Ballots have already begun arriving in the hands of San Francisco voters, and as we muddle through long lists of voter guides, candidates and propositions, we will ask ourselves many questions. 

But will we be asking the right ones?

It is a privilege, and wholly inadequate, to deliberate over which unsatisfactory choices we will make this election cycle, without material worry as to whether our ballots will be collected and counted, or whether our polling stations will be opened; meanwhile the Supreme Court’s recent ruling in Louisiana v. Callais has allowed southern states to redraw Black-majority congressional districts out of existence entirely, gutting the Voting Rights Act and disenfranchising millions of Black people in a single stroke of a pen. In Louisiana alone, a state where there has never been a black person elected to a statewide executive office, over 40,000 ballots that were already cast will now be defunct according to these new maps. 

This is not an unfortunate isolated event, but rather the latest decisive move in a decades-long struggle to claw back the democratic gains won through generations of Black struggle, labor movements, anti-colonial resistance, and mass civil disobedience. Reforms were not secured because the ruling class suddenly developed a conscience, they were bloody concessions won because millions of people developed their collective consciousness, organized, rebelled, and created a political crisis so great that it threatened the legitimacy and stability of the entire capitalist system. From Birmingham to Selma, the expansion of democratic rights in the United States came through sustained pressure from below, from the oppressed masses and workers.

What does it mean for us to participate in this system of government which so easily stratifies access to basic functions of democracy, one that even after over a century and a half of effort and reforms, so easily and gleefully reverts its shape to previous racial viciousness?

The United States of America is the most advanced settler-colonial project in the world. Chattel slavery funded colonialism and was the fuel that kickstarted capital accumulation as we know it, until it was legally replaced with prison labor, with Black people still the primary targets of the USA’s forced labor industry, their communities and bodies policed and incarcerated at much higher than average rates. The United States is a prison house of not only people but whole nations as well. Indigenous peoples have endured centuries of genocide, not as an unintended byproduct of white nation building, but as the primary vehicle of it. Even today Indigenous lands are stolen and exploited, from Standing Rock to Pe’Sla water and land defenders have shown us how plainly our modern day government, courts and military coordinates with private companies to desecrate Indigenous lands and brutalize their bodies for profits. The last two decades of the creation and expansion of ICE have only been a continuation of the colonial violence which established these borders in the first place. Our government shamelessly runs concentration camps for children and trades human bodies to foreign prisons because it has no need for shame as it fulfills its intended purpose.

Our planet faces a catastrophic ecological crisis imposed on us all by capitalism. Due to our state’s most recent imperialist violence we face shortages of fuel, food and other necessities in the immediate future. Our politicians from Congress all the way down to the municipal city level are either captured by capital interests or rendered toothless before those who are. Austerity measures are being inflicted on our most vulnerable populations while the price of commodities rises endlessly, a cliff is rapidly approaching and we must prepare. 

So what then, is to be done?

We cannot merely say that “democracy is dead” and give up, this would be a fundamental misunderstanding of the contradiction; democracy is not dead, democracy has not yet been born. Instead we must collectively create democracy, bottom up, from our own power as workers and whole communities; voting is only one small part of a democratic society. History has taught us plainly that the ruling class will never concede without being forced to and that liberation is never given, it must be seized. As socialists we must recognize the electoral terrain for the limitations it reveals with its own contradictions; a system of governance that was derived from white men who owned people as livestock and who murdered and robbed whole civilizations for the pursuit of property is not the basis for a functional democracy. While we engage in elections strategically, we would be foolish to turn a blind eye to the results of centuries of struggle, the effort wasted trying to mold and reshape it into what it is not, that has failed to produce lasting material changes.

The only proven counter to capitalism which has descended into fascism is socialism; a state that only exists to manage capitalist property relations and labor extraction must be replaced with one that manages the productive relationship amongst fellow workers to provide for the needs of all. We must recognize the disenfranchisement of any of us as the disenfranchisement of all of us and fight back in every available avenue. We must identify the primary contradiction and determine our course of actions accordingly, not merely continue to play fairly within the parameters laid out by those who benefit from our oppression. It is our duty to build collective power and then to wield it in service of building socialism. To stand in solidarity with communities both near and far, we must speak out at every injustice, especially the ones that are not an injustice to us.

An injury to one is an injury to all.