By COCO SMYTH

Political leaflets that arrived in many Ohioans’ mailboxes on Oct. 11 have brought a modest independent socialist electoral campaign to the center of attention—and controversy—in Ohio and even national politics.

Greg Levy, an organizer with the Party for Socialism and Liberation, is running for a U.S. Senate position representing Ohio. He’s running against Republican Jon Husted to his right and Democrat Sherrod Brown, also to his right. According to his campaign website, Levy is running on positions such as “Free Palestine,” “Abolish the Billionaire Class,” and “Universal Free Healthcare.”

Most notably, unlike the most well-known self-identified socialist politicians today, he is running independently of and against the Democratic Party. This is the basis of the current discourse and controversy over his campaign.

Thousands of Ohioans received campaign mailers emblazoned with slogans like “Join the Revolution, Vote Greg Levy,” “Send a Worker to the Senate” and select demands from the campaign’s website. According to a report by Anna Staver of Cleveland.com, a SuperPAC created on Sept. 29, Enough Promises Ohio, was behind these flyers. Thanks to public campaign financing laws, it was revealed that Enough Promises Ohio spent over $400,000 on flyers for Greg Levy and opposing Sherrod Brown. Staver’s report also identified a series of links between this mysterious new SuperPAC and the Republican Party’s broader funding apparatus.

Greg Levy has publicly denounced this maneuver which was conducted with neither the knowledge nor the support of his campaign. According to a public statement from the campaign, “There is a well established record of both Republican and Democratic Party operatives using their financial resources to try and trick voters. This is a highly undemocratic practice and does a disservice to voters in Ohio and throughout the country. … We reject and condemn the dirty tricks and racist impersonation of our campaign by entities working on behalf of those same capitalist institutions. This racist caricaturing of our candidate, a form of digital blackface, is a cheap, cowardly attack that is meant to demean the communities we represent and scare voters away from policies that put the needs of working families ahead of corporate profits.” The statement concluded by noting that the campaign is considering taking legal action against the SuperPAC.

The Republican-linked mailers have expanded the campaign’s reach outside the circles of leftists and organizers in Ohio that it appeals to and has incited a controversy over the significance of independent leftist politics. Instead of the SuperPAC issue provoking a moment of interrogation of the shady campaign financing and undemocratic norms that prevail under the U.S. “democracy,” the prime takeaway in the discourse has been that independent socialists only serve the interests of the Republicans and the far right.

Liberal and even leftist commentators have called for Greg Levy to step down so that he doesn’t steal votes away from Sherrod Brown and secure a victory for Jon Husted. This notion of independent leftist candidates acting as spoilers and undermining the Democrats in service of the right-wing is a classic means the Democrats have used to entrench the rule of the capitalist parties further.

It’s been made into a common sense that an independent leftist campaign pulls its votes directly from the Democrats’ pockets. This is a questionable assumption. The voters for a campaign like Greg Levy’s are people who are already strongly disillusioned with the Democratic Party’s capitalist politics.

It’s also laughable that Democratic commentators pretend that opportunistic Republican mailers for a socialist campaign would prove decisive in this election when that money is chump change in comparison to that spent on the bourgeois candidates. To date, superPACs have spent or reserved $239 million for Jon Husted’s campaign while $168 million has been spent in service of Sherrod Brown. Meanwhile, Sherrod Brown’s campaign has swamped Jon Husted’s five to one in terms of direct campaign contributions with a grand total of $61 million and $18.8 million respectively. If the Democrats lose this election, it will be thanks to their own deeply unpopular politics rather than superPAC expenditures on socialists.

But the issues at stake here are far bigger than that of whom Ohioans will vote for in this Senate race. The Republicans have orchestrated a decade-long offensive against Americans’ basic rights, their livelihoods, and the workers of the whole world. Instead of mounting an opposition to the reactionary Trumpist program, the Democratic Party has adapted itself to Trumpism on immigrants’ rights, trans rights, and imperialism—to name just a few cases.

As we saw with the first No Kings demonstrations and the anti-ICE mobilizations, millions of people are just waiting for the call to resist Trump’s “MAGA” agenda. Yet the Democrats have refused to utilize their substantial resources—from personnel, to organization, to cash—to build up a serious resistance. They have no positive or progressive program for the future of the country and thus tail after Trump while prattling on about appealing to the mythical moderate Republicans and centrist voters. Despite Trump’s unprecedented level of unpopularity for a president, the Democrats can’t manage to mount a serious campaign to displace the Republicans electorally, let alone organize millions against Trumpism.

This is why fighting for working-class political independence in our workplaces, communities, and even at the ballot box is so vital. Millions of workers are ready to stand up against the systematic Trumpist attacks on our rights and livelihoods, but the Democratic Party is an obstacle on our path. We have the power to resist, but only through our own mass struggle as workers. We can neither rely on the capitalist parties to defend our existing rights nor struggle for more.

We need to fight for an independent workers’ party rooted in the unions and the social movements which has the capacity and will to fight for the interests of the working class everywhere. And such a party is possible if we build up organizational capacity, militancy, and a mass orientation within the working class’ movements which already command the allegiance of millions.

An important step in that direction is for class conscious workers to break from the logic of lesser evilism and realpolitik that the capitalist parties use to demonize, discredit, and disorganize the socialist movement. Consequently, we oppose the Republicans’ monetary maneuvers and the Democrats’ weaponization of them against the Greg Levy campaign which seeks to attack the rising class consciousness and striving for independence among workers today beyond just this single campaign. The two parties, ostensibly so opposed to each other, unite with each other to break up any expression of working class political independence.

Despite our serious disagreements with the PSL’s political and organizational approach more broadly, we reject these capitalist maneuvers against Greg Levy, which only serve to undermine the possibility of resistance that isn’t totally subordinated to the whims of capitalists who have no intention of struggling against the far right.

The Democratic Party has chosen time and time again to stand with the Republicans against the desires of the working class on the most decisive issues in U.S. politics from health-care policy to genocide against Palestinians, the war on Iran, immigration, and repression against democratic rights. We’ve waited a decade for them to resist Trumpism and only have the memories of the rights and conditions we had before to show for it.

At the ballot, workers who have had enough of the capitalist parties should refuse to vote for any of their candidates, Democrat or Republican. Further, the Republicans are attempting to turn Ohio’s racist voter ID law into an amendment to the Ohio Constitution to make it even more difficult to get rid of. Voting “no” on Issue 3 is a reaffirmation of our democratic rights even though struggle is still needed to overturn the pre-existing voter ID law. For class-conscious workers, this election is an opportunity to reaffirm our commitment to the socialist alternative we need and rededicate ourselves to organizing the struggles in our workplaces and communities that will make it possible.

Photo: Greg Levy. (Jeff St. Clair / Ideastream Public Media)

The post Are independent socialists Republican Party pawns? first appeared on Workers’ Voice/La Voz de los Trabajadores.

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