Socialism and Electoralism
The recent successes for democratic socialist candidates like Zohran Mamdani in New York and Omar Fateh in Minneapolis have reinvigorated discussions on what revolutionary potential might be found in bourgeois elections. However, communists, organizers, activists, revolutionaries, and workers must be clear-sighted when it comes to engaging in bourgeois electoralism.
Socialists and democratic socialists running in bourgeois elections are misleading the working class. They’re draining it of the revolutionary potential required to construct the dictatorship of the proletariat — the true resolution to the contradictions facing society.
Without the dictatorship of the proletariat, we can’t resolve the current contradiction between capital and labor. Without resolving this contradiction, we can’t liberate ourselves, our communities, or our futures.
The Incorrect Tactics of Communists During the 2024 Presidential Election
The correct path is to explain to the working class that the presidential elections are a masquerade which attempts to legitimize the genocidal imperialist rule of the US capitalist class. Both candidates are our unrelenting class enemies, whose objective is our subjugation and exploitation. Liberation can only come from committing our energy to building our own centers of power — working class centers of power and socialist revolution.
On Reactionary Environmentalism
Us revolutionaries, us Marxists must combat the ways in which capitalism mystifies the natural world and our relation to it. With dialectical materialism we see that there is no dichotomy between civilization and nature. Nature is not something to be conquered, nor is it something humans must “return to”, or that should reclaim us at the cost of basic security and livelihood for millions or billions of the most vulnerable people. There is no human production without the natural land it must occur on, and we are at a point where the way we produce things directly affects the environmental trajectory of the entire planet. We must understand the relationship between civilization and nature as a dialectical one, and dismantle the structures of capitalist imperialism so that we can overcome our alienation as workers, with the planet we all live on, produce on, and need to survive.