Class Alignment Electoral Strategy Part 1: Why Elections?
Passed January 24, 2026
March 2, 2026
How socialists engage with electoral work is a question as old as socialism, but as DSA has grown and engaged in electoral work, the organization has established a broad consensus on the utility of engaging in electoral work itself. Beyond that, there has developed clear supermajorities at convention for some ideas that were formerly controversial: running on the Democratic ballot line for at least the near future, building toward a partylike structure1, generally avoiding “paper endorsements”2, and a relentless focus on door-to-door field campaigns. Since these debates have generally been put to bed, DSA and its tendencies have struggled to articulate a more comprehensive theory of electoral politics.
Groundwork would like to put forward our electoral strategy: the Class Alignment strategy of electoral socialism, a holistic approach rooted in a Marxist analysis and the practical application of the lessons learned over the last eight years of electoral organizing in DSA. We owe a great deal to comrades from across the organization who have formulated some of these ideas, in particular the concept of class struggle elections, first explicated by the Bread & Roses Caucus, and the electoral programs and strategies spearheaded by the Socialist Majority Caucus and others.
First, our strategy rests on the basic analysis that the fundamental obstacle of modern society is the capitalist class that dominates political and economic life at every level in this country and globally. This class has ordered society according to its own narrow interests, creating wealth inequality at unprecedented levels, destroying the basic ecological premise of life on earth, and fueling imperial war and genocide abroad and fascistic attacks on our people at home. This system of class relations has withstood centuries of organizing by the socialist movement.
As such, we view the primary goal of the socialist movement as the defeat of the capitalist class and the seizure of power by the working class to reorient society for the benefit of all. In order to win this conflict, our class needs to build the only weapon we can: organization. For us, this organization must be a mass democratic party of the working class. This is where DSA comes in. Our primary role in this moment is to build a party of, for, and by the working class: a fighting force capable of the world-historic transition from capitalism to democratic socialism.
Why do we engage in electoral work? This is a question that has not been settled in DSA — we have agreed in the short-term that it is because electoral work has grown the organization and popularized socialism. But where are we heading with it? As more DSA members are elected to office, we need a coherent theory of what it is they have been elected to do. Do we elect candidates just to raise the red flag of socialism and propagandize? Are they elected instead to improve material conditions for the working class and demonstrate democratic socialist capacity for governance? Our approach rejects both strategies and synthesizes these ideas into a comprehensive framework for winning socialism that fundamentally abolishes the class system, with practical applications for chapters and their work.
The central problem for the socialist movement today is the lack of working-class organization. Our approach to electoral work should be to use it primarily as a tool to build this organization. The primary goal for electoral work is Class Alignment: building a workers’ movement large and organized enough to take power. This means politicizing the working class as a class for itself and winning a majority of workers to our cause. These are prerequisites to socialism. This requires the creation of a left-labor electoral bloc cohered around class.
But the working class also needs a vehicle: the mass party. This must be a democratic membership organization for workers. Membership decides democratically on a program, elects a representative leadership to direct work, selects candidates for elected office, functions with organizational unity, and — crucially — seeks to take and wield power. Workers’ power lies in our numbers, but without organization, these numbers can’t be brought to bear.
In the electoral arena, class alignment can be promoted through agitation-heavy campaigns that cleave workers from capital and move them to act politically as workers, developing a self-conscious working-class political identity. We can also use the contested terrain of the state to win transformative reforms, not for the sake of improving conditions of the working class as an end, but to open up space for working-class organization at the base. Socialists in office can win reforms that allow workers and tenants to organize, shift the balance of power away from capital, and expose the nature of class struggle by fomenting conflict between capital and labor. Socialists can also win majorities and govern at the local level. Electoral work must exist in concert with other socialist organizing work in the service of class alignment, rebuilding working class political consciousness at a mass scale, and building DSA as a political party that can act as the vehicle of working-class political activity.
We do not advocate for reforms merely to raise living standards for workers, but to increase working-class organization and inculcate class struggle. Reforms should disempower capital and build working class self-activity. Rather than retreat from demands that can be won, we must advance those that expand working-class organization. Nationalizing sectors of the economy, winning labor rights, and guaranteeing housing rights do not ameliorate class struggle; they foment it. Tenant protections that enable rent strikes, public control of utilities that limit capital’s power, expansions of labor rights like the PRO Act that allow unions to organize on a mass scale, and decommodification efforts like the Green New Deal and Medicare for All are examples of transformative reforms that open space for working-class power and create the basis for future struggle. These are not technocratic tweaks. They are class antagonisms legislated. These are the terrain on which socialism becomes possible.
To win these reforms, we need to engage with electoral politics and grapple with the contradictions of building power — namely, that we must win elections and engage with workers on the mass scale only available via electoral politics and simultaneously sustain political independence via partybuilding. These reforms are winnable, but not currently by socialists alone. Yet they are necessary prerequisites for socialists to act alone. Therefore, we must engage in legislative fights even where socialists are not a majority. Winning reforms that open space for working-class organization and change the balance of power between labor and capital, at the local, state, and national levels — even through working with non-socialists — will build class independence rather than stymie it.
Some tendencies in DSA want to “vote in” socialism, electing a majority and then legislating in reforms that socialize the means of production. Others have a purely agitational view. For many in DSA, electoral work exists only as a project from election cycle to election cycle, without a long-term strategy for turning this work into a concrete roadmap for socialism.
Building class alignment through electoral organizing involves two tasks that are both necessary but also often opposing, working in a dialectical relationship: politicizing workers at a mass scale, and building a disciplined party that can then fight for and win the redistribution of power to our class. Our approach synthesizes these two tasks into two distinct types of electoral campaigns: Class struggle elections and cadre elections.
1 A democratic membership organization with a platform that selects and runs its own candidates. This was first explored in DSA’s specific context by Seth Ackerman and then further by Jared Abbot & Dustin Gaustella.
2 Endorsements that function only as recommendations of which candidate is better, rather than engaging in a concerted campaign to elect the endorsee socialists.
