[T]he working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.
- Marx
[R]evolutionaries who are incapable of combining illegal forms of struggle with every form of legal struggle are poor revolutionaries indeed.
- Lenin
For Marxists in the U.S., the arena of electoral politics presents a foundational contradiction. On one hand, our electoral system is the most refined and developed form of “liberal democracy,” choreographed political theatre where two capitalist parties pantomime class conflict. Untethered from their working class constituencies, they are free to put on the costume of the downtrodden worker, the struggling small business owner, or the benevolent capitalist as they choose. Whoever wins any election, the levers of meaningful political change are kept insulated behind an array of anti-democratic institutions, from a capricious lifetime judiciary, to a reactionary and unaccountable police force, to a capitalist class that hoards an immense and increasing share of the wealth at the national and local level. The primacy of electoralism (the strategy for social revolution primarily done by electing socialists who will reform the state towards socialism) in turn becomes a Sisyphean strategy, perpetually stuck in a loop of DSA chapters running undisciplined candidates who, when elected, become their own site of struggle within the party - locally or nationally - requiring resources and time pulling us away from the path towards a socialist horizon.
On the other hand this stage, by design, captures the attention of poor and working people dissatisfied with their conditions and who want to seek out alternatives. Upticks in DSA membership during major political events are a measure of electoral campaigns’ impact in growing the socialist movement from the unorganized working class. Finding and speaking to these people is the essential task of socialists, and electoral politics presents an enticing opportunity to do so. How do we rectify this contradiction?
The revolutionary socialist movement can and should utilize elections through the historical material analysis provided by Marxists. This is not a binary choice of “run to win” or “run to agitate”, but a method of organizing the working class into DSA to continue to build the party beyond electoral work that will lead the transformation of our society to a socialist society. This revolutionary path of electoral campaigns is one DSA must pursue to run genuinely independent candidates, build confidence and trust with marginalized and working class people, and to instill the notion that socialism cannot be won on the ballot alone.
Why should we run for office in the U.S.?
In U.S. history, campaigning for electoral office has been used to spread a socialist message and build a socialist constituency, from Eugene Debs and Upton Sinclair in high-profile executive campaigns to the Milwaukee Sewer Socialists and the Socialist Party members of the New York Assembly in 1920. The very act of campaigning for office presented an opportunity to win segments of the working class over to the cause of socialism and the anti-war movement. In more recent memory, the Bernie Sanders campaigns of 2016 and 2020 and the Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez campaign in 2018 revitalized a socialist movement that had been dead for the better part of a century, with the electoral trend continuing recently with the election of Zohran Mamdani at the end of 2025.
We believe it’s necessary for us to contest electoral races. Our argument to utilize the ballot for organizing revolutionaries is not a new one, but it is distinct from the political perspective of electoralism, reformism, and the “democratic road to socialism”. August Nimtz in The Ballot, The Streets, Or Both? describes Lenin’s position on the importance of running candidates for office. “Elections can serve […] as a way to measure the strength and support of socialist politics and parties among the working masses and to lay a foundation to develop a base and cadre for revolutionary action.” Marxists in Kerala, India have utilized elections to build a sprawling party apparatus that has lifted one hundred thousand people out of extreme poverty. Even Fidel Castro while in the Orthodox Party knew to use elections while elections are still allowed. As Marta Harnecker documented in Fidel Castro’s Political Strategy, “because the period was one of parliamentary freedoms, he set out to make use of the platform offered by elections to propose a revolutionary program”.
In contrast when Marxists cede the electoral sphere, they allow other forces to rush in or remain unchallenged. When we fail to enter electoral politics as socialists, workers desperate for some kind of alternative will turn toward other electoral campaigns if they even bother to be politically engaged at all. Mainstream, populist, and/or reactionary candidates will fill that vacuum, leading U.S. workers deeper into the political abyss and creating more political apathy and dysfunction. It is critical that we offer an option for people whenever a choice is available, and running candidates for office is in line with current conditions in the U. S. socialist movement.
How to reconcile the contradiction between electoral politics – as a bourgeois dead end and as an unavoidable site of class struggle – and how to engage on the enemy terrain of the electoral system (or whether we should at all) has been a challenge for socialists around the world for as long as the movement has existed. In the U.S., we have the uniquely challenging conditions of relearning the lessons that were lost when our movement was annihilated by the Red Scare, while facing a uniquely chaotic moment in the political system at large, as contradictions within the capitalist class and the imperialist world system upset the business-as-usual electoral stage. We need to extend the Marxist analysis to the construction of a more concrete electoral strategy towards revolutionary ends – not just answering the question of whether we should run candidates at all, but also how the candidate and the party should campaign and eventually govern.
How should we campaign?
Even when there is no prospect whatsoever of their being elected, the workers must put up their own candidates in order to preserve their independence, to count their forces, and to lay before the public their revolutionary attitude and party standpoint.
Running for office is not an end in itself. Rather, it is one of a multitude of methods, especially in bourgeois republics like ours, that can play some positive role in heightening forms of political consciousness of the masses by drawing their attention towards the inherent contradictions of “democracy” within capitalism. Like labor and tenant organizing, public demonstrations, mutual aid, and other organizing tactics, electoral campaigns present unique benefits and drawbacks, and they should be evaluated continuously rather than uncritically and unquestioningly practiced or treated with primacy relative to other tactics.
Our goal is not, and cannot be, to simply win elections and implement socialism through the legislative process. Rather, our goal should always be to weaken the institutions that preserve Capitalist state legitimacy, recruit people to the cause of socialism, and continue to build the party capable of growing and acquiring power to rule our society. We do that through having candidates that represent the legitimacy of our platform and organizing, to use the campaign as a bullhorn for our platform and in turn organizing people into the party – DSA – as organizers.
[Organization Is Our Principal Task! On Socialist Electoral Work
By Sam H-L DSA caucuses have spent endless time squabbling at the national level about “the break” from the Democrats: when this break should happen, and how clean it should be. Regardless of where you stand, the question remains the same: what should our relationship to the Democratic Party be?
Red StarSam H-L
](https://redstarcaucus.org/organization-is-our-principal-task-on-socialist-electoral-work/)
Present a credible alternative
Some say that the [parliament] is a fraud. That is true. There are such times when we must take part in elections to expose a fraud.
- Lenin
The first foundational goal of a Marxist electoral campaign should be to present a credible alternative to “politics as usual”. The candidate and the campaign should be interlopers on the stage of capitalist politics, not reading the script and not taking cues from donors and consultants. Voters should see our candidates as unmistakably distinct from their Democratic and Republican opponents, and the candidate should use the opportunity to show that their opponents are fundamentally aligned with each other as servants of the ruling class. The campaign should focus on using the specific issues of the campaign to indict the underlying political system, the rule of both parties, and the undemocratic nature of the U.S. political system.
Electoral strategies have been employed over the years by DSA candidates with varied results, but the measure of success can’t be limited to just vote count but also in delegitimizing the capitalist electoral machines that wage class warfare locally and nationally. Calling out “special interest groups” and “corporate PACs” are broad strokes compared to pointed critiques of specific capitalists and their shill candidates attached to the strings they pull. When drawing a contrast of who’s funding a campaign or endorsing a candidate, it offers ordinary people a name and face to put to who’s exploiting them and who they need to be fighting. People expect politicians to be shady, but if they see how the opposition is directly tied to your awful landlord or boss, the political becomes personal. The right election can be an opportunity for a call to action against a specific individual or governing body that embodies the failed programs of liberal bourgeois democracy.
All this, however, is predicated on running independent socialist candidates who refuse to bow down to the duopoly and whose real goal is to organize themselves with other candidates, electeds, and voters separately as socialists. Occasionally this means a candidate runs in a partisan primary or uses a ballot line on nonpartisan races, but doing so with the purpose of running a socialist campaign and platform organized independently with our comrades in DSA. It is imperative that the relationship between the candidate and DSA is driven by democratic organs of DSA and not vice versa. The task of these candidates, as socialist organizers, is to use their campaigns to move people into DSA and develop them as socialist organizers. This is not mutually exclusive to running competitive campaigns, and the false dichotomy of running to win versus running to “agitate” fails to account for DSA candidates who do not compromise their socialist principles and follow their chapter to win races and govern effectively as socialists in office, most notably Congresswoman Rashida Tlaib.
[Misreading Mamdani’s Victory: Zohran and the Contradictions of Electoralism
As Red Star’s 2025 convention platform argues, organization is the principal task of electoralism in DSA. The primary role of elections is not to win reforms for their own sake, but to strengthen DSA, deepen working class political consciousness, align DSA with radical sections of the working class, and
Red StarHazel W
](https://redstarcaucus.org/misreading-mamdani/)
Marxists running for office should widen the target of their campaign to include people that aren’t likely voters, and they should ignore likely voters that are not working class or are class enemies who will actively take time and energy away from reaching our target audience. Outreach with the poor and working class areas of districts should be prioritized, along with targeting renters and young people. People who are not eligible to vote, such as minors, people with immigration status, and formerly incarcerated people, should still have their needs uplifted and prioritized by electoral campaigns. Every working class person a campaign reaches has the potential of being further organized, be it through the campaign itself or ideally in DSA. Campaign platforms and literature should focus on dismantling neoliberal privatizations and austerity and agitate and educate voters about class conflict that affects them.
This type of campaign must elevate class consciousness and help organize marginalized and working class people into the mass movement against the capitalist state. Within typical campaigns in the U.S., new and chronic registered voters are targeted since the aim is to get the most likely voters. This tactic ignores the large swaths of people who don’t vote every election, who abstain from voting, are disenfranchised, are purged, or aren’t registered. This misses the opportunity to organize the unorganized who oftentimes feel left out and disillusioned by the ruling class. A Marxist candidate is an organizer before they are a politician.
Spread the Socialist Message
Parliamentarianism doesn’t eliminate, but lays bare the innate character of even the most democratic bourgeois republics as organs of class oppression. Helping to enlighten and organize wider masses of the population than those which previously took an active part in political events, parliamentarianism doesn’t make for the elimination of crises & political revolutions, but for the maximum intensification of civil war during such revolutions.
- Lenin
Campaigns should use the pulpit to preach revolutionary consciousness and party standpoint. Historical socialist campaigns in the U.S. include Eugene Debs’ presidential campaigns that drew tens of thousands to hear him speak against war, for worker power, and the ultimate goal of socialism. In the modern context of the United States, political candidates may have access to candidate forums, town halls, questionnaires, and mass media to elevate revolutionary sentiment against the state and revolutionary optimism. A candidate may only get 30 seconds or a few minutes to do so, but that revolutionary message may reach tens of thousands of people not just in the jurisdiction but across a city or county or region, all the more reason to never water down the message for the sake of getting votes.
Social media offers a free platform to reach masses of the population in spite of censorship and algorithms. Local campaigns for public power, getting ICE out of your town, rent control, and bodily autonomy rights can be elevated using media outlets afforded to candidates and the dais once elected. Electeds can demonstrate leadership by condemning the blockade of Cuba and war against Venezuela and Iran; starting a divestment effort against Israel’s genocide can foster an internationalist framework to tie the fights abroad to the struggles in local communities and give the masses an opportunity to hear how their struggles are a larger part of the fight against imperialism. A Marxist candidate must spread the message that the people hold power outside of the ballot box.
Grow the infrastructure of the Party
[I]f campaigns were conceived from a pedagogical point of view, where election campaigns are used to deepen awareness and popular organization [t]hen, even if the electoral results are not the most favourable, the time and effort invested in the campaign are not wasted.
The core of a campaign run by Marxists can take on myriad shapes, but there are defining factors of how they do or should run their campaigns to get the most desirable outcomes.Win or lose, electoral candidates and their infrastructures don’t disappear, and the relationships built during a campaign can live as long as they’re tended to. Instead of ephemeral electoral campaigns, socialists need to turn the momentum of elections into ongoing, permanent connections with a working class base. Candidates must follow-up with volunteers, donors, and voters who they contacted to join DSA, using electoral campaigns as an engine to grow DSA.
Finally, we can start the process of getting people invested in alternative politics through an electoral campaign, in which candidates who exemplify an important issue or sets of socialist priorities meet with people, hear them and what they need, and incorporate it into their platform - simply having people start to believe in a political persona is not enough. It is merely the first step to creating a discussion of more radical politics in a language that might be more familiar to more people in a neoliberal society such as ours. Eugene Debs highlighted the need to make his message as clear and simple as possible during his time.
Marxist candidates and campaigns can exploit the political spectacle to get our messages to the working class, recruit people to DSA, and articulate a clear political alternative to the stagnant Democratic and Republican capitalist parties while running to get the votes needed to win. But candidates and their campaigns must build relationships longer-term. Once the formal “election season” is over, candidates must find ways to maintain a connection to their base, whether that’s helping to develop issue-based campaigns or being part of organizational work that already exists. Whatever the case may be, the goal is to help develop a protagonist constituency that can wield power and influence, regardless of who’s in office. This is the Marxist strategy for electoral campaigns - to contribute to the broader tidal shift towards revolution.
[On Protagonism
NPC candidate John Lewis describes the role of protagonism as a concept in left-wing movements and socialist projects.
Red StarJohn L
](https://redstarcaucus.org/zenithv3-protagonism/)
How should we participate in government?
For those socialist candidates that do win, more than likely in legislatures or local councils or boards, there is still value in this success, however precariously held. Depending on the seat, holding office can yield specific powers that can be leveraged to “[lay] bare the innate character” of the office and the corresponding governing body. Without getting into the volume of “what if” scenarios, there are tactics, strategies, and principles that should be applied by Marxists while holding public office. Lenin describes electoralism in Left-Wing Communism as “parliamentary prejudice” yet understands the role organized socialists have when elected. “It is only from within such institutions as bourgeois parliaments that Communists can (and must) wage a long and persistent struggle, undaunted by any difficulties, to expose, dispel and overcome these prejudices."
It is likely that Marxists elected to an office in the U. S. are doing so in the minority of whatever body they’re elected to. We must remember that “the working class cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made state machinery, and wield it for its own purposes.” Anticipating this scenario means properly preparing for how to enact the broader political agenda of the campaign within the limits of liberal democratic bodies. Using the opportunities provided to expand the socialist movement means active use of levers like the ability to call for public hearings, get ballot measures introduced, and have access to public discourse via the media. Agitation against weak points of the state’s legitimacy, such as regulatory power, funding, or legal actions are other opportunities that electeds can pursue. Mobilizing hundreds or even thousands of residents around a specific reform has the possibility of actually gaining demands or driving people’s energy against oppositional forces and towards organizing within DSA.
Nimtz in The Ballot, The Streets, Or Both wrote “Lenin seized every opportunity around Duma elections and Duma deliberations to educate workers on the differences between revolutionary social democracy and liberalism, arguably the most repeated theme in his interventions.” Building power outside of the state is vital to the victory of socialism, and electeds should utilize their position to encourage and support that power being grown or expanded. Elected offices should interface with workers in their jurisdiction as much as residents and certainly more than business owners within their districts, and should encourage unionization, direct action, and class conflict publicly and directly. In addition to legislative reforms around land use, elected offices should prioritize renters and unhoused people over private property owners, ensure living conditions are being met, and support and encourage organizing tenants, social housing, and reclamation of land to the public. Political appointee power should be given to recallable individuals elected from relevant democratic institutions or member run organizations, and nominees from the working class should be presented to contrast the typical nominations from political donors, leadership in academia, and other nonprofit and for-profit entities. Reform alone will not create a revolution; every attempt to disarm capital is critical.
Lastly, there are reforms and government policies that socialist legislators can play a role in possibly winning. In local city councils, such things as rent control and municipal grocery stores are issues that many residents want. Socialist legislators can harness this energy from the bottom-up and help apply pressure to win gains against capital. People desire more social services than simply more funds for the police, and budget processes can be used to increase their voices. Within Congress, socialist legislators can join less revolutionary members in slowing down the processes, to “gum up the works” when it comes to ICE or military funding. They can, in certain scenarios, call for investigations into political corruption or impeachment charges, or in policies that placate corporate entities at the expense of the masses of people.
For all the time and energy that DSA devotes to elections, both nationally and in chapters, the question of governing is largely unaddressed. The relationship between our electeds and DSA either as a national organization or a local chapter, is not consistent – if it exists at all. None of what we want or plan matters if the focus is only on campaigning and not governing. This relationship must become consistent, and it’s imperative that DSA’s National Electoral Commission (NEC) and chapters begin to do so in line with the National Convention resolutions surrounding our red lines, expectations of endorsed electeds, and developing Socialists in Office Committee structures. This should all ideally occur before a candidate even runs but certainly after a member is elected. It is critical that the NEC prioritizes mutual relationships between electeds and the chapter and national DSA as much as getting them elected. These structures must be transparent and accountable to members rather than group chats or private relationships. With notable endorsed electeds having strained relations with their local chapter or the broader national membership due to a lack of discipline regarding our platform and commitments, we can’t move forward effectively without addressing the issue of electeds distancing their relationship from the chapter after being elected.
What does this mean for DSA?
We in Red Star believe that DSA is the most effective collection of socialists and communists to defeat capitalism at present in the U. S… It is a positive that local DSA chapters are encouraged to engage in electoral campaigns by recruiting and developing members into candidates for office, and it is imperative to have DSA chapters decide who represents the chapter on the ballot and develop electoral strategies that align with the will of the National Convention as adapted to their local conditions.
[Communists Belong in DSA
Too often, DSA is dismissed as a purely social democratic organization, and outsiders discount the communist organizing within it. As a Marxist-Leninist DSA caucus, we reject this narrative. DSA is our political home! We in Red Star are communists who believe that DSA is the most effective place to serve
Red StarChristina W
](https://redstarcaucus.org/communists-belong-in-dsa/)
We argue that developing DSA into a party beyond a ballot line goes hand in hand with running candidates with a Marxist strategy and to ensure elected socialists are embedded with their local chapter, developing members both politically and as leaders within itself. DSA chapters should be encouraged and supported by the NEC to develop electoral campaigns for candidates that intend to use their campaigns to build DSA at the local level, making sure candidates have sufficient political education and alignment, and develop a relationship with the candidate that isn’t transactional but mutual. In order to continue to build a party independent of the capitalist parties, DSA should develop relationships between former and current endorsed DSA members across the country towards the development of independent electoral organizing and fundraising programs like Socialist Cash. We should utilize DSA members that want to work on electoral campaigns to be connected with locally endorsed campaigns at other chapters running candidates for things like phonebanking and texting.
Most critically, building the party we need in this moment requires learning the lessons of socialists in the past. Running candidates in liberal bourgeois elections must be done not solely to get elected, but to heighten class consciousness and bring people into DSA to develop them as leaders and organizers. DSA members who eventually do get elected need to operate independent of the capitalist parties and instead organize with DSA rather than outside of it. DSA at the local and national level must develop a mutual relationship with candidates it runs and elects, and utilize the whole of DSA electoral programs as a single party apparatus that is greater than the sum of its parts.
Bob is a member of New Orleans DSA and a former candidate for New Orleans City Council. His campaign case study can be found below and on DSA forums.
[bob-case-study
Bob M’s review of his campaign for New Orleans city council
bob-case-study.pdf
5 MB
download-circle](https://redstarcaucus.org/content/files/2026/04/bob-case-study.pdf “Download”)
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