Burning Comet Association

With the Working Class, Not Above It

With the recent primary successes of democratic socialists Zohran Mamdani in New York and even more recently Omar Fateh in Minneapolis in their respective mayoral primary races, many may be inclined to ask why we do not dedicate ourselves to offering up our own candidate for office or primary. Though we do not begrudge these candidates their victory nor the chance for socialism to once again gain prominence in the American political scene, we see in this rising tide much of what has come before with other famous socialists, such as the likes of Bernie Sanders and AOC. Though their victories seem to demonstrate emerging socialist consciousness, more clearly their victories represent the further delegation of political autonomy into the provided lanes of the system, smoothing economic agitation back into the familiar hero worship of the electoral system.

Electoralism and the attempted summiting of state power represent a profound failure in imagination. After recognizing the failures and inequities inherent in the system, electoralists still turn to reform by its own rules to confront it in the name of a supposed feasibility when compared to the loftier goal of revolution. In all actuality, reforming the capitalist system, with all its labyrinthian complexities and spiraling fractals of oppression and inequities, is a far more monumental and unworkable goal. The constant diversion of the movement and energy of the working class into election campaigns distracts from the real goal of the complete abolishment of capitalism and its conditions. By favoring incrementable progress with the familiar pattern of one step forward and then two back, electoralists create ample room for disillusionment when the rich, who ultimately hold the class power that may actually determine elections, corrupt, stall, or dismantle the progressives’ years-long march of progress in an instant. In doing so, they grant the reactionary a great favor in handing them the disillusionment and alienation they seek from the populace to gain power.

By rallying around a central leader or figurehead, we accept the capitalist premise that the working class can not rely upon their own power and must therefore relinquish their autonomy and free will to another. In doing so, this primes the working class to internalize their own subservience when a leader inevitably ends up abusing their power. Ironically enough, former socialist presidential candidate Eugene Debs expresses it aptly:

“I am not a Labor Leader; I do not want you to follow me or anyone else; if you are looking for a Moses to lead you out of this capitalist wilderness, you will stay right where you are. I would not lead you into the promised land if I could, because if I led you in, someone else would lead you out. You must use your heads as well as your hands, and get yourself out of your present condition.”^[1]

Only the working class may lead itself out of its present condition as fascism braces to hold capitalism’s buckling line once more. There is no model, nobody to guide us towards the future we are fighting for. It has only been seen so far on this planet in glimpses like that of a passing star. We may theorize, imagine, and argue about what it may look like as we build towards it, but the truth is that nobody knows the way. The path towards humanity’s liberation is untread. Yet it is nevertheless our endeavor and project to work towards it through the means of revolution and the building of working class power, beginning today our construction of the new world within the shell of the old without delay or hesitation, with the working class, not above it.

[1] Debs: His Life, Writings And Speeches