The Path for Socialism Is Focus

Far more than socialists, Democratic Party leadership should own November’s outcome. President Joe Biden failed to communicate the merits of his domestic agenda to Americans. He didn’t direct public ire about the economy towards profiteers or speak with urgency about the impact of inflation on ordinary people. Instead, Democrats spent much of the last four years saying everything was fine, and hoping abortion rights and ​“protecting democracy” would be enough to keep them in power.

Now is a time for the Left to show its distance from the Democratic Party’s elites and their discredited style of politics.

The first thing to do is to make sure socialist politics are oppositional and rooted in working-class communities. One way is to identify villains — from grocery giant CEOs at the national level to corporate landlords at the local level — that people can blame for their difficulties. Programmatically, we need to focus on the pocketbook issues that workers care about the most. That means not only providing rhetoric but having credible policy answers to both the distributional and supply aspects of problems like the housing crisis.

We’re at our weakest when our demands seem both maximalist and contrary to popular interests, like police abolition. The Left is at its strongest when it has a credible social-democratic response to a problem: ​“Can’t afford health insurance? Well, we have this policy called Medicare for All that would give everyone free insurance and a direct relationship with their doctor unmediated by expensive, third-party insurances. We can win this good policy, but we need your help to take on vampiric health executives and their allies in Congress.”

It is important to remember, if we campaign on everything, we campaign on nothing. In the coming years, we need to pursue a ruthlessly focused politics that highlights issues that will best build a popular base for the Left.

Indeed, part of our distancing from the professional-class style of today’s Democratic Party will mean a thorough rejection of identity politics in favor of a universal appeal that has the same popular message for people of all backgrounds.

This is a politics that is reductionist by design, not in its theoretical rejection of the many forms of oppression that exist or the complexity of working-class life, but in the practical application of its politics.

A politics rooted in the centrality of class, and the creation of institutions that can carry on the class struggle within and beyond the workplace, would win the material gains and build the social base that could permanently reshape our society.

Tapping into our shared desire for peace, stability and dignity will lead this movement toward solidarity with those deprived of their dignity by bigots, or deprived of peace by war-makers, or deprived of stability by ruthless market competition.

But creating this politics starts with constructing a rhetoric and program that’s built to attract working people, not members of the same professional class that brought us Kamala Harris.