Chapter 5: K Tho, What Is To Be Done About It? Part III

We will probably have to take over the Republican ballot line to win. This is not the same as becoming Republicans, although Karl Marx wasn't above that and neither should we be. America is the only bourgeois democracy on Earth that restricts ballot access to this degree, so we will have to take over one of the two parties. If Bernie's forces working with the bougies will be our opposition in this scenario, that means we can't take over the Democrats. If we're appealing to the conservative working class in the wake of Trump getting discredited and the Reaganites still discredited, the Republican Party is a natural enough fit. That doesn't mean becoming Republicans any further than applying the mass line to Republican primaries in order to win them. It would be a fusionist exercise, much like how leftists in New York run on both the Democratic Party and Working Families Party ballot lines, except our communist party wouldn't have its own ballot line and would be mobilizing to seize theirs.

However, we shouldn't be too worried about the notion of becoming Republicans. It's true that Lenin said that communists should campaign under the banner of their own vanguard party, with their own slogans. But the Republican Party is a communist vanguard party, albeit one that lost its way. The exiled German followers of Karl Marx helped found it, fought for it in the Civil War, and then lost control of the party to the capitalist reactionary elements that it was forced to share the party with because communism was new then. But a vanguard that lost its way long ago is still a vanguard; the Communist Party of the Russian Federation is filled with grifters and opportunists, but also real comrades. It's lost its way, but it will yet one day find it again. It is also so with the GOP. As Eugene Debs once said in a speech in Springfield, Illinois in 1908, "The Republican Party was once Red. Abraham Lincoln was a revolutionary."

We won't be the first socialists to try to win power by appealing to the conservative working class, nor the first communists. The Socialist Party of America once used this strategy to great effect, almost becoming an equal force to the Democrats and Republicans before FDR stole their thunder. They had "socialist tent revivals," mimicking a popular religious form among the prairie settlers, but bringing them libraries and socialist lectures instead of Jesus. Their magazine "Appeal to Reason," would be described by modern wokelords as "problematic" but by modern political scientists as "effective." They didn't look down on the conservative working class, but instead levelled with them as equals and advocated to them for their own real interests. The New Deal happened because this worked too well to be permitted to continue.

This is our clearest path to victory; the route the SPA took before the New Deal and the route the conservatives took after it. This is not a caving-in on our principles, not one bit; just a reformulation of our rhetoric and our forms in functional service to our principles. It's a direct application of the mass line (one of the few useful ideological contributions Mao made, which was still merely an elegant restatement of Lenin). As the Huguenot would-be king of France, Henry IV, once said when told he must become Catholic to be crowned, "Paris is worth a mass." So too is Washington worth "problematic" forms, if it leads to egalitarian functions.

The end goal of this latter strategy will be to prompt a reactionary counterrevolution that can be put down by force. But instead of doing it with a lukewarm social democrat as we tried twice with Bernie, we will have to build specifically Marxist-Lincolnist power to the point that we can elect the nation's second Marxist-Lincolnist President. If, for some reason, that fails to prompt a counterrevolution, then it's not coming, period, and we can just proceed to enact full communism with electoral reform and be surprised that the democratic socialists were right this whole time. But I find that last scenario too unlikely to contemplate it very seriously.

To take over the Republican Party, strong communist organizations with a membership in the millions is going to be key. Whether the liberals and fascists make an unholy military alliance against us or not, climate change is happening and is going to create hundreds of millions of refugees, and if we can feed, clothe, and house them, we can organize most of them too.

I realize this strategy may not immediately strike most of you as sound, as it flies in the face of everything the bourgeoisie have taught us, even as leftists, to believe. The Democrats are our allies, the liberals are our allies, and if they aren't they're still the people we have to appeal to to change their ways if we're to have any hope of beating reaction, which is obviously more Republican than Democrat. The only problem with that last sentence is it's absolutely backwards wrong, to the point it almost seems engineered to be so after you consider it all.

We're going to need two things to explain why this is, though: an explanation of form versus function, and a history lesson.

Onwards to Chapter 6!