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Santa Socialism

A diagnosis


John Lang explores what it means to engage in wishful thinking about political change. Asking legislators to give meaningful reforms without first organizing to build our own power amounts to sending a wish list to Santa and expecting real results.

Swaths of the US Left today have a particular orientation to socialist movement work that limits our power and misleads us into circumventing the real organizing that’s necessary to win. I want to name this orientation not to mock it or the earnest comrades who believe in it, but to enable us to identify such inclinations together and reorient ourselves and our organizations. I call this orientation Santa socialism: It’s the idea that we can bring about change by crafting the perfect wish (generally legislation) and writing to Santa hard enough (with strategic wording and “letters to Santa” in various forms to target lawmakers). It’s a forgivable outgrowth of liberalism, but it belies and propagates an incorrect theory of power. If we want to expand the movement, build power, and win, we need to accept that Santa isn’t real.

How does Santa socialism look in practice? Santa socialism encompasses a spectrum of campaigns, not only literal letter-writing to politicians. In a typical Santa-socialist campaign, the first step – when faced by a problem in our workplace, our neighborhood, our community – is to turn our attention toward the government as the sole entity that can solve the problem, rather than private actors like bosses, corporations, landlords, and developers, or the cops sent to protect them.

When the target, Santa, is identified as the government, the second step is to decide what we’re wishing for from Santa, i.e., to craft a perfect but “reasonable” legislative policy. We can’t ask for the moon, but Santa might grant us a moderate legislative step in the direction of socialism. Policy wonks and nonprofit professionals are welcome here, to advise us on what is reasonable to demand and what is possible within the parameters of the state. The policy wonks in our left spaces are generally middle-class or raised middle-class, and legislative proposals that excite them are assumed to excite ordinary, working-class people.

a rectangular poster with a graphic image of an older Karl Marx wearing a santa hat with the caption: “All I want for Christmas is the means of production.”
Image by Justus Hayes.

The final step in a Santa-socialist campaign is “strategically” asking Santa for our wish. The strategy is not a plan to build power of our own that’s commensurate with the power of our capitalist enemies, but instead consists of playing 3D chess, such as identifying who is the appropriate elected official to propose our bill, and which elected officials on the board can we push and how. Maybe if we water down our bill before launching the campaign, it can garner a slight majority and pass. After all, if we ask Santa for too much, we might get coal in our stockings instead.

The tactical horizon for Santa socialism is a weak pressure campaign to move electeds. Sometimes our letters to Santa are literal letters to politicians – just add your name and address and click “Send” – but sometimes letters are tweets – even better if a communications professional can craft the perfect tweet with the right hashtags. A more expansive strategy is to phone-bank people (generally card-carrying or dues-lapsed members of the Democratic Socialists of America) so they can send even more letters to Santa.

In perhaps its most advanced form, Santa-socialist campaigns hold actions targeting the appropriate legislative bodies or politicians. But the actions are, in practice, small rallies with speeches and signs and fewer than fifty attendees, most of whom are middle-class members of socialist organizations or staff organizers at non-profits. If there are ordinary, working-class people in attendance, they’re generally self-selecting activists mobilized by organizers and staffers. With endless issue-based campaigns taking turns to rally outside the appropriate government building, it almost feels like lining up for tokenistic photo-ops with the shopping mall Santa.

But most people who would be affected by the policy proposal do not show up, and little effort is made to convince them that the rally is relevant to their own issues. The actions are therefore neither big nor disruptive. However, this isn’t an issue for a Santa socialist campaign because the real goal is to achieve press coverage. Ultimately, the news article that results if a rally is successful is just a big, public letter to Santa. This orientation in the world of labor unions has been diagnosed as “labor liberalism” by Joe Burns, and it has debilitated the working class at the point of production.

Two recent examples of Santa socialism from New York are the campaigns for Good Cause Eviction and the Build Public Renewables Act. They were successful but only to a degree – a degree that demonstrates the limits of Santa socialism.

The former was a multi-year fight for protections against lease non-renewals and a cap on rent increases. It was driven by a 3D chess strategy of identifying who to move among a legislature full of Santas and asking them in different ways: tweeting, getting news coverage, lobbying, and backroom conversations in the capitol. But the power that could be attained through Santa socialism fell short of the power of the real estate lobby and conservative Democrats, who in the end inserted loopholes for avoiding the regulations and raised the cap on rent increases. This watered-down version of Good Cause Eviction was the most that could be achieved without an organized tenant movement of tens of thousands of ordinary people.

The Build Public Renewables Act (BPRA) that passed was also watered down and ultimately hamstrung, as a result of the limited power that the Santa-socialist campaign could muster. The strategy focused on tweeting to Santa, electing a few better Santas, and playing 3D chess in the capitol, favoring communications professionals and inside operatives over grassroots power. To make the policy more palatable to Santa, organizers dropped the primary bill – to expropriate the private electric utility company – leaving only BRPA’s secondary bill authorizing a particular state agency to construct renewable energy. Even campaign insiders admit that the final policy proposal was weak. After trading votes for concessions over how the state agency would be governed, BPRA passed. In a final maneuver that outplayed Santa-socialist strategists, the governor appointed a conservative to head the state agency, thereby blocking BPRA’s implementation. When we rely on clever ideas, horse-trading, and asking Santa, we don’t build the power necessary for undiluted and durable victories.

Campaigns that consist of asking Santa hard enough do not build the people power necessary to win against capitalist enemies and the capitalist state. But the Santa-socialist orientation does not take this power imbalance into account, because within this theory of power, there is only one power-holder: Santa. The Santa-socialist post-mortem can only conclude that Santa didn’t deliver, either because we didn’t ask Santa hard enough, we didn’t ask the right Santas the right way, or Santa – that is, lawmakers – aren’t on our side. When the focus is on asking Santa, people are just beggars rather than sources of our own power. Wishful thinking, even when combined with clever maneuvers and communications stunts, does not constitute real power.

I diagnose the Santa-socialist orientation because I hope socialist movements can reorient, not because I want to mock comrades. I don’t blame newcomers to the Left for Santa socialism, because it’s a vestigial outgrowth of liberalism. It grafts socialist demands onto a liberal theory of power, in which the only people who have power are lawmakers, and we can only move them by voting, writing letters, and, in the most militant conception, mobilizing self-selecting activists for non-disruptive rallies. But the fact is, Santa isn’t real. Politicians are but shopping mall Santas, and there are no elves in the North Pole that will make our reforms for us, no matter how hard we ask.

Instead, we must recognize that we only get what we’re organized enough to take, to paraphrase the grassroots and mighty National Union of the Homeless. The alternative to the incorrect Santa-socialist theory of power is understanding that the ruling class – politicians, capitalists, landlords – only caves to our demands when we can cause a crisis for them, and we can only cause crises when we can organize masses of ordinary people to disrupt business as usual – through labor strikes, rent strikes, direct action, even voting uncommitted. Only then do we have the power to equal or exceed the power of our capitalist opponents.

But attaining this much power requires real organizing. Organizing is not mobilizing, i.e., turning out ordinary people already predisposed to activism to rallies and photo ops. Organizing is building organizations of ordinary people. Organizations like tenant associations and militant unions are the building blocks of movements, in no small part because they can rope in people who aren’t predisposed to activism. But organizing these building blocks requires face-to-face, bi-directional conversations about people’s felt issues, not issues that we assume affect them or policies we assume will appeal to them because they appeal to us. Campaigns must fight to solve real issues faced by ordinary people, and organizations must be built to leverage people power to win those campaigns.

To be clear, this is not a call to abandon legislative goals. Instead, we must recognize that legislative campaigns without mass movements, constituted and empowered by grassroots organizations, put the cart before the horse – or the sleigh before the reindeer, as it were. Now is the time to build organizations of ordinary people that can leverage disruptive power, especially against private actors like bosses and landlords, as dress rehearsals for leveraging disruptive power against state actors, like individual electeds and party machines.

Organizing is not glamorous and it’s not as fun or easy as crafting utopian policies with like-minded, college-educated socialists. Organizing requires hard conversations and turbulent meetings with real people with eclectic politics, meeting them where they’re at and gradually empowering them, one task at a time. It’s slow, with many failures and opportunities for self-disappointment. But there is no Santa to ask. We must make the gifts we give each other.

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John Lang View All

John Lang is a community organizer in New York City.