A number of recent articles on this web site have spelled out an overall assessment of the 2020 elections and explained why we consider opposition to the Democratic Party to be a fundamental cornerstone of class politics. The purpose of this article is to explain socialist strategy and tactics in the 2020 elections. The main conclusion of the article is that socialists should call for a vote for the Green Ecosocialist slate of Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker in every state.

 Fighting Trump

Many activists will say that they agree with the general socialist stance towards the Democrats, but there’s something different this year. Trump is so dangerous and the prospects of a second term so threatening to the working class that general positions are superseded by immediate urgency. A unique emergency requires supporting Biden in order to defeat Trump.

 Supporters of this viewpoint are certainly right when they point to the racist and authoritarian nature of Trump’s lumpen capitalism. We do not minimize the dangers of Trump’s offensive for one minute. We part company with the Biden voting radicals on something else: how can Trump and Trumpism be successfully combated?

 Mass action and organization

Here the fundamental point is the question: how can any ruling class offensive be successfully fought? The answer is by changing the balance of class forces through mass action in the streets and workplaces. Large scale demonstrations and strikes have proven to be the only effective method of securing advances for the working class and its movements. The roster of such victories is well known: the suffragist movement winning votes for women, the pivotal CIO upsurge in the 1930s winning unions and vastly improved working conditions, the antiwar movement helping to end the Vietnam war, the civil rights movement ending Southern Jim Crow, and the urban Black struggles of the 1960s achieving great gains in social spending. This is not just an old socialist litany. It is a precise and accurate view of how social change takes place. Elections are not the method by which reaction is defeated and the class struggle moved forward, mass struggle is.

 This general point is certainly true in Trump’s America. The huge street demonstrations of the Black Lives Matter movement this summer has been the greatest single challenge to Trump. Imagine the situation if the George Floyd movement had been joined by other such movements: a labor movement on the scale of the 1930s, an immigrant rights movement on the scale of the great May Days of 2006 and 2007, and a women’s rights movement on the scale of the 1960 and early 70s?

 The construction of such struggles and organizations is the center piece for defeating Trump’s policies. Mass struggle is paramount, but it does not exist in a world of its own. Different electoral politics advance or thwart the development of strong oppositional movements. This is the context in which we should approach questions of strategy and tactics towards an election. We are for a political tactic that advances the fightback in the streets and workplaces, we are against an electoral tactic that weakens that fightback.

  Democratic Party: capitalism’s shock absorbers

This is where the question of the Democratic Party comes into play. The Democratic Party is a crucial integral component of US capitalism. It is not “just a ballot line,” a “terrain of struggle,” or any such thing. It is the essential means by which the US capitalist class has been able to absorb, integrate, and defang potential social opposition.

 This isn’t just an idle socialist theory. Isn’t it exactly true that as the great social movements turned their attention and energies to the Democratic Party, those movements wound down and demobilized?

 Anything that strengthens the Democratic Party strengthens the mechanism by which the ruling class maintains its rule. This is true of critical support, “inside/outside,” seeing them as means to “defeat Trump,” or any such tactics. Voting for and endorsing Democratic Party candidates undercuts the building of powerful street and workplace struggles and assists the integration of those struggles into the framework of bourgeois politics.

 Put simply, we are for an approach to elections that says struggle is the way to fight the ruling class and its parties. We are for voting for candidates that, however imperfectly, advance that perspective. We are against candidates and campaigns that weaken extra-parliamentary action by absorbing it into the Democratic Party, one of the two wings of the “property party.”

 To sum up this section of the article: yes, Trump’s policies are a clear and present danger to the working class and oppressed people. Fighting these policies is job one today. The mass way to fight these policies is action in the streets and workplaces. Voting for the Democratic Party in any shape or form is voting for the party that the ruling class uses to derail the necessary fightbacks.

 Howie Hawkins—a socialist alternative to the duopoly

 While we oppose Biden, we’re not for staying home on November 3. We can register our support for the idea of class independence by voting by Howie Hawkins and Angela Walker. This campaign makes ecosocialism its centerpiece. An Ecosocialist Green New Deal is probably the most stressed of the campaign demands. The candidates have a proud labor movement record: Hawkins as Teamster at UPS and Walker as a Milwaukee ATU driver. It’s worth drawing attention to Hawkins and Walker’s clear class opposition to the Democrats. This places them to the left of many other socialists. It was striking that Hawkins’s campaign leaflet for the 2019 Haymarket/ Jacobin/ DSA Socialism conference was entitled, “Class Independence.”

The Green Party is not a strong party. The campaign slogan of, “a million votes for socialism” may well prove overoptimistic. However, there’s no questions that Howie and Angela stand on the side of “street heat.” This campaign’s emphasis on the Black Lives Matter rebellion, support for labor and social movements, and general socialist outlook make it one well worth supporting.

For more information on the Hawkins/Walker campaign: https://howiehawkins.us/