By COCO SMYTH

Democratic socialists have once again conjured life out of the barren soil of U.S. electoral politics. From Darializa Chevalier, Claire Valdez, and Brad Lander in New York City to Abdul El-Sayed in Michigan, electoral victories across the country have raised hopes that a left-wing alternative is breaking through the stranglehold of ruling-class politics.

Meanwhile, the establishment has met the moment with anger and upset. Figures aligned with the hated Democratic establishment such as Tom Suozzi and James Carville have called for leftists to leave and build their own party. Representative Josh Gottheimer summed up this sentiment plainly, arguing: “The Democrats have a big tent. That’s our strength. We embrace a range of ideas—but there’s no room for anti-American bomb-throwers who oppose our ideas, values, & leaders.”

Across the aisle, Republican Party sentiments have built on this theme but with more vigor. Trump argued the growth of socialism in the Democratic Party is “the biggest threat to our nation there is, maybe since our founding.” Trump hasn’t limited his attacks to words, however, working systematically to criminalize leftist organizing, social movements, and labor struggles in a new wave of McCarthyism.

Neither the universal denunciation of the politicians and the hit pieces of the mainstream media nor the rising repression have dampened the desire for change, though. The growing number of democratic socialists in office is one small expression of the broader discontent and desire for major reform; but can the Democratic Party really be a vehicle for radical change?

What is the Democratic Party?

Since the 19th century, the Democrats have shared power with the Republicans without interruption. Despite many zigzags in orientation in the century and a half since that time, the Democratic Party has been a vehicle for the ruling class without fail.

In the modern era, it has represented the “left” of the capitalist mainstream. Despite its progressive pretensions, the Democrats have worked with the Republicans to secure U.S. imperial control, oppress minorities, and destroy left-wing and labor movements. The list of crimes committed by the Democratic Party is too lengthy to recount, but a sampling of major ones of late include their unwavering support for the genocide in Palestine and their defanging of the 2020 rebellion against racism.

In political program and composition, the Democrats have always been capitalist. They represent the interests of the ruling class while preventing any left-wing alternative based on the working class from arising. None of this is a secret; the Democratic leadership is quite open and proud of this fact. “We’re capitalists. That’s just what it is,” Nancy Pelosi argued.

This hostility to progress has tanked the popularity of the Democrats. In the lead-up to Barack Obama’s 2008 electoral victory, the Democrats reached a high of 55% favorability due to his posturing about “hope” and “change.” In the years since, the Democrats have transitioned from the party of false promises to the party of the preservation of the status quo. Working-class Americans never saw a real recovery after the 2008 financial crisis, and skyrocketing rent, health-care costs, cost of living, debt, and stagnant wages have pulled off the mask of the “American Dream” for tens of millions. While Trump offered a toxic vision to “make America great again,” the Democrats tried to convince us that “America is already great.” For their services to the ruling class, the Democrats have secured the impressive historic low favorability of 27%.

A socialist future for the Democrats?

It’s in this context that a left emerged as an alternative to politics as usual within the Democratic Party. Bernie Sanders’ 2016 presidential run crystallized mass dissatisfaction around progressive demands like universal health care, and popularized “democratic socialism” as an alternative. This surprising turn of events also transformed the hollowed out Democratic Socialists of America into a vibrant organization of tens of thousands of members within a year.

For many years, “the Democratic Party is the graveyard of social movements” was a common refrain among socialist organizers. That was easy to say in the years before 2016 when the only politics on offer was unbridled capitalism. Since then, the growth of the progressive wing of the Democrats has challenged that thinking. Over 250 DSA-backed candidates running within the party have been elected to office since 2016.

Due to this success in practice, new theories have been developed to square the circle of socialists operating in one of the world’s worst capitalist parties. A variety of frameworks have been developed by socialist writers, from the “dirty break” to the party surrogate, to find a middle path between subjugation to the capitalist Democrats and total independence from them.

In contrast to the DSA of decades past, the new theories reject reforming the Democratic Party. The new thinking recognizes that the DP is fundamentally capitalist and that its nature won’t change. Instead, the argument is shifted to the level of strategy. Writers such as Seth Ackerman and Eric Blanc have argued that due to the peculiarities of the U.S. political system, a frontal assault on capitalism through the formation of an independent workers’ party is not possible. Instead, socialists must use the unique features of U.S. capitalism’s limited democracy against it.

The central innovation here is the claim that the DP is not a political party at all. The party system in the U.S. consists of state-regulated ballot lines instead of regular membership organizations under top-down leaderships as in many other capitalist democracies. Consequently, the parties cannot directly discipline their base or block socialist candidates operating within them. This makes it, so the theoreticians say, an empty vessel that can be used strategically to avoid the exclusionary restrictions of electoral law and the two-party system. The benefits of these frameworks have been clear—allowing socialists to benefit from proximity to power without the sacrifice of principle. Unfortunately, the reality of this political bargain isn’t as it appears.

Pyrrhic victories and adaptation

A permanent feature of this decade of left democratic electoralism has been the inspiring progressive campaign followed by capitulations and betrayals on the part of “our electeds.” We have no lack of examples of democratic socialist “electeds” betraying the movement’s principles in recent years. In 2022, Sanders and AOC lined up behind the DP to prevent a nationwide railway strike for minimum demands like the use of sick leave without repercussions. Jamaal Bowman voted to fund Israel’s Iron Dome, provoking a crisis within the DSA and the exit of many pro-Palestine organizers. More recently, Zohran Mamdani accommodated himself to the DP mainstream, betraying the No More 24 movement he had previously campaigned for.

When the interests of the working class stand on one side and the Democratic Party stands on the other, “our electeds” choose the Democratic Party. In power, socialists within the DP give nice speeches while toeing the party line on votes and endorsements of right-wing Democrats. No left Democrats at the national level refused to endorse Harris in 2024 despite her commitment to genocide in Palestine and capitalist exploitation.

Against the new theories, the “electeds” of the Democratic left abandon working-class independence and openly advocate for the internal reform efforts that have proved too noxious for most rank-and-file socialists to espouse. Instead of an empty vessel we have a barrel of poison. The Democratic apparatus has 100 means to discipline its politicians from withdrawing financial support to backing opponents and slander from the media. But the issue goes even deeper than that—all the way to the root of the reformist electoral approach which guides all these reformers.

Reform and revolution

Though an issue, the left Democrats’ awful positions and votes are not fundamental. The real problem is their unwavering commitment to electoralism as a path to reform. The logic behind democratic socialist electoral strategy today ensures that capitulation is inevitable. Since these politicians are only concerned with winning reforms, they have to find ways to achieve them. In the context of a government in which the capitalists reign supreme, they see the only path to legislative reform as being through the Democratic Party. The democratic socialist politician must then convince a whole flock of bourgeois politicians to get behind their legislation. This is no easy task. To get anything through, a socialist politician must collaborate with our enemies. In the rare cases when progressive legislation makes it through these hurdles, it is a shadow of what was intended and often comes with strings attached—like a commitment to support an increase in police or military funding.

When we look past the rhetoric, the activities of the Democratic opposition present no threat to capitalism. In reality it’s quite the opposite: the left Democrats’ magic brings life to the desiccated corpse of the party by dressing up its body in nice clothes. The left Democrats serve an important function in bringing people disillusioned with the party back into its ranks.

All this comes at the expense of what’s necessary to build a mass socialist movement capable of fighting back and overthrowing capitalism. The strength of the socialist movement derives from the level of working-class consciousness and the degree to which workers are organized. The labor and social movements that bring the working class into political life determine what our class is capable of. By operating within a capitalist party, we only make it more difficult to develop the organizations we need to fight.

The revolutionary alternative

What we are lacking in the U.S. is not the right representatives in the halls of power, but organization. The source of the two parties’ power is their ruling-class base, and secondarily the passive acceptance of the workers. On the other side, the base for socialism is the working class. When we build within the bosses’ parties, we build the ruling class’s power while confining the working class’s struggle behind our enemies.

The key tasks of socialists today are to build up mass movements against oppression and to reorganize the labor movement with a class-struggle perspective. Over the last decade we’ve seen no lack of mass struggle—from Black Lives Matter to the movement against ICE—but these upsurges have failed to root themselves in independent organizations. Socialists need to build those organizations and bring thousands and eventually millions of people behind them. With workers conscious of their own collective power, we can finally turn from subjects of the capitalist order into active fighters for our own liberation. The decisive struggles that will develop working-class organization and power will be outside the capitalist government—struggles that teach each worker that we must fight for ourselves under our own banner.

What role do elections play, then? Electoral work can act as a platform for putting forward socialist politics, counting our numbers, and cohering a working-class base. This work can only build towards workers’ power, however, if it is totally independent of the capitalist parties. And if an independent party run by working people and the oppressed were to win seats, our principal aim would not be to wheel and deal with the capitalists for minor reforms, but to use the platform that these positions give us to expose the capitalists and aid the workers’ struggle outside government, which is the real source of our collective power.

The election of democratic socialists is a good sign. But signs only mean so much in politics. While excitement over these electoral wins continues, socialists need to take a hard look at the path forward.

The outpouring of calls by the Democratic mainstream for leftists to leave the party has been met with laughter and dismissal. Despite the clear reactionary motivations of these capitalist politicians, though, we need to stop and think whether adaptation to a criminal party suffering from a historic fall in popularity and mass disdain is what it will take to win socialism. Imagine what could be possible if the millions disillusioned with capitalism had an independent workers’ party willing to sweep aside the bankrupt system.

In this period of catastrophic crisis for the U.S. ruling class, the working class has an unparalleled opportunity to enter the stage and take the reins of politics from our oppressors. But socialists need to stoke the embers of struggle and help it catch fire with mass organization and working-class political independence.

Socialists must work to become gravediggers for the capitalist parties rather than necromancers. Breathing life into the lifeless is an alluring concept, but our task is far greater—to leave the graveyard and build anew for the living.