Empowering Progressive Third Parties in the United States

Defeating Duopoly, Advancing Democracy

Jonathan H. Martin

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• eBook ISBN:
  9781317693246
• Subtopic: Political Parties
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This ground-breaking collection of writings explores how progressive third parties in the U.S. can become more electorally successful and politically influential. It is the only recently published book that focuses exclusively on how such parties may advance. Their rise may be essential to countering the powerful, growing sway of wealth within the two major American parties, and to creating a more just, democratic United States.

Contributors include key participants in and observers of the U.S. left third party movement. Nearly all have previously authored books or articles on progressive politics. Many have led effective left third party efforts, and some have held elected office on behalf of a progressive third party. Together the writers reflect on a wide range of relevant parties—including the Green Party, the Vermont Progressive Party, the Labor Party, the Working Families Party, Socialist Alternative, and potential new parties on the American left. The authors highlight a variety of strategies and conditions that may facilitate electoral breakthroughs by such parties and their candidates. Overall, the collection suggests that U.S. progressive third parties may make more headway if they thoughtfully combine their idealism and sense of urgency with a flexible, pragmatic approach to gaining power.

1

How a Socialist Won

Lessons from the Historic Victory of Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant*

Ramy Khalil

Everybody knows you have to accept corporate money and work within the corporate-dominated two-party system to get elected, right? Not so with Kshama Sawant. In November 2013, nearly 100,000 voters elected her to the Seattle City Council—as an open socialist—and she didn’t take a dime in corporate cash! In a huge political upset, Sawant’s victory sent shock waves through the political establishment and even around the globe. Sawant is the first independent socialist elected in a major U.S. city in decades. Her historic breakthrough was covered by every major newspaper in the country, major TV stations, and newspapers around the world. In the months following her victory, Sawant and her Socialist Alternative political party led a successful movement to implement their main campaign pledge, raising Seattle’s minimum wage to the highest in the country—$15 per hour.¹ And the movement is spreading nationally.²

How did Sawant and Socialist Alternative succeed in unseating a well-connected, 16-year incumbent Democrat? Is Seattle just a mecca of progressive politics? “Our campaign is not an isolated event,” claims Sawant. “In fact, it’s the bellwether for what’s going to happen in the future.”³ Sounds nice. But is she dreaming?

The Times Have Changed

The success of other progressives in November 2013 suggests that Sawant’s statement above isn’t just a dream. Democratic candidate Bill de Blasio was elected by a landslide as New York City’s mayor by promising to fight inequality and racist police brutality—much like Sawant, although he is by no means a socialist.⁴ Ty Moore, another Socialist Alternative candidate, ran for Minneapolis City Council and came within just 230 votes of being elected. The labor movement in Lorain County, Ohio, was fed up with the Democrats’ betrayals and succeeded in electing several “independent labor” candidates (though some maintained ties with the Democratic Party).⁵

“It’s a sign of the times,” argues Sawant. “The Great Recession has provoked a backlash from the 99 percent. People are fed up with losing their jobs, homes, and pensions.”⁶ A recent study found that the richest 1 percent captured 95 percent of the income gainsof the economic “recovery” in the United States, while working-class people saw their incomes decline.⁷ Student debt has surpassed $1 trillion, more than the total accumulated credit card debt in the country.⁸ Meanwhile, corporate politicians continue their austerity agenda of tax breaks for corporations and the richest 1 percent while slashing social services and jobs for working people and the poor. In response to this growing inequality, a groundswell of resistance from working-class people keeps erupting across the globe: revolutions in the Middle East, general strikes across Europe, a labor uprising in Wisconsin, Occupy Wall Street, and protests in Turkey and Brazil. It’s only a matter of time before the next mass struggle breaks out.

Transitional Method

Everyone is talking about inequality—and lots of people are eager to do something about it—but only a few activist movements in the United States have been able to give a popular expression to this burning desire. The Occupy Wall Street movement was extremely successful in thrusting the issue of inequality into the mainstream, but eventually the movement began dwindling with no clear way forward. As Occupy activists got drawn into the 2012 corporate-controlled elections, Socialist Alternative argued that the movement could be rebuilt by running 200 independent Occupy candidates across the country.⁹ Unfortunately, very few activists took up this call, and discussions about challenging inequality were drowned out by the corporate media, which refocused political debates around Obama, Mitt Romney, and other corporate politicians’ agendas.

One exception to this trend was the tremendous response Occupy activist Kshama Sawant received in her first election campaign in 2012. She won 29 percent of the vote against the Washington State House Speaker Frank Chopp, the most powerful state legislator in Washington. This demonstrated the potential that existed if Occupy had run more independent candidates.

Around the same time, fast-food and Walmart workers captured people’s imaginations by organizing rolling one-day strikes across the country demanding a $15 per hour minimum wage and decent working conditions. In 2013, Sawant’s next campaign linked up with the fast-food strike movement in Seattle, and we in Socialist Alternative recognized that the demand for a $15 minimum wage was gaining a tremendous resonance. After many meetings and discussions, we decided to focus our campaign around a call to “Make Seattle Affordable for All” and three specific, concrete demands: rent control and affordable housing, a tax on the superrich to fund mass transit and education, and, above all, a $15 minimum wage.

Socialist Alternative used what we call “the transitional method”: We connect with the consciousness of everyday people, meet them where they are, and then point a way forward to help social justice movements achieve victory. The transitional method also entails linking demands for basic improvements in workers’ day-to-day lives with the need for a fundamental restructuring of wealth and power in society along socialist lines.

Growing Openness to Socialism

Despite universal demonization of socialism by the corporate media and the political establishment, the Sawant and Moore campaigns demonstrated that “socialism” is no longer a dirty word. Multiple polls, including a recent Gallup poll, have found that a third of Americans react positively to the idea of socialism—a historic increase from decades ago and a 3 percent increase from 2010 to 2012.¹⁰ Merriam-Webster declared the words “socialism” and “capitalism” together to be their Word of the Year in 2012 due to the high number of online dictionary searches for the words.¹¹

The working class of the United States has not experienced being bitterly betrayed by Social Democratic or Communist political parties as in most other countries—parties that claimed to fight for socialism but ultimately sold out or even implemented austerity attacks on the working class. In the United States, socialism increasingly sounds like a new attractive idea, an appealing alternative to people suffering from unemployment, low wages, and growing debt under capitalism—despite much confusion about the real meaning of socialism. Among both African Americans and young people (ages 18–29) there is now more support for socialism than capitalism—a sign of things to come.¹² This helps explain in part why the results from both our 2012 and 2013 election campaigns revealed that of the demographic groups who voted for our candidate, most were low-income voters, youths, and people of color.

One of the secrets of our success was our analysis of the various levels of political consciousness of different sections of the population. Although we understood that only a small number of people consciously identify as socialists, we had concluded that there is quite a broad section of the population, especially young people, who are very open to socialist ideas, an even larger section who question capitalism, and a huge swathe of the population that is angry at Wall Street and corporate “politics as usual.”

The Need for Political Leadership

Our electoral campaign tapped into the disgust with the political establishment (despite widespread political confusion), and we educated people, raised class consciousness and popularized socialist ideas. For example, Sawant popularized the idea that large corporations such as Boeing (which has plants near Seattle) should not be run for the profit of a few people, but instead should be taken into public ownership and democratically run by workers and the wider community.

However, the working-class anger at corporate politics simmering beneath the surface of society would never have been expressed in Seattle and channeled in a progressive direction in 2013 if we had not taken a bold electoral initiative. That is why it is vital that labor and other progressive movements not only organize rallies, strikes, and so on, but also follow Sawant and the Lorain County, Ohio, labor movement’s example of running independent candidates. Otherwise, political discussions and debates throughout society will be controlled and limited by the two corporate parties. If working-class activists and progressive organizations do not build a strong left-wing political alternative, then the vacuum of growing anger in society will be filled either by right-wing demagogues or by populist Democrats who will attempt to contain our movements within the “safe” channels of the corporate Democratic Party.

To build on the momentum of Sawant’s 29 percent of the vote in 2012, Socialist Alternative appealed to Occupy, labor, civil rights groups, and left-wing parties to join Sawant in running a slate of vigorous independent candidates for Seattle City Hall the following year.¹³ Unfortunately, they failed to see the opportunity that existed and declined our requests, and many of them continued to bang their heads against the wall of the Democratic Party.

In Minnesota, by contrast, the state council of Service Employees International Union (SEIU) not only endorsed Ty Moore’s Socialist Alternative campaign but contributed considerable financial and human resources. If more unions and progressive organizations would direct their resources to run and/or support independent candidates like this, there is no doubt we could run many successful campaigns and begin to build a new political party of the 99 percent.

Sawant’s tremendous impact demonstrates how candidates and a political leadership are absolutely necessary to give a visible expression to the underlying anger and desire for change in society—and to channel that discontent around a clear agenda. The Seattle labor and progressive organizations’ failure to recognize the huge opportunity they would miss by not participating in a coalition slate of independent candidates with Sawant largely stems from their lack of a class struggle, socialist perspective. Many on the left blame the country’s conservatism on the confused consciousness of working-class people, often underestimating ordinary people’s desire for progressive change. Marxists realize that there is a lot of political confusion among the working class, but we identify the source of the country’s political conservatism in the ruling class and its media, as well as its political and other cultural institutions. Marxists believe that the majority of the working class wants progressive change, but that workers need fighting organizations and a political party to educate people and to harness and express the working class’s latent power.

The missing ingredient in building a progressive movement is not primarily workers’ consciousness, but rather the lack of a political leadership that can give voice to workers’ interests. We believe that a workers’ party and independent candidates will play an invaluable role in shifting the whole terms of debate, debunking the propaganda of the ruling elite, and educating workers about their real interests. We can already see how much having Kshama Sawant in office has been able to shift the Seattle political debate, and to some extent the national political debate, in favor of raising the minimum wage to $15 per hour.

How much more could be accomplished if we had hundreds of independent candidates and our own mass party fighting for workers and exposing the Republicans’ and Democrats’ corporate agenda? A new political party of workers, people of color, women, and environmentalists would shift the whole terms of debate in the country, unite various movements together, and significantly raise workers’ consciousness about our real interests.

Despite the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling that legalized unlimited corporate spending on election campaigns, the Sawant, Moore, and Lorain County labor campaigns shattered the myth that candidates have to accept corporate money to run for office. When more labor, civil rights, and environmental organizations sever their ties with the Democratic Party and fund independent candidates, there is no question that we can definitely build a mass political alternative. Building such a party is an absolutely essential task today.

The Crucial Role of Socialist Alternative

Many progressive activists have argued that building a party such as Socialist Alternative is sectarian and a distraction from building a broader movement. Although Socialist Alternative is still a small, though rapidly growing, Marxist organization, it’s clear that Sawant would not have won if we had not built up our socialist organization in the years before 2013. It was Socialist Alternative’s political analysis that enabled us to identify the opportunity that existed for independent left-wing candidates. And it was only the existence of our activist organization that allowed us to implement our tactic and test this...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• Contributors
• Preface
• Introduction: The Future Rise of Progressive Third Parties
• 1 How a Socialist Won: Lessons from the Historic Victory of Seattle City Councilmember Kshama Sawant
• 2 A Green Becomes Mayor: The Election of Gayle McLaughlin in Richmond, California
• 3 The Rise of the Portland Greens
• 4 Lessons of the Vermont Progressive Party
• 5 Community Connections: How Progressive Third Parties Can Win More State Legislative Elections
• 6 Beyond the “Spoiler” Myth: Exploring the Real Lessons of the Nader Campaigns for Progressive Politics
• 7 The U.S. Greens in Presidential Elections: Losing Their Mojo and Getting It Back
• 8 Labor Party Time? Not Yet
• 9 Don’t Wait for Labor: The Necessity of Building a Left Third Party at the Grassroots
• 10 A New Progressive Party: How the Working Families Party Can Change Electoral Politics
• 11 Breaking Through by Breaking Free: Why the Left Needs to Declare Its Political Independence
• Epilogue: Questions and Answers about Progressive Third Party Empowerment
• Index