Using the Office to Win in the Workplace
Though we may not elect our way to socialism, electoral work is crucial to supporting labor work. We will need the office to get there.
by Aaron Bager, Melina Herrera
At the January General Meeting, we as Detroit DSA discussed our electoral strategy and what forms it has taken, and what our future in it might look like. It is through discussions like this that our ideas, which are always different and varied due to the big tent nature of our organization, can come together to form a strategy that we can collectively agree on.
In that discussion the biggest question that was brought up was this: why are we doing electoral work? Why would we bother working on electoral campaigns when we could be organizing workers? It was claimed that historically, the changes we seek to make only come from the bottom-up and not the top-down, and that all socialist movements that sought to make change solely through electoral work have failed.
However, we cannot ignore the critical role politicians and legislation have in shaping the legal boundaries of what workers can do. To drop our electoral work altogether would be catastrophic for the labor movement, and the socialist movement overall.
Leveraging Laws for Labor
Our electoral work supports our labor work. We may not have decided how we interact with the state, if at all, but make no mistake: our enemies do not have any qualms about wielding state power against us and the working class. We saw how Biden and a Democratic majority in Congress destroyed the possibility of a rail strike that could have brought the economy to a grind.
This is exactly why we shouldn’t give up completely on electoralism. By leaving a vacuum, we leave both parties to do as they please. Our voice is small, but the goal is to grow to be a mass movement capable of challenging the Democratic Party. In order to do that, we need to continue building up our electoral apparatus
Beyond that, our electoral work should have a focus on supporting things like the PRO Act, repealing Right To Work laws, passing the Medicare for All Act and the Green New Deal. The goal isn’t to subvert or replace our labor work with those actions, but to strengthen workers and give them the ability to organize better. Our country is at an all-time low in terms of union density, hovering around 10% country-wide as of January this year, and only slightly higher at 16% in Michigan. This is in no small part because DSA, and the broader left, did not start winning until fairly recently, and therefore had no power when it came to labor.
To ask workers, who are already overworked to the point of exhaustion, to do more work to organize their workplaces without offering them meaningful legislative support, is a losing strategy. Workers need more protections if we are to pitch unionization to them. If we wish to increase union density, we have to make the act of creating them much easier than it is.
We only have to look to Starbucks and Amazon to see what companies are allowed to get away with in this country. Sure, workers cannot be fired for unionizing, but they can conveniently be fired for separate reasons while unionizing, or be penalized for doing so. It directly prevents our unionization efforts, and makes the pitch of forming a union in the workplace one that brings up considerable anxiety in workers.
We have to curb the power of corporations to bust unions if we wish to build greater union density in this country, and our most effective angle is to do this through legislation. Through legislation we can take away the scare tactics that workplaces use, and embolden workers in taking power for themselves.
Building the Chapter Through Election Campaigns
Last Election season, our chapter endorsed two electoral efforts — Prop 3, which repealed Michigan’s archaic abortion law, and public transit millages in Oakland and Macomb Counties.
Some members criticized those efforts because they did not result in a massive influx of members. After all, recruitment is one of the main goals for our electoral work, and has proven successful in doing that in the past. How many people have joined our chapter because of high profile figures like Bernie Sanders or AOC? Without Bernie, AOC and our very own Rashida Tlaib, DSA would still be somewhat irrelevant in the political discourse in the United States.
While we did not see dramatic gains with our most recent local electoral work, that does not make electoral a dead end for recruitment. Moreover, we did recruit a handful of members through our Prop 3 and transit work, and developed the skills of many comrades. Further, as candidates similar to Bernie take the stage, we will see similar influxes of members as we have before. It falls on us to build an organization that can take these members in and effectively keep them engaged.
It should be noted that while recruitment is one of the most important things we do, it is not the only reason we engage in campaigns of any kind. To be clear, when we use “campaign” in this context, it is how we define a campaign in the context of our chapter, not just electoral campaigns. Something we have lacked as a chapter is how we define success and failure in a campaign, only choosing to do so when we reflect on the campaign.
Instead, we need to seriously consider defining what we consider a success leading into the campaign, what we seek to achieve by undertaking it, with clear metrics. We should understand recruitment as one of the many goals we could be considering, and our chapter should reflect on that as we get closer to our chapter convention.
Don’t Throw the Baby Out With the Bathwater
Many assume that trying to build socialism through electoral work is a top-down approach and not a bottom-up approach, where we depend on elected officials to hand socialism to us down on a silver platter while giving up our own power. This is a false dichotomy. In some cases yes, electoral work revolves solely around getting people elected and getting laws passed. However, in working with our elected officials, we gain insight into their districts and come to understand the issues and concerns of the people of that district. In surrendering these relationships, we lose this information.
One could argue the same would be the case in surrendering the rank-and-file strategy: without interacting with the rank and file of unions, we lose sight of what union members care about. Given that union density is at a historic low, we need to keep in mind the workers that are being left behind when we choose only to interact with unionized workers. Our electeds cover that gap, they share vital insights about the concerns and issues that their constituents have. Outside of our involvement in unionized workplaces, we are flying blind.
Our electoral work should focus on putting politicians into power that can push through useful reforms that empower the working class, while at the same time using our relationships with electeds as conduits to reach their constituents, both to educate and organize them. One cannot be done without the other.
This article is part of a series that shares different perspectives about electoral work within our Metro Detroit DSA chapter. To read the other articles in the series click, check out this section of the article for hyperlinks and stay up to date with The Detroit Socialist.
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