not. The Democrats are not a “cross class coalition” or a social democratic party, but a capitalist one, and they do not offer any kind of alternative socialists should support. They are bankrolled by big business, tightly controlled by a party bureaucracy dedicated to preserving the system (remember Nancy Pelosi proudly declaring “we’re capitalist”) and committed to enforcing U.S. imperial rule. They are institutionally  impervious to reform from the Left.

Up until the rise of Trump, the Democrats had been the ruling class’s B Team, which it trotted out on the field when its A Team, the GOP, had discredited itself. The Democrats’ role has been to co-opt and neutralize the Left, unions, and social movements and prevent the formation of any kind of left-wing alternative and channel such resistance back into the confines of the two-party system.

Liz Cheney’s Democratic Party

But now, with the GOP dominated by an erratic wannabe dictator whose crackpot economic ideas would undermine U.S. capitalism and imperialism, the ruling class—importantly including its foreign policy and national security apparatus—looks to the Democratic Party as its A Team. Its agenda under the Biden/Harris administration has not been to provide a progressive alternative, but to refurbish U.S. capitalism, restore U.S. imperialist hegemony against China and Russia, and re-impose the establishment’s legitimacy against challenges both from the right and Left.

Anyone who doubts that characterization should watch or rewatch Harris’ debate with Trump. While she pledged to restore the status quo ante on abortion rights and objected to her opponent’s racist rants and record, she spent the bulk of her time spouting right-wing positions.

She promised to make “our” military the “most lethal fighting force in the world,” to ensure that U.S. imperialism and not China “wins the competition for the twenty-first century.” She also vowed to implement a Republican  “border security bill” to repress migrants, adopt law and order policies to “crackdown on violent crime,” and greenlight more fracking just like Biden did with his Inflation Reduction Act.

Those positions were not, as Elbaum claims, examples of caving in to the MAGA right, but ones long held by the Democratic Party: it started most of Washington’s wars in the twentieth century; has armed Israel for decades with trillions of dollars annually, including the most recent allocations to support the genocide; helped create the militarized border regime under Clinton, and deported so many people under Obama that he won the moniker Deporter-in-Chief; collaborated with the GOP on the law and order frenzy that led to our system of mass incarceration; and under the Biden/Harris administration drilled and fracked the greatest amount of fossil fuel in U.S. history. 

Only the contrast with Trump makes the Democrats appear less than pure evil. And, far from resisting the right, Harris is strategically orienting toward its establishment faction, with her campaign soliciting endorsements from right-wingers like Liz Cheney, war criminals like her father Dick Cheney, and a litany of other creeps that Elbaum and others on the Left once denounced as dangerous reactionaries when in office.

Indeed, Liz Cheney is overjoyed to embrace the Democrat’s nominee as a member of the right. She told ABC News,

[Harris’s keynote address at the DNC] “is a speech Ronald Reagan could have given. It is a speech George Bush could have given. It’s very much an embrace and an understanding of the exceptional nature of this great nation, a love of America, a recognition that America is a special place.

Underestimating Opportunities and Responsibilities

At the same time as Elbaum underestimates our predicament as prisoners of these two ruling class parties, he also underestimates the opening the Left has today. His position suffers from a profound defeatism out of touch with our enormous opportunities and therefore responsibilities.

Since the Great Recession, which has triggered a global capitalist slump, our society and nearly all others around the world have experienced some of the largest mass uprisings, including political revolutions that have brought down governments most recently in Bangladesh. Here in the U.S., we have seen the explosion of Occupy, the Black Lives Matter uprisings in 2014 and 2020, mass actions in defense of migrant rights, the Red State Teachers Revolt, and the victory of the UAW over the Big Three.

Perhaps most importantly, the explosion of solidarity with Palestine in cities and on campuses across the country since last October has placed opposition to U.S. imperialism and the Democratic Party at the heart of the left-wing pole of political radicalization. The relentless protests against “Genocide Joe” played an essential role in undermining his campaign and forcing the Democrats to replace him with Harris.

We are thus in the early stages of rebuilding a militant minority among workers, oppressed groups, and a whole generation of young people. Our problem has been that the existing organizations of the working class and oppressed communities tend to be weak and often dependent on funders and patrons tied to the Democratic Party. We have yet to forge new, independent mass organizations and a political party of our own to lead struggles in workplaces, communities, and the ballot box.

The Left, if it is to play any role in our society, must recognize the historic opportunity opened in this epoch of crisis, struggle, and radicalization and take advantage of it. Instead, Elbaum argues for the emerging Left to expend our resources in adopting the same tired strategy that has failed us in the past. He, like the rest of the old and New Left have been hostage to that position for so long that they now suffer from Stockholm Syndrome.

Misrepresenting his opponent 

Tempest is attempting to chart a different course, and it is beginning to gain traction among new radicals, especially those outraged by the Democrats’ support for Israel’s genocidal war. Perhaps this provoked Elbaum to respond with such condescending ferocity. Unsurprisingly, he misrepresents our position and subjects it to ridicule.

He accuses us of political cowardice for not calling for a vote for Harris, as if that is the sum total of our position. In numerous articles on the question of the Democrats and socialist strategy, we have laid out an argument much more developed than Elbaum’s straw man. We are challenging the hegemonic policy the Left has accepted for decades of not just voting for Democrats to stop the right but also wasting our precious and limited resources—financial, human, political, and moral—campaigning for them. 

How many times have we heard from Elbaum and others that we must drop all else and canvass to stop fascism? It has become such a cliché that it now sounds like the boy crying wolf. In reality, we have not faced fascism from the GOP in the past.

But we do not deny that Trump’s transformation of the party has made that a possibility in the coming years. To be clear, Trump is no fascist, and the Republican Party is not a fascist one. However it now includes a fascist minority that is beginning to organize gangs of street fighters to physically attack the Left, unions, and oppressed people.

As socialists we are committed to a fight for democratic rights, a principle the Democrats and their allies in university administrations across the country have proved willing to abandon in support of Israel’s genocidal war on Palestine. We share with everyone in the U.S. the fear of the threat Trump and these fascists pose and we are wholly dedicated to fighting them. We understand and sympathize with people who will vote for Harris out of that fear. And we do not and will not argue about individual decisions people make in the ballot box. 

But we do not think our campaigning for Harris and the Democrats will stop the rise of the far right. The Democrats want to shore up the capitalist system in the interests of the ruling class albeit with promises of liberal reforms, most of which they have failed to deliver and will not without mass struggle from below.

Barring that, a Harris/Walz administration will preserve the problem—the crisis ridden capitalist system that is the petri dish for the growth of the new far right. If Harris wins, she will at best preside over a divided government that will prevent her from passing her handful of promised liberal reforms like codifying abortion as a national right. If the Left does not fight for its demands and position itself as an alternative, the right will and it will gather its forces into an ever greater threat to our already endangered democratic rights.

So, whatever an individual decides to do at the ballot box—whether simply out of fear, or as a self-conceived tactic—we need a different strategy to defeat both the Trumpite GOP and the capitalist establishment represented by the Democratic Party. We contend that our mass organizations—political groups, unions, and social movement organizations—should not spend our time, money, and energy campaigning for the Democrats.

Instead, we should spend all of that building organization, demonstrations, staging direct actions, organizing workers, and supporting strikes like the new one against Boeing. Socialists should focus on such struggles from below, develop a new militant minority embedded among workers and oppressed, and out of that process forge a new socialist party of our own.

Thus, in contrast to Elbaum’s caricature, we support the formation of an electoral party to contest our class enemy’s parties at the ballot box. We have in fact repeatedly called for such a party in the past and present. 

But, in this election, we do not have a united Left galvanizing behind one campaign. Instead, we have several ones competing with one another, all of which lack support from mass organizations of the Left, especially unions and social movement organizations. We do not have anything close to the French Left’s New Popular Front, which united our side against both Emmanuel Macron’s capitalist establishment and Marine Le Pen’s far right.

Given that fact, we must organize the class and social forces and win them to build a new party. While that party should use elections, it must not see them as its priority. Why? Because only a change in the balance of class and social forces—that is, a change in the balance of social power—will enable us to secure reforms and position a party to lead a genuine political and social revolution. Independent electoral campaigns should give voice to class and social struggles, not substitute for them.

Lessons and legacy of block and build

Elbaum’s strategy of supporting the Democrats as a lesser evil will impede not advance that project. He misrepresents his position as simply calling for a vote for Harris. If that was the sum total of Elbaum’s position we would not spend our time in an argument with him but state our position and agree to disagree.

But, his “Block and Build” strategy, like all variants of lesser evilism, argues not just for the Left to vote for Harris, but to spend our time, money, and energy on campaigning for her and doing all we can to ensure her victory. For Elbaum and others, the election of Democrats is the precondition for the Left carving out space to build itself, social movements, and the class struggle.

In reality, the Block and Build strategy has not, and will never, accomplish its stated goals. Instead, it disorganizes the Left and strengthens the right. When the Left, and the mass organizations of working and oppressed people, campaign for Democrats, this inevitably involves spending less resources, if any, on educating and organizing against one of our enemies. 

In addition, in making the case for that lesser evil, the Left inevitably mutes its criticisms of the Democrats and predictably morphs into boosterism, presenting them in the best possible light as Elbaum does in claiming that they represent “an alternative.” The worst example of this standard evolution is Alexandria Ocasio Cortez (AOC).

Remember AOC began as a rebel running on Sanders’ coattails as a candidate who challenged the Democratic Party establishment going so far as to join a sit-in organized by Sunrise in Nancy Pelosi’s office. Quickly, however, she abandoned such symbolic radicalism, and began calling Pelosi her “Mama Bear.”

She then became the Left’s chief advocate for Biden’s re-election, lionizing him in the midst of the genocide as “one of the most successful presidents in modern American history,” defending him to the last against those calling for his replacement with Harris, whom she impugned as a vehicle for the donor class.

But, after the establishment’s palace coup against Biden, AOC converted herself into a left-wing booster for Harris, securing as a reward a prime time speaking slot at the Democratic National Convention. In her speech, she dressed up Harris as a champion of the working class and claimed without a shred of corroborating evidence that the Vice President was “working tirelessly to secure a ceasefire in Gaza.” Time Magazine took the opportunity to highlight her transformation from “Democratic Party Outsider to the Face of Its Future.”

The Left’s slide from lesser-evilism into such boosterism enables the Democratic Party once elected to move further to the right, renege on any vague promises, and implement policies that strengthen capital and worsen the conditions of the working and middle classes. As discontent grows, especially among small business owners and downwardly mobile managers, the only alternative is the far right with their reactionary “blame the other victims” solutions to the capitalist crisis.

History is littered with the failure of strategies like Elbaum’s. The classic example was in Germany in the struggle against Hitler and his Nazi Party. The Social Democrats supported General Paul von Hindenburg for President in the 1932 election to prevent the Nazi’s rise, only to see Hindenburg appoint Hitler as Chancellor of Germany.

Another classic case was in Spain during its civil war in the 1930s. The Communist Party held back the socialist revolution and supported the capitalist Republic against Franco, and, in doing so, demoralized their working class and peasant supporters and lost to the fascists.

Nor has the strategy worked more recently in the U.S. During the 1980s, the Left’s attempt to forge a “Rainbow Coalition” inside the Democratic Party undermined the Left, including the New Communist Movement, and delivered its remnants to a party ruled by neoliberal reactionaries like Bill Clinton. With the retreat of class and social struggles and the abandonment of independent politics by the Left, the two capitalist parties, the lesser and greater evil, faced little opposition, and moved as whole so far to the right that today Liz Cheney can celebrate Harris as a Reaganite.

The track record of “Block and Build” has also been disastrous since the rise of the new Trumpite GOP. After cresting through the wave of struggles over the last fifteen years, the Left, unions, and social movements tailed Bernie Sanders into supporting Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden all in the hopes of blocking Trump and the right.

But supporting the lesser evil has not blocked the rise of the right in the U.S. Trump and the GOP survived all their trials and convictions, cohered around a far more developed program in Project 2025, organized their forces, and enlarged their base. Nor has it built the Left, social movements, and unions.

Instead, our side abandoned opposition to Biden and the Democrats, and stopped, on the whole, fighting for our radical demands. The most tragic example was Black Lives Matter four years ago.

In the spring and summer of 2020, the U.S. saw the largest social movement in its history—the George Floyd uprising against racist police murders. The Democratic Party, however, effectively hijacked the movement, got it to abandon its demands, and re-directed activists to campaign for Biden against Trump.

The movement collapsed, leaving little organizational infrastructure in its wake. Once in office, and faced with no opposition from the Left, Biden retreated from any mild promise of “police reform” to position the Democrats as one of the two parties of law and order.

Fast forward four years later, Harris, who had tried to explain away her brutal career as a prosecutor in her 2020 primary campaign, now boasts about throwing people in jail. The demise of Black Lives Matter was not exceptional, but the norm for most other class and social struggles, which largely demobilized themselves under Biden. As a result, the Democrats had a free hand to implement their program, not ours, and adapted to the right in the hopes of neutralizing their increasingly rabid opponents. 

So, today, the Left, social movements, and unions are in the main weaker, more disorganized, and less confident. And Trump, and Trumpism, is a greater threat than ever before. Whatever the outcome of the election, which at the moment is closely contested, we can safely expect over 70 million people in this country to vote for Trump.

Thus, the far right will not go away, but actually pose a greater threat. If Trump wins, he will try to implement Project 2025’s authoritarian project, and if he loses, he will contest the legitimacy of the election in Congress, the courts, and mass protests including a possible repeat of January 6th. Either way, we seem headed for a constitutional crisis, in which traditional strategies like Elbaum’s will seem like quaint relics of a bygone era.

Time for a new strategy

We must devise our own course fit for our concrete historical and national circumstances and based on Marxist theory1Elbaum tries to dress up his old, failed strategy with quotes from the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin, wrenched from their historical context and misused to impugn anyone and everyone arguing for an alternative to both capitalist parties. This is nothing new. For decades, the Communist Party misquoted Lenin’s Left Wing Communism an Infantile Disorder to justify voting for a capitalist party. Today, Elbaum lifts quotes from Lenin in debates over the Bolshevik’s military strategy. In that context, Lenin criticizes some socialists for using revolutionary phrases and rhetoric to justify a doomed strategy of expanding the war against Germany, instead of accepting the necessity of a temporary compromise in order to prepare for future revolutionary struggles. This has nothing to do with voting or not voting for Democrats, a capitalist party. On that question, Lenin like Marx, Engels, Luxemburg, and most other revolutionary socialists opposed voting for, supporting, and campaigning for bourgeois parties. Indeed, his clarion call was always for class independence, including when faced with the choice between the bourgeois liberal Cadet party and the most brutal reaction in its Russian form, the Black Hundreds after the defeat of the 1905 revolution. He declared, “the workers’ party therefore warns the masses against the clandestine election tricks of the Cadet bourgeoisie, against its stultifying cry: Entrust to us, lawyers, professors  and enlightened landlords, the task of combating the Black Hundred danger!” He went on to argue that “the advocates of blocs with the Cadets are not only doing harm to the proletariat and to the whole cause of liberty. They are prejudicing the development of political consciousness among the urban and rural poor. They are not performing their immediate duty, which is to free these people from the influence of the liberal bourgeoisie.” To be sure that he was not misunderstood, he concluded that it was necessary to raise the slogan, “Down with all blocs! The workers’ party must conduct its election campaign independently, not only in words, but in deeds. It must provide the whole people, and the masses of the proletariat in particular, with a model of courageous and consistent criticism based on principle. Only in that way shall we succeed in rallying the masses for effective participation in the struggle for freedom and not in the sham liberalism of the Cadet betrayers of freedom.”and the lessons of history. Elbaum’s “Block and Build” strategy has proved itself a dead end. It has failed to block the right, failed to advance class and social struggle, and failed to build the Left. It has time to ditch it in the dustbin of history where it belongs as evidence of the disastrous consequences of abandoning class independence to support, and even worse join, liberal bourgeois parties. 

The socialist Left has to face reality and adopt a new strategy. Regardless of what people do at the ballot box, we should not campaign for Harris and the Democrats but instead build the class struggle and social movements and most importantly solidarity with Palestine.

In those struggles socialists must forge a new militant minority and galvanize it to build a new socialist party. Regardless of the outcome of the election, Tempest is eager to work with everyone on the Left, including Elbaum and his comrades, to build such a party of our own. Now more than ever, we have a world to win, and nothing to lose but our chains, including those that shackle us to the Democratic Party.

Featured Image Credit: Image by SuSanA Secretariat; modified by Tempest.

Opinions expressed in signed articles do not necessarily represent the views of the editors or the Tempest Collective. For more information, see “About Tempest Collective.”