Speak Truth to Power? No Thanks! Let’s Take Power! Electoral Politics: Build Dual Power, Dismantle the State (Keith) by X.

Participation in electoral politics is one of the more controversial issues among significant portions of the Left. Many revolutionaries don’t vote and don’t participate in local elections. Two misconceptions blind revolutionaries to the possibilities of electoral politics. First they see revolution as an insurrectionary event in the distant future to prepare for, and the primary means of preparing is protesting and perhaps publishing a newspaper. Revolutionaries opposed to electoral politics have many other objections but let’s not rehearse them all here; they are as familiar as they are tired. Electoral politics is one of the best tactics available to revolutionaries who want people to seize power immediately to dismantle the state piece by piece and replace it with the revolutionary democratic power of organized self-determining people. Elections and the system’s (false) claim to democracy are the Achilles’ heel of the system which is only protected by our own inactivity.

“Protest Mode” is the way that Amiri Baraka described a form of organizing that made demands on the “powers that be” but failed to actually take on the task of organizing to take power. As Baraka put it, “we need to organize to take power where we can literally put our hands on it.” What does he mean? In the 1994 speech, he joked that would-be revolutionaries announce “death to the bourgeoisie, we’re gonna do this and we’re gonna do that to the bourgeoisie” but these revolutionaries can’t get a school board member elected in a local election, “they can’t even elect a dog catcher.”

Participating in electoral politics is full of risks, but the risks are our opportunities as well. The system tries to constrain electoral campaigns to promote the individual candidate and limit mass democratic participation. This undemocratic structure is even more developed and dangerous once a candidate wins. Once the newly-elected official enters the halls of government, the people are kept out! This way the system can work over politicians like Nurse Ratchet in One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest. We cannot surrender to this imposed anti-democratic structure. But the best way to destroy it is to organize electoral struggles along revolutionary democratic lines and to build a revolutionary democratic movement that retains precedence over individual candidates. We not only need to beat the system in the elections, we must continue to beat the system after the elections. A real “people’s campaign” must maintain its independent momentum and organization (dual power) to support its candidates after they have won but also, if needed, to remove them by recall if they decide to sell out. This is one of the best ways to build dual power because it strengthens the movement while at the same time it weakens the power of the system by undermining it. One of the main tasks of an elected revolutionary democratic candidate is to start dismantling the antidemocratic structure of the system from within.