Max Elbaum takes recent socialist electoral gains seriously without pretending that governing capitalist institutions is the same as overcoming capitalism. The contradiction is real: movement-backed officials can improve people’s lives while operating machinery built to preserve a different social order.
His strategic formula, borrowed from the South African left, is “with the state, against the state, beyond the state”:
- With the state: win office, practice co-governance, deliver material gains, expand democratic space, and learn how public systems work
- Against the state: keep movements independent enough to press demands and oppose even allied officials
- Beyond the state: build unions, community organizations, media, and cultural power capable of surviving elections and challenging capitalist rule
The struggle for governing power cannot simply be skipped:
- Workers and oppressed groups fought bitterly for suffrage because elections can alter living conditions and democratic rights
- Programs such as Medicare for All require both mass pressure and officials able to legislate and administer them
- The modern state contains welfare, labor, environmental, and civil-rights institutions as well as police, prisons, and the military
- People learn electoral politics’ limits by collectively pushing against them—not only by hearing that elections are insufficient
The coercive state remains the hardest terrain. Elbaum argues that a serious left government would need a credible public-safety program, abolition of ICE, a sharply reduced military budget, solidarity with Palestinians, and less US coercion of the Global South.
This is not a map to a guaranteed destination. It is an argument against two shortcuts: treating electoral wins as socialism, or treating abstention as radicalism. The practical task is to gain enough power inside a rigged system to unrig it while building an organized popular force outside government that can go further.