Electoral is a sprint; Socialism is a marathon

ISSUE #2

by Mary Imgrund

After our weekly DSA joint canvass launched, the staffers quietly typed away at our sticker-covered Macbooks while a few candidates discussed burnout, frustration, and rage on the campaign trail. When we were alone, the impromptu co-working meet became more akin to a therapy session. I smiled faintly, “I feel like I wake up every day and set myself on fire.” 

Self-immolation may be necessary to get through the desperate, flailing race of election season. However, our goals as socialist organizers require more care and more intimate discussions that the race to April 4th preclude. 

At our last electoral meeting, we discussed the challenges inherent to our dual-purpose goals: organizing members into electoral and up to be leaders and the immediate needs of turning out canvassers, creating graphics, setting logistics for events, doing fundraising, and everything else that needs to be done yesterday on the campaign trail. 

I bemoaned my yearning for longer-term discussions about what our goals are, what socialism looks like at the municipal election, and what we can accomplish in the next 5 or 10 years. And a member brought up the core contradiction of doing this work: Electoralism is a sprint. Socialism is a marathon. 

So how can we run two races at the same time with wildly different needs? 

To start, the idea of contradiction is nothing new in leftist spaces. 

In Mao’s treatise “On Contradiction,” written in 1937, he suggests that contradictions are what define a thing and without contradiction, a thing loses its identity. A classic Marxist interpretation of this is that the primary “contradiction” that defines every society is class struggle. 

Mao continues that primary contradictions, say, capitalism, always create “secondary” contradictions, such as between imperialists and their colonies that require the “primary” contradiction, in this case, a capitalist society. These “secondary” contradictions flow downstream from the primary contradiction, but may often become more important or the most prevalent in society. 

I find this to perhaps be one of the strongest points from Mao’s writing on contradictions because it makes a very clear case that in order to fight capitalism, we must strongly oppose white nationalism and christian identity movements in order to effectively struggle for the working class. Almost 60 years later, the introduction of the idea of intersectionality, originating in critical race studies, added much-needed clarity and definitions to many of these overlapping and cascading series of “contradictions,” thanks to Black feminist scholar Kimberlé Crenshaw. 

In his book Contradictions of Real Socialism: The Conductor and the Conducted, 

Michael Lebowitz explores the “real socialism” movement originating from 20th—century socialist societies to distinguish themselves from abstract, theoretical socialism. He finds that many of the contradictions within these “real socialism” societies, such as the separation of thinking and doing, created the conditions in which a nascent capitalist class emerged and was the source of the crises of “real socialism.” 

Instead, he argues, socialists must go beyond “the hierarchy inherent in the relation of conductor and conductor to create the conditions in which people can transform themselves through their conscious cooperation and practice – a society of free and associated producers.” 

Many have also written about my specific dilemma working in electoral politics. Not only are we asked to be at once the “always on” campaign staffer and the community organizer, but we’re also asked to grapple with the contradictions of electoralism itself. 

We acknowledge that institutions like the City Council or the Mayor’s office are inherently bourgeois institutions that were created to uphold the will of capital; meanwhile, we must also fight like hell for every crumb and every concession we can get from these institutions. We have to run the best campaigns and play the game of professional electoral politics to be the most effective in creating the best relationships and getting the best concessions from these institutions. 

We acknowledge the limitations of electoralism while working within those constraints to begin undoing frankly genocidal policies against the poor and working class as many of Denver’s current mayoral candidates promote (arrests as a response to homelessness? Are you serious?). 

So, in that, I become more comfortable with the two races our committee is running right now. Many of us are sprinting. Others are on the marathon track. Most of us change which race we’re running on a daily basis. We need to phone bank and while doing so, begin imagining what the next five years of socialist electoral activism can look like. We need to knock on doors and also spend time having long and deep conversations with our comrades about what our goals and shared values are on the electoral stage. 

We need to elect all of our endorsed candidates on April 4th and get right back to work on April 5th promoting bills to defend tenants with our comrades in Housing Justice, strengthening our relationships with our new electeds, decide what our legislative priorities are, and even support our neighbors in Aurora who are having their own election soon. 

My legs are tired, but I’m still running. If you want to get involved, join our electoral meetings (that I promise only sometimes take over 2 hours), bi-weekly Mondays at 6pm. 

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Mary Imgrund is the former chair of the Denver DSA Electoral Committee.

EDITOR’S NOTE: This article was written in spring 2023 as part of an issue on local elections and the midterms (Issue #2) which was not able to be published at the time due to capacity constraints. It is now being released from the vault.