DSA

The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not represent the official position of Working Mass.

Electoralism is a strategy of electing politicians with the goal of creating political change. From a young age, many of us are indoctrinated to believe voting has great power;our childhoods are filled with lessons and stories about how voting is the way democracy is preserved and political change happens, backed by a sanitized lie that the Civil Rights Movement achieved its ends through the vote and not human struggle itself. Elections have very rarely achieved any meaningful changes for the working class or done any lasting damage to the capitalist system. As Lenin argued in The State and Revolution, “to decide once every few years which member of the ruling class is to misrepresent the people in parliament is the real essence of bourgeois parliamentarism.” Politicians will always be more loyal to preserving the system that safeguards capital rather than liberating the masses, precisely because of their relation to the electoral system of the state, even with professed socialist politics.