The Democratic Socialists, the Democratic Party, and the tactic of critical support

In a previous post, I explained why I disagree with a statement put out by the New York City DSA criticizing Alexandria Ocasio Cortez for saying that she would support all the Democrats in November. I think it was OK. She has made her differences with the establishment Democrats perfectly clear, and no one who pays the slightest attention to politics could possibly believe that she supports Cuomo's policies.

But unless she went out of her way to denounce Cuomo in the general election, her support for his candidacy will be taken for granted: she is his running mate. And her denouncing Cuomo would not have made any sense to the people socialists are trying to reach.

But is it true that her statement about “rallying behind all Democratic nominees” in effect “erases” the message of the insurgent candidates against the party establishment, as the criticism of her asserts?

I don't think so. I believe people who follow politics in the slightest understand Ocasio represents a very different political approach from Cuomo's, despite what she said.

I want to suggest that the way to analyze this situation, from a Marxist point of view, is as an application of the tactic of "critical support."

Lenin, writing about Britain right after the Russian Revolution, urged his British comrades to back Labour Party candidates. He explained that "I want to support [Labour Party Leader] Henderson in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man."

What does that mean? That the objective of your “support” is precisely to hasten the day when someone like that won’t be able to fool enough people to stay in office.

Does this mean you really secretly want Cuomo's Republican opponent to win? Absolutely not. You really do want Cuomo to win, to show, for example, that he has no solution for the health care insurance crisis.

You might think, after two terms Cuomo has already shown that plenty!

But the issue is not what you or I understand, but how millions of ordinary people see things. They have barely begun to think through ideas like single payer medicare for all, a living minimum wage of $15 an hour, free college tuition, driving big money out of politics and especially how those things can be achieved.

The idea is to tell working people that don't yet agree with your more radical program that you won't stand in the way of what they view as a lesser-evil candidate like Cuomo in a two-way confrontation with the more reactionary candidate. 

Can't this be confusing, running in opposition to what Cuomo stands for, supporting his socialist opponent in the primary and then turning around and saying "vote Cuomo on November 6"? Actually, that is pretty standard in American politics. And Bernie Sanders did the same thing in 2016, and both clarity about his program being different, and his reputation for integrity, did not suffer in the slightest.

But why do this at all? Why not simply run as independents, as Bernie had always done before 2016? It's just a tactic, isn't it?

Two reasons:

First, Bernie has been an exception, unique. There have been hundreds, possibly thousands of campaigns run as independents or third party candidates in the last few decades, and I can't remember one that had even a smidgin of the support Bernie has garnered locally in elections before 2016. There have been a few other "independents" who have made it to Congress, but these have been traditional politicians who for some reason were on the outs with their party machines, not politically independent.

Second, because Bernie's 2016 campaign, not as an independent, but within the Democratic Party, changed things. It set a new pattern, created a new model. Millions of people rallied to his banner to support not just a candidacy, but become part of a movement. The big jump in DSA membership after the June New York congressional primary confirms that this is the shape the movement is taking right now. What we need to do is understand what it means..

As I explained in this post, I think what is involved is working people trying to grope their way to uniting as a class, to fight for a program that defends our interests.

To really do that, what we need is our own party, a workers party, not necessarily in the form of a ballot line (which is what most people in this country think of when you say "party") but a national organization or movement that acts in a coherent way explicitly in the name of working people.

But isn't it a contradiction to try to do that within the oldest capitalist party in existence, the Democratic Party? Absolutely. But we can't simply reject the contradiction. It must be overcome, the movement has to work its way through it. And there really is no point complaining that things ought not to have developed this way. They did.

In there any historical precedent for this, a working class movement gestating within a capitalist party? Actually that is not so unusual. But there is one historical example that I think is worth delving into, and it comes from the founders of the modern socialist movement Karl Marx and Frederick Engels.

Frederick Engels in the 1840s

The experience was recounted in 1884 by Engels in the article, "Marx and the Neue Rheinische Zeitung," dealing with events decades before, during the revolution of 1848.

The context was that towards the end of 1847, Marx and Engels  succeeded in convincing a group called The League of the Just to become the Communist League and adopt the Communist Manifesto as its program.

The Manifesto had just been published when a revolution broke out at the beginning of 1848 in France and soon spread to Germany. At Marx's initiative, the Communist League, composed mostly of Germans in exile, dissolved. The reason was that Germany was divided into many different states and principalities, making it impossible for a group to offer more than general guidance and ideas, but Marx believed a newspaper --the Neue Rheinische Zeitung-- was a better instrument to do that. Engels explains:

The proletariat [was] undeveloped ... having grown up in complete intellectual enslavement, being unorganised and still not even capable of independent organisation.... Hence, although in point of fact the mortal enemy of the [bourgeoisie], it remained, on the other hand, its political appendage.... Thus, the German proletariat at first appeared on the political stage as the extreme democratic party. 

In this way, when we founded a major newspaper in Germany, our banner was determined as a matter of course. It could only be that of democracy, but that of a democracy which everywhere emphasised in every point the specific proletarian character which it could not yet inscribe once for all on its banner.

I think the analogy with our days is in the extreme political underdevelopment of the American working class and what has been until now its "complete intellectual enslavement." Thus, now that the U.S. working class is beginning to come onto the political stage, it does so "as the extreme democratic party." The coincidence of the name "democratic party" is accidental, of course,  but the political similarity is not.

And note: this is not about a lesser evil strategy. Nor is the point to reform or transform the Democrats; it is about the working class being transformed through this and other experiences, cohering ever more clearly and consciously as an independent political force.  

What is most striking is that Engels says when Marx and his friends began their work in Germany, "our banner was determined as a matter of course." It could only be that of the working class movement that was beginning to emerge but was not recognized as such and instead viewed as the left of the bourgeois-democratic forces. Engels concludes:

If we did not want to do that, if we did not want to take up the movement, adhere to its already existing, most advanced, actually proletarian side and to advance it further, then there was nothing left for us to do but to preach communism in a little provincial sheet and to found a tiny sect instead of a great party of action.

That's the choice. We either accept the movement as it is as our starting point in order to help it go further, or we can stand on the sidelines shouting "correct" slogans at it.

And if we accept the movement as it is, it means accepting the tactic that Bernie pioneered in 2016, and that tactic of necessity implies going along with the results of the primary. We don't have to actively campaign for the likes of Cuomo, but we have to understand that from where Ocasio Cortez is now situated, it makes sense for her to have said what she did even if we as the DSA would not have put out a statement like that.

Socialists are getting a much broader and more sympathetic audience by running as Democrats given this new motion among working people, but offering "critical support" to traditional Democrats is an inescapable part of the tactic. It is built into the situation.

But we do so honestly, openly and transparently. We don't pretend differences with corporate Democrats have disappeared. We don't suggest the "lesser evil" is really OK after all. But we don't break with the working class people who are evolving towards political independence by trashing them for voting for Cuomo (which is the effect of denouncing him and opposing a vote for him).

--José G. Pérez