In most American cities, real estate and development companies own the city council and mayor (if there is one) thoroughly. Yet people like Kshama Sawant have managed to get on the local government and make effective changes. Any socialist electoralist strategy in America has to successful start at the local level, so I'm asking if there's any stratagies we should employ to build labor power and/or effect local legislation. Of course direct action strategies like the Young Lords did in the 60s is effective, but I am thinking more electorally here. Direct action and electoralism can, and should, be in concert.
Discussion: How the fuck do you break the iron grip capital has over government?
I'll seriously take any thoughts. Mine so far is to literally copy the Young Lords and do a mini garbage offensive by cleaning trash off of urban corridors in my city. Then just be like "we're socialists, wanna help?" Obviously electoralism isn't the end all, but city council is selling out land and pricing out working class people every year. Getting at least one comrade on the council would be able to materially help people.
Electoralism can best be used to lend credence to the group doing direct action.
Officially celebrating those actions and condemning other parties for failing to act.
Do as many good things as you can in office and prevent as many bad things as you can. Build up support for your party and politics over time until you have the votes to build a legal framework preventing landlords, real estate dicks, or development ghouls from being on the city council.
Do as many good things as you can in office and prevent as many bad things as you can.
This post is more about breaking into local office, or at least breaking some of the power that real estate (or your whatever your local capitalist is that controls the government). Voter turnout is like under 25% in non presidential years and only old surburban people end up voting.
I think unfortunately if there was a surefire or even just repeatably moderately successful track to socialist entryism in electoral politics, we'd already all know it and be doing it.
Unfortunately, the only way in is to do things the hard way, work really fucking hard for a really long time to create a movement in your area that will hopefully bust the doors off the voting hall and get you in. You can use direct action and social media to accelerate growth of that movement, but it's still going to be an uphill multi-year battle.
If you're thinking local offices and how they might be effectively used, look at district attorney elections. They hold a ton of power over what crimes get prioritized and how different crimes are handled.
At the simplest level, you could make an immediate impact by not charging minor, bullshit crimes (e.g., drug possession) or focusing on repeat offenders and non-carceral solutions. You can rachet down years of incarceration or supervision for more serious crimes. A more complicated -- but feasible -- option is to also prioritize prosecution of crimes committed by the local business interests you're talking about. In theory, that's a fairly straightforward path to checking their power, and it would have popular support.
Plus, there are templates for winning these types of elections on this type of platform, so you're not breaking entirely new ground.
I would be uhhh...really careful about that. One issue is that the local large-scale developers are also the local crimelords in many, many places. More than one well-meaning leftist has met an unfortunate end that way.
It's going to depend heavily on what your municipalities can legally do. A number of DSA chapters have run into this issue where they've been successful in local politics only to have the state legislature overrule whatever they achieve. Read your state constitution and city charter for more information.
If you're state allows municipalities a lot of autonomy though, then you've got to build a party and win a majority of seats (and possibly the mayoralty, read your charter). Maybe you can run referendum, or sneak in something in the off cycle elections, but that's how to control local government. The good news is that you can make the local officials' lives hell in the meantime.
Edit: In most cases it will be best to attack state house seats. In most Democratic controlled states, a dozen or so house seats held by a left coalition would be enough to block any Democratic legislation, then you try to extract concessions from them. Not exactly a revolution but it might be something.
Will literally take any suggestions, no matter how small, on how to dismantle capitalism at the local level.
You should talk to some ISA peeps in Seattle and ask them how they did it, I assure you they would love nothing more than to tell you
A wedge is a piece of wood, metal, or some other material having one thick end and tapering to a thin edge, that is driven between two objects or parts of an object to secure or separate them. :gui-better:
