In 2016, the Bernie Sanders campaign reintroduced the idea of socialism into the us political mainstream. The Democrat establishment stifled it and put forward Clinton, as the only alternative to an extreme right-wing agenda. After Trump’s election, and the concomitant discrediting of the dp establishment, many turned towards democratic socialism. Fifty thousand—mostly young people—have joined the Democratic Socialists of America. But the more dsa matures, the more challenging are the strategic questions we confront. I’ll focus mostly on the role of elections for our movement: despite the dangers of electoralism, a class-struggle approach to elections and elected office is an essential element of dsa’s work today.

Socialists are trying to achieve the most difficult thing humans have ever attempted: the conscious transformation from one social order to another, carried out by, and in the interests of, the majority of society. Capitalists have incredible powers to maintain the status quo and, unless workers are organized, they have very little power. But organizing is difficult and often ends in failure. Even the highest points of class struggle, such as the 1930s and 40s in the us, have been fleeting. Organizations and working-class consciousness dissipate after major defeats, or are co-opted by the dp; workers have been divided by racism, sexism and other reactionary ideologies; older generations of militant organizers have died off. Yet only organized socialists can consolidate the gains of class struggle, assimilate the lessons of the international working class and bring these to a new generation. We cannot simply elect socialists to office, to legislate socialism from above. The state under capitalism is not a neutral tool; its legislators and administrators are under immense pressure to advance a pro-business agenda, to block or water down progressive reforms. Capitalists’ control over investment decisions grants them an indirect structural power over the decisions of elected public officials. Second, though the redistribution of resources will require an ambitious legislative agenda, the power to achieve and defend those gains will depend primarily on organized workers and their capacity to mobilize a mass social base.

That said, the last three years have demonstrated the power of elections and elected socialists to advance socialist ideas and inspire workers themselves to organize. To understand why, we should first appreciate how low the level of working-class organization and consciousness has fallen during the last forty years. Whereas at the high water-mark of class struggle in the 1930s and 40s, millions took part in strikes each year, in 2017, as few as 25,000 workers took part in major work stoppages. The neoliberal assault on unions and the left had all but erased class politics from the American political lexicon. This puts socialists today in a very different strategic conjuncture to that of the mid-20th century, when European social-democratic leaders and the Roosevelt Administration in the us set out to channel high levels of working-class militancy, represented by mass strikes and general social upheaval, into more easily contained collective-bargaining regimes.

In today’s context, Sanders’s campaign has been an effort to raise the political consciousness and activity of millions of workers. Even though his platform might be largely indistinguishable from those of the 20th-century social democrats, it plays a different role—one that Bhaskar Sunkara has called ‘class-struggle social democracy’. Along with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Rashida Tlaib, Sanders represents an approach to electoral politics that can help advance the socialist cause. First, by winning office and campaigning for a radical legislative agenda, these class-struggle social democrats have given people a sense that more is possible, beyond the confines of neoliberalism and austerity. They are helping to raise the expectations of the working class, rather than lowering them, as the 20th-century social democrats did. Sanders and others have inspired masses of people to become interested in politics for the first time. The clearest example of this is Ocasio-Cortez’s drive to popularize the Green New Deal. As a new socialist Congressperson, Ocasio-Cortez was able to team up with young activists and put a working-class solution to the climate crisis in the national spotlight—something climate campaigners had been unable to do for years.

Second, this politicization builds on a continuous process of political education. Sanders regularly points out that billionaires like Jeff Bezos are to blame for poverty, homelessness and ecological destruction. He takes a clear stance against the Republicans’ racism and sexism, urging workers to recognize their shared interests as against those of the business elite and their politicians. Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have both made clear that without a mass movement of ‘people versus money’, outside the halls of power, their reform agenda will be out of reach—encouraging a new generation to take part in politics and activism. Third, by aiming their fire at the billionaires and corporations, Sanders and Ocasio-Cortez have eroded the legitimacy of the corporate-backed Democratic Party. This is not to say I agree with their orientation towards the Democrats: both seem committed to reforming or re-aligning the Party, instead of engineering a break from it. However, by raising class consciousness, bringing a new generation of workers to political activism and popularizing anti-corporate policies like the Green New Deal, class-struggle social democrats have begun to highlight the dp’s contradictions, while creating a viable political space outside and to the left of it. Finally, by re-introducing the idea of socialism into the American mainstream, Sanders has encouraged a sub-set of these newly politicized layers to develop explicitly anti-capitalist ideas. Young people are becoming radicalized, joining organizations like dsa, learning about the labour movement and getting jobs in strategic sectors like teaching, nursing and logistics, as part of a broader rank-and-file strategy for re-igniting working-class militancy from below.

Two recent examples illustrate ways in which a class-struggle approach to elections can be mutually reinforcing, and not opposed to, social-movement organizing outside the state. In West Virginia, the teachers who would go on to become leading organizers of the 2018 public-education strikes had been inspired to join dsa, thanks in part to their work during the 2016 Sanders campaign. It was during his run for the Democratic nomination that these activists built the skills and networks that helped Sanders spread the same ideas that would undergird the teachers’ strike: working-class solidarity, redistribution from the corporations and the ultra-rich to the majority, the need for movement-building from below. The dsa members and teachers who helped lead the strike popularized the call to fund teachers’ demands through a tax on the rich and on gas companies, as against the unions’ insistence that the state legislature should pay for it with cuts to other services.

In California, the East Bay dsa played a major role in supporting the Oakland teachers’ strike. Our dsa chapter had two important capacities to offer. One was a group of Oakland teachers who were also socialists and dsa members, most of them new to the left in the last few years. These teachers, supported by dsa’s impressive network of experienced union activists, all became excellent organizers through the strike. The chapter was also able to mobilize hundreds of its members to support the strike in myriad ways: feeding thousands of students who relied on free or reduced-cost school lunches, so they didn’t need to cross the picket lines; supporting the pickets directly; producing propaganda supporting the strike, including our own publication, Majority. None of this would have been possible had the East Bay chapter not built up its skills and networks over the course of a year-long electoral struggle in support of Proposition 10 and our local class-struggle candidate, Jovanka Beckles, for the State Assembly.