Why stand in elections?
By Barry Conlon
Arguments about whether or not to stand in elections have a history in the socialist movement almost as long as the history of the movement itself. There are three broad positions running through those debates recurring again and again.
This article originally appeared in Rupture 12, buy the whole issue here:
Firstly, some see fundamental change as coming through elections and parliaments. Usually, although not quite always, this view is associated with gradualism and most types of reformism. I’m not going to spend much time arguing against this position, but it’s worth remembering that this is in fact the position held by most of the labour movement and much of the socialist movement historically.
Secondly, some reject elections and parliaments entirely or at least for all practical purposes. This is a position associated historically with Anarchism but it also recurs in various dissident Marxisms and even in some more leftist variants of Stalinism.
Thirdly, there is the position mostly associated with the broad tradition following Lenin, the Bolsheviks and the early Communist International, that socialism will not be legislated through parliament but engaging with and, where possible, standing in, elections is strategically useful for other reasons. There are all kinds of variations and degrees of difference within these three broad camps, but the basic arguments keep recurring.
The case against electioneering
The state is not neutral. It is an instrument of class rule. The capitalist state functions to protect and further capitalism and the interests of the capitalists. Parliaments may reflect real differences of interests and strategies between different factions of capital, but they cannot simply be used by the opponents of capital.
To begin with, they do not wield power independently of the rest of the state. They are part of a matrix of related institutions, including constitutions, courts, upper houses, central banks, the state bureaucracy and the armed bodies of the state, which collectively function to (among other things) prevent any elected government from threatening the interests of the ruling class.
Try to expropriate the capitalist class from Dáil Éireann and you will quickly find that the Constitution forbids it quite firmly. As do the judiciary, the Department of Finance, the European Central Bank as well as the European courts and the institutions and treaties of the European Union more generally.
Of more relevance to today’s reformists and social democrats, few of whom retain such drastic goals, is that the same web of institutions serves to restrain even radical reforms. The Supreme Court for example threw out an attempt to introduce rent control in the 1980s. The Constitution, after all, explicitly protects private property. EU procurement rules, enshrined in binding treaties, are deliberately designed to force states to rely on market mechanisms. EU fiscal rules are designed to hinder redistributionist economic policies. It’s not that no reforms are possible, but that the space for reform is limited and as the state has become more sophisticated and international parastate structures like the EU or the World Trade Organisation have developed, that space has only narrowed.
All of this is correct, insofar as it goes. Socialism is not going to be legislated through the Dáil. Socialists can’t just win an election in France or Argentina or the United States or India and transform social relations and basic economic structures from above.
But that doesn’t put the issue of elections to rest. It barely scratches the surface of the controversy. There are other reasons to participate in elections, reasons which have nothing to do with naive legalism, timid incrementalism or parliamentary cretinism.
A Marxist response
The first and most obvious of these is that parliamentary seats provide an extremely useful platform even though they are not themselves a mechanism for fundamental socialist change. Having TDs in Ireland, or their equivalent in other liberal democratic states, gives a political organisation an enormously amplified voice. Parliaments themselves are high profile platforms, but membership grants access to the media in the form of interviews and creates an expectation that the news media cover their views more generally.
People Before Profit’s four TDs, its MLA and Solidarity’s TD are the highest profile socialist activists in the country and their voices and the views they represent are heard far more often by the general public than those of often equally dedicated and articulate activists. We might prefer that this not be so, but many things about this society are not as we might prefer. When you hear socialist arguments made on Irish television or in Irish newspapers, the bulk of the time they are being made by elected representatives.
It’s important to note that they are not unfairly occupying space that would otherwise be taken up by other socialists. Without their presence, the socialist movement would be cheerfully ignored most of the time by all sections of the media and socialist arguments would rarely be carried at all. They don’t want us there and if there is no expectation or obligation that our representatives be covered, most of the time they simply ignore us. Whether we like it or not, you can be heard by more people in one national radio interview than might hear you speak in five hundred grassroots public meetings.This is not speculation. There are many socialist groupings without elected representatives and they are uniformly lower profile. When the socialist left had no representation in the Dáil or Stormont, it had a generally lower profile. This was a particular disadvantage in the immediate aftermath of the 2008 crash, when there was nobody in the Dáil to act as a figurehead or to advocate radical left responses.
This is not to suggest that elected representatives are an entirely unproblematic good. Regardless of how personally principled and dedicated they are, they come under constant pressure to moderate their views, to not sound like a crank, to seem reasonable within the confines of an unreasonable system. However, this is only a more intense variant of the ideological pressures all radical activists face, at least insofar as they engage seriously on an ongoing basis with the general public. Trade union activists, workplace activists, community activists, social movement activists are all subject to the same pull towards moderation. In RISE’s view one of the purposes of a revolutionary organisation is to exercise a counter influence, on members in general but in particular on those members who find themselves in elected roles, whether in parliament or in workers movement bodies.
More than just a platform
There are less obvious advantages to electoral participation that are just as important. One is that there is no better way to get a picture of the level of support you actually have than to run a serious election campaign. Knocking on doors, talking to randomly selected members of the public rather than those who have preselected themselves by attending a meeting or approaching a stall, is a bracing experience for many young radicals.
It is very easy to become disoriented in an activist milieu or in your own personally curated social media bubble and start to imagine that your ideas are much more widely held than they are. Engaging with thousands of members of the public, talking to them, trying to convince them of at least some of your views and then seeing how many of them vote for your candidate rather than a boring neoliberal, a corrupt gombeen or a racist moron tends to impose a certain realism about where we are and how many people agree with us.
Other forms of campaigning can also bring socialists some of this grounding experience, but not with the same clarity. Whether we like it or not (a recurring phrase in this article for good reason) elections and parliaments are still the dominant way in which most people think about politics. Election campaigns provide a way to reach people in circumstances where they are generally more receptive to talking and thinking about political issues.
Avoiding impatience, quoting scripture
There is a recurring tendency among socialists to want to reject this reality and to assert that in fact working class people aren’t interested in elections, that they in some sense see through the role of parliaments and politicians. Therefore, it follows, when socialists engage in elections they are propping up the capitalist political order.
These kinds of arguments are a case of impatience leading directly to self-delusion. The Dáil does not gain credibility because we stand for it. We gain credibility from it. We are marginal, the political system is not. We can convince ourselves that a sizable minority abstaining from voting represents some kind of advanced radical political consciousness, rather than apathy, lack of interest or despair, but we will be the only ones convinced.
I don’t like arguments from authority and I don’t particularly value “orthodoxy”, but for what it’s worth all of this is in keeping with Lenin’s views. In “Left Wing Communism”, his famous polemic against impatient ultra-leftism in the early Communist International, he sought to explain that; no, the workers have not seen through parliament and capitalist democracy. Pretending that they have is a way of evading rather than confronting a problem. Lenin, it’s worth noting, thought that participation in even the most reactionary parliaments, in even the most revolutionary times was nearly mandatory for Marxists.
An enormous amount has changed in a century but not everything has. Parliaments and elections remain stubbornly relevant. In today’s world, wherever parliaments do not exist or do not function in some rough approximation of the norms of liberal democracy, far from this spurring movements for workers’ councils, we tend to see popular movements for improved parliamentary democracy. Instead of futilely trying to wish them away, socialists have to find creative ways to use parliamentary platforms to strengthen extra-parliamentary movements and organisation.
Barry Conlon is a former member of the Rupture editorial board and current member of People Before Profit in Dublin, and part of the RISE network.