The three candidates chosen at the convention were an Afro-American bus driver, a Latino van driver (who only spoke Spanish) and a white revolutionary who had graduated from Rutgers. In addition to electing candidates, the People’s Campaign featured –a first in the United States– an elected campaign manager and a steering committee that most people at the convention felt should be broad and representative of different communities and social classes opposed to the existing political machine. So the revolutionaries had to not only deal with small business people and petty landlords among others but also to negotiate to keep them supportive of a radical program—these were real lessons in coalition building and “politics” which much of the Left, because they refuse to engage in grassroots electoral work, has never even experienced.
The program was extensive and radically redistributive. New Brunswick had been re-nicknamed by city officials the “Healthcare City” because of the number of hospitals and medical research facilities in town. The People’s Campaign platform called for free healthcare for all residents, admittance to Rutgers University for all New Brunswick high school graduates, rent control, an elected civilian police control board, affordable housing, a public swimming pool and so forth. The candidates and all positions of responsibility were subject to recall at any time up until two weeks from Election Day. (The group decided to place this limitation on recall so that everyone could focus on the election in the final weeks.)
Our opponents were long time incumbents of the Democratic Party, one of the most powerful political machines in the State of New Jersey. The previous mayor, John Lynch, is not only mobbed up (now under indictment), he is also the king maker of the statewide democratic party. The machine is backed by Johnson & Johnson (J&J), a global corporation whose world headquarters are located in the center of downtown New Brunswick. The local Democratic Party does J&J’s bidding and J&J rules the city with a mix of coercion and consent. They set up NGOs that attempt to determine the cultural and social life of the city, making sure it is corporate friendly while striving for pseudo- hipness.
The local Democrats dominate local small business through intimidation. For example, they have fire and health inspectors that can shut a business down. Small businesses are expected to make substantial financial contributions to the machine as part of the cost of business, and display Democratic Party propaganda. The machine also awards contracts and can make sweetheart deals for things like property purchases and liquor licenses. In order to work for the city as a firefighter, cop, in sanitation, or in the parks department you must regularly attend fundraising dinners and make campaign contributions. These workers are also the machine’s ground troops, they tear down opposition posters, hand out and post machine literature and work the polls on Election Day. We learned this during the course of the People’s Campaign became a crash course in politics—politics 101. Despite five years of organizing before the electoral campaign we had little sense of how the city was actually run until we faced off against the machine for political control of the city at the ballot box.
We organized to win, not to protest. We handed out over a quarter million pieces of literature (no shit!) and recruited hundreds of new people to the movement. Clausewitz famously commented that war is the continuation of politics by other means. Well elections are the closest thing to war without bloodshed. We battled their hired campaign goons on the streets: When they ripped down one of our posters, we ripped down ten of theirs. We ran from the police, got caught by the police, and finally negotiated with the police with the help of supportive attorneys that since the machine was tearing down our literature (and the police weren’t stopping them) they would no longer stop us either. While we negotiated this agreement, we had won it first on the street: The police couldn’t stop us since our numbers were too large. They agreed to stop bothering us so that they would no longer look like incompetents.
Election Day was the major battle. We recruited progressive lawyers to volunteer to monitor for fraud on Election Day (the machine is notorious for cheating through fake residences for supporters, vote suppression, etc.) We had some two hundred and fifty volunteers at the polling stations and getting out the vote (GOTV). This required high levels of organization and planning. Much of it is very basic: All campaign workers must be fed (that has to be organized and planned) and we need people at every polling station handing out literature and talking to people, winning votes and reminding supporters. Inside the polling place, we need challengers and lawyers who monitor the process and determine which supporters have voted and which voters still need to brought to the polls and so forth—it is a tremendous effort.
Nonetheless, electoral politics, at least for the foreseeable future, is one of the best ways to engage with the day-to-day struggles of the majority of people, they provide a vehicle for revolutionary democratic forms of organizing and they allow for the actual seizure of power by the people. Winning control of a city council or winning a mayoral election means the control of jobs, resources, and the ability to pass laws: The war on drugs could be over in your town, the domination of landlords could be ended, minimum wage laws can be passed, etc. Running and winning local election is a school of revolutionary democracy and a way to build the movement. Not the only way, but an important and necessary way.
Zen and the Art of Electoral Politics:
The Conclusion of the People’s Campaign
The Conclusion of the People’s Campaign
In Alejandro Jodorowsky's surrealist western El Topo, the gunfighter protagonist (for whom the movie is named: El Topo or the Mole) confronts four master gunfighters. The philosophy of one of the gunfighters should be adopted when engaging in electoral politics. The gunfighter tells El Topo that he no longer tries to win gunfights, he only tries to attain perfection in each fight; and thus bullets have no effect on him and he never loses.
The major error we made in the People’s Campaign was long term planning. We failed to consider seriously what we would do if we won, if we lost, and most importantly how to maintain, consolidate, and grow the movement that we had built during the course of the campaign. Indeed, winning or losing is a secondary concern that we confront at the level of tactical consideration: The strategic question is beyond winning or losing, the strategic question is how to grow a revolutionary democratic movement where people work and decide together. If we do that, we can then do certain things if we win the city council seats and other things if we don’t, but the main thing is that the movement grows with people taking control over their lives, working and deciding. We develop the revolutionary process whether we win or lose.
On Election Day our candidates received over two thousand votes each (28% of the total) and our first meeting following the electoral loss was still attended by over 80 people. The possibilities were enormous. We had accomplished more than any other grouping that challenged the local political machine in decades. But our accomplishment was not the number of votes we got (although that reflects what was happening), our accomplishment was bringing people together to work and decide, to build an electoral movement based in democratic participation. Unfortunately, most of the people who attended the post election day meeting didn’t return for another. They never returned because our conception of revolutionary democracy only really emerged after the campaign was long over. We focused, unlike the master gunfighter, on winning and losing, rather than on building revolutionary democracy. The initial meeting deteriorated in petty bickering and half-baked proposals. We had failed to consider what to do if we lost (not to mention what to do if we won). We could have immediately planned, discussed and debated the next election, what had gone wrong during the last campaign, what went right, etc. etc. We could have consolidated a movement of very committed people.
By trying for perfection the gunfighter wins without trying to win. The same is true in electoral politics. It is not that winning is unimportant. We are not advocating running electoral campaigns as protest campaigns, or agitation campaigns, or to get a certain small percentage of the vote and then get matching funds. We run electoral campaigns to build the movement and do our utmost to win the election, to organize people to seize power little by little, bit by bit. Elections are a tactic. If we build the movement along revolutionary democratic lines, if we strive for perfection, if we keep our strategic goals in the forefront, if we grow a movement of fully engaged people, working and deciding together, we will win at the ballot box and everywhere else we take on the system.
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(1) Surveys are a great way to learn about issues people face day to day. The mistake with our survey was that we generated the questions for people to answer and rank amongst our core organizers and then went to people to discuss them. A better way would be to add an additional step and let people develop the survey itself.
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