Friends,
This article is timely, as we have a primary election in Maryland on June
2. I am voting for Bernie Sanders for president, Brandon Scott for mayor,
Bill Henry for comptroller, Logan Endow for City Council and Dan Sparaco for
City Council president. Bill Henry, for example, led the charge for the
Baltimore City Council to pass a Back from the Brink resolution, and Logan
Endow has committed to working with Prevent Nuclear War/Maryland on a
divestment from fossil fuels and weapons contractors resolution. Let the
revolution continue.
Kagiso,
Max
https://truthout.org/articles/its-possible-to-run-for-office-as-an-unapologetic-socialist-and-win/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=f949bcee-9efa-4f92-8c32-834604b21c85
EXCERPT
It’s Possible to Run for
Office as an Unapologetic Socialist and Win
Voters cast their ballots in downtown Chicago, Illinois, on
April 2, 2019.KAMIL KRZACZYNSKI / AFP VIA GETTY IMAGES
May 20, 2020
Despite being an eternal
disappointment to the majority of people, the capitalist-allied political
establishment is able to remain in power in part by maintaining the illusion
that politics is for experts, people with Rolodexes full of professional
contacts, people who went to elite schools. Since the myth of meritocracy
maintains that people get ahead professionally because they’re smarter or
better than others, the people who are in charge (both as candidates and behind
the scenes) are presumed deserving of their pedestal — and the proof
of their deservingness is precisely that they’re in charge. It’s a dizzying
tautology.
The truth is that the people
who engage in politics professionally are not inherently smarter than everybody
else. (In fact, through engaging with the process up close, we’ve learned that
many of them are actually less smart.) And when they turn their backs on
principles of equality and justice, they demonstrate that they don’t deserve to
be in the drivers’ seat. They do have some specialized knowledge, but ordinary
people can develop that knowledge themselves through collective trial and
error. If we don’t muster the courage to challenge the establishment, they’ll
run the show forever. If we want politics to change, it’s time to roll up our sleeves.
The 2019 socialist victories in
Chicago are the clearest indication that a big, bold electoral strategy can
actually win. Six members of the Democratic Socialists of America were elected
to the Chicago city council in April 2019: Carlos Ramirez- Rosa, Rossana
Rodriguez, Byron Sigcho-Lopez, Jeanette Taylor, Andre Vasquez, and Daniel
La Spata. This means that 12 percent of the fifty-member council are DSA
members.
When Chicago DSA (CDSA) began
thinking about how it would approach the 2019 election cycle, many members
counseled a conservative approach. Only one DSA member, Carlos Ramirez-Rosa,
was running for reelection. All other socialists running for city council would
have to topple incumbents, several of whom had held office for decades or were
part of long-standing local political dynasties. Many in the chapter argued to
endorse one or two campaigns and throw everything behind winning them.
Ultimately, CDSA opted for
audacity rather than timidity. That audacity paid off. “It turns out that as we
endorsed more candidates, our capacity grew rather than shrank,” Steve
Weishampel, at the time the CDSA’s electoral working group co-chair, wrote
after the elections.
The successful campaigns shared
a few key characteristics. The candidates had a core message in common: fight
the wealthy and their political lackeys pushing gentrification and austerity in
Chicago. The six races spanned much of Chicago and a wide range of
neighborhood-specific issues, but all the candidates signed onto a broad, left
platform: housing for all, sanctuary for all, education for all, and taxing the
rich. These demands reflected political issues and movement demands in Chicago,
but are also burning issues throughout the country.
And they were united in a
political approach that wasn’t afraid to name the class enemy in the city,
especially the real estate developers that are rapidly gentrifying
working-class neighborhoods and forcing working people out of Chicago.
Ramirez-Rosa, for example, made
his race a referendum on affordable housing and gentrification, a pressing
issue in his ward, where rents are rapidly rising. He painted real estate
developers as the enemy of the ward’s working class. The real estate developers
responded by painting him as
the enemy. The ward’s largest landlord, Mark Fishman, spent at least $100,000
on Ramirez-Rosa’s opponent in an effort to unseat him; other developers, big
landlords, and property managers spent an additional $100,000. Voters were
flooded with attack mailers — DSA canvassers often saw them stacked
high on porches and in apartment building vestibules — leveling wild
accusations that Ramirez-Rosa was a deadbeat city council member and that he
didn’t actually care about affordable housing in the ward. They didn’t work.
“In corporate politics the
narrative is you can screw over the voters, you can screw the working class,
and as long as you have the money to get on TV and slam your opponents in the
mail boxes, you can win,” Ramirez-Rosa said after the election. “We turned that
logic upside down — not just in my ward, but in wards across Chicago,
where we saw corporate Democrats spending big and losing. At the end of the
day, if you reach the voters door to door with a compelling message and a
political vision that speaks to their needs, they’re going to go with you every
time.”
Ramirez-Rosa’s campaign didn’t
shy away from attacking the ward’s most powerful capitalist. That
class-struggle approach paid off: he won reelection by nearly 20 percent over
his real estate–friendly opponent.
Ramirez-Rosa’s win and the
other five victories didn’t come in a vacuum. All six of the candidates are DSA
members, but they are also aligned with unions, community groups, political
organizations, and other groups. Those groups both paved the way for these
victories and played key roles during the campaign. And DSA showed them that
socialists are key allies in these fights.
All of the candidates were
endorsed by United Working Families (UWF), the political organization formed by
the Chicago Teachers Union (CTU) and SEIU Healthcare Illinois- Indiana along
with a number of community groups, which other unions and community
organizations have joined in recent years. It also devoted significant
resources to many of the campaigns. Most unions and progressive groups shy away
from the “socialist” label. UWF didn’t.
In addition to UWF’s support,
Rodriguez had the backing of a neighborhood group, 33rd Ward Working Families,
that had run teacher and socialist Tim Meegan for the office in 2015. Since
then, the group has organized around affordable housing and immigrants’ rights
in a working-class immigrant neighborhood, Albany Park — so
effectively that the losing incumbent, Deb Mell, complained that 33rd Ward
Working Families “never stopped running over the last four years.” Mell, a
hapless hack whose father gave her the city council seat in the middle of his
term in 2013 after holding it himself for nearly four decades, apparently
thought candidates who organize in their communities are cheating. After her
victory the Chicago
Sun-Times christened Rodriguez a “dynasty slayer.”
UWF and the rest of Chicago
wouldn’t be willing to elect leftist candidates if the city hadn’t been such a
hotbed of working-class militancy in recent years. The CTU’s 2012 strike
brought a sea change to city politics, popularizing opposition to austerity and
making the union the city’s most important force in that fight. The CTU’s
willingness to strike — in public schools, as it did again for a
single day in an illegal strike in 2016 and in a long, open-ended strike in
2019, and in charters, where it organized aggressively and struck repeatedly
after 2012 — has reshaped the city’s politics (and helped make all
kinds of workers, from graduate teaching assistants to the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra, more willing to withhold their labor from the boss).
That militancy is also seen in
CTU-adjacent community groups like the Kenwood Oakland Community Organization
(KOCO), of which Jeanette Taylor has been an active member for many years. KOCO
is a mostly black organization based in black neighborhoods on the city’s South
Side that has long fought education austerity. Their organizing helped inspire
the group of reformers within the CTU that took over the union’s leadership in
2010 and pushed it in a more radical direction, committed to fighting for the
city’s entire working class (especially in black and Latino neighborhoods)
rather than just teachers themselves. KOCO led a month-long hunger strike in
2015 demanding the reopening of a neighborhood high school. Taylor was one of
the hunger strikers. “The movement made and pushed me,” Taylor said before she
was elected. “I don’t like doing all this, running for office and talking in
public. That’s something I was molded into doing.”
In other words, CDSA
audaciously ran five socialists for city council, and for playing key
roles — in several cases, the central role — in the
victorious campaigns. But DSA didn’t win these victories on its own. The group
was part of a broad working-class movement that tied electoral campaigns to
grassroots labor and community organizing and militancy. Without that wider
ferment in the city, it’s doubtful the six socialists would have won their seats.
The lesson from Chicago, then,
is not just that you can run socialist candidates who take on the ruling class
and actually win, and not just that you can run many socialist candidates
and win. It’s also that socialists must join (or start) fights at their
workplaces and in their communities that can create the broader political
conditions for electoral victories. Those fights, built painstakingly over
years and even decades in the city, created the conditions in which six
socialists could win city council seats — and shortly after the
election, CDSA’s then co-chairs Leonard Pierce and Lucie Macias could declare
in the Chicago Tribune,
“Chicago’s politicians and the ultra- wealthy, from the mayor’s office to
corporate boardrooms, need to understand that business isn’t going to continue
as usual in this city.”
It’s impossible to know what
will come of these wins. At the time of this writing, the six socialists have
held office for less than a year. The city’s capitalist class, like capitalists
everywhere, is very powerful. And because CDSA doesn’t have many institutional
mechanisms to force its candidates to remain faithful to a socialist program,
it’s possible that the rich could pick off a few of the socialist victors. A
key task going forward will be figuring out how to not just win city council
campaigns like these, but keep victorious city council members from succumbing
to capitalist or mainstream Democratic Party pressure.
But in the immediate aftermath
of the victory, things look promising. The city council socialists have hit the
streets: Rodriguez has used her megaphone to support tenants organizing against
abusive landlords in the neighborhood and provided space for numerous
working-class organizing efforts in her ward. Several of the new council members
have used their office to organize against Donald Trump’s threatened ICE raids
in Chicago. The newly elected leaders even joined in blocking traffic outside
City Hall to protest massive giveaways to real estate developers shortly after
the elections. A “Socialist Caucus” on the fifty-member city council is in its
infancy, one that will hopefully be more politically principled and consistent
than the “Progressive Caucus,” whose members can’t be relied on to speak as a
bloc on much of anything.
And all of the six could be
seen on the picket lines during the CTU’s 2019 strike. They coauthored a Chicago Sun-Times op-ed
siding with the teachers over the mayor and demanding that Chicago’s schools be
adequately funded—no small development in a city where the city council’s
complete fealty to the mayor could previously be taken for granted. Chicago’s
elected officials are using their office to stoke more grassroots organizing,
more bottom-up opposition to austerity, more class struggle.
The political conditions in
Chicago are unique, of course. So are every city’s. But, given national
currents, we’re likely to soon see other cities wage local electoral
campaigns that name our enemy, the capitalist class, and that work and grow
alongside militant working-class organizing.
Adapted from Bigger than Bernie: How We
Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism by Meagan Day and Micah Uetricht, now available from Verso Books.
This piece was reprinted by Truthout with
permission or license. It may not be reproduced in any form without permission
or license from the source.
Meagan Day is a staff writer at Jacobin. She is the
co-author of Bigger than
Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
Micah Uetricht is the managing
editor of Jacobin and
host of Jacobin Radio’s
“The Vast Majority.” He is the author of Strike for America: Chicago Teachers Against Austerity and
co-author of Bigger Than
Bernie: How We Go from the Sanders Campaign to Democratic Socialism.
Donations can be sent
to Max Obuszewski, Baltimore Nonviolence Center, 431 Notre Dame Lane, Apt. 206,
Baltimore, MD 21212. Ph: 410-323-1607; Email: mobuszewski2001 [at]
comcast.net. Go to http://baltimorenonviolencecenter.blogspot.com/
"The master class
has always declared the wars; the subject class has always fought the battles.
The master class has had all to gain and nothing to lose, while the subject
class has had nothing to gain and everything to lose--especially their
lives." Eugene Victor Debs
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