One of the most common misperceptions socialists encounter in the world of mainstream politics is the idea that socialism describes government intervention in the economy. That raises the question: whose government? People who view the world in liberal terms tend to have a mystified view of the state. They see it as a neutral body standing over society, capable of acting as a referee in disputes between classes. Socialists have attacked this idea since at least the time of Marx. The state, socialists have long held, is not a neutral body but rather what Marx and Engels called the “organized power of one class for oppressing another,” meaning the state in the capitalist epoch is “a committee for managing the common affairs of the whole bourgeoisie.” Put in simpler terms, the modern state is a tool for the capitalist class as a whole to protect its interests by imposing its will on the working class.

Even a century and a half hence, it is not safe to put this issue to rest. The most prominent self-described socialists in America, Bernie Sanders and the “Squad,” continue to frame socialism largely in terms of securing a “fair deal” for the working class, a deal mediated by the government as it currently exists. Reformist socialists of this type do not necessarily believe that the state is a neutral entity—they would be the first to recognize that policymaking is caught in the vice grip of corporate lobbying—but their entire strategy to achieve what they consider socialism is premised on the idea that the state is neutral territory. In other words, the problem with the state is that the wrong people are running it. If you elect the right people, say the reformists, you can make the government work for you. If only it were that easy.

First, let us be clear: setting aside where the problem stems from, there can be no argument about whose interests the United States government currently serves. If you need evidence that ours is a government by, of, and for the capitalist class, you need only look around you. Reforms like  a mandatory living wage, universal healthcare, tuition-free college, and the Green New Deal all enjoy the support of commanding popular majorities as high as seventy percent of the voting public, yet the federal minimum wage is at its lowest point in terms of real value since 1956 as one in ten households struggle to afford food, tens of thousands of people die every year because they cannot afford healthcare, more than forty million Americans have gone into debt to pay for college, and rather than take action to address the looming climate apocalypse, the government is poised to greenlight a massive new oil extraction project that will release as much carbon dioxide as 66 coal plants firing simultaneously. At every turn, we see “our” government obstructing reforms that would transform the lives of working-class people to instead protect and expand the vast ill-gotten fortunes of the capitalist class. 

When these class antagonisms flare up in more dramatic ways, the government’s loyalties are even more apparent. When millions of working-class people rose up to demand community control of law enforcement in 2020, police at all levels of government arrested over 13,000 people and beat, gassed, and shot at countless others. Local governments uniformly increased police funding the following year. When mineworkers in Alabama struck for higher wages and better hours in 2021, the National Labor Relations Board attempted to bankrupt their union by ordering it to pay the mine operators millions of dollars for “lost productivity” the following year. When rail workers across the country were prepared to strike over a lack of paid sick days in the fall of 2022, Congress declared the strike illegal and forced them to remain at work on their employers’ terms. When the people of Atlanta began protesting plans to create a new police training supercenter by leveling a large swath of the city’s forests while working-class issues like mass homelessness and crumbling infrastructure go unaddressed, state and local police began terrorizing the protesters, killing one and arresting forty-three others as “domestic terrorists” since December of 2022. A government like this one, which so flagrantly uses its power to subdue labor for the benefit of capital, is a natural enemy of the socialist movement, so it is no surprise that the current administration considers those “opposed to all forms of capitalism” to be “a key component” of the “domestic terrorism threat.”

How might we go about rectifying all this? The straightforward reformist solution of changing the character of the state by electing a new set of people to helm it is a dead end, because the regime we live under is not merely led by the wrong people. No, it has the interests of our ruling class built into its very framework. The House of Representatives, the only organ of government at the federal level with even a tenuous claim to being democratic, is counterbalanced by the Senate, whose equal apportionment among the states distorts the influence of individual votes by a factor of up to seventy-to-one. Both chambers must then contend with the power of a one-man executive elected by the electoral college, which dilutes the power of the popular vote in much the same way as the Senate. The President, in turn, relies on the power of a large pool of unelected bureaucrats in the executive branch and the web of influence extending out from there into the private sector—Trump’s “deep state” is a misdirection, but like all effective lies, it contains a kernel of truth. A thorough house-cleaning of the federal bureaucracy would require the consent of the Senate for every significant appointment, meaning whether the reformist socialist movement approaches the issue of repurposing the government for socialist ends from the legislative angle or the executive one, it will find itself stymied by the profoundly undemocratic nature of the Senate all the same. But even supposing the movement defied the odds and won control of the Senate, the House, and the presidency, its reforms would still be at the mercy of the Supreme Court, whose members are not even indirectly elected and serve for life. Finally, and most definitively, if a socialist-controlled Congress instigated a standoff with the President or vice-versa, or if a socialist governing trifecta initiated a standoff with the Supreme Court, the loyalty of the military would be the decisive factor. The U.S. military, of course, acts in the interests of the military-industrial complex and can therefore be trusted to come down on the side of the capitalist class in the event of a constitutional crisis. We need not look further than the long list of Cold War-era military coups against democratically-elected socialist administrations around the world for proof-of-concept.

The capitalist state is not a tool that can be wielded by any class for any purpose. In its historical emergence as a tool of capitalist domination, it developed particular attributes suited only to minority rule and only, therefore, to the oppression and exploitation of the working-class majority. In the United States, these attributes take the form of an impenetrable series of obstacles to democracy, each one buttressing the other. What, then, can the socialist movement hope to do? 

The class character of our government lies down at its roots, so we have no recourse but to uproot it. In the words of Vladimir Lenin, “the liberation of the oppressed class is impossible without […] the destruction of the apparatus of state power which was created by the ruling class.” We must put forward a bold program designed to qualitatively transform the public power from a tool suited to the enemy’s objectives into one suited to our own. Our most basic demands must be: 

1. One person, one vote
2. Destroy corporate power
3. End the standing army and the police state

“One person, one vote” will entail, at minimum, the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, the presidential veto, and arguably the office of the presidency itself, with corresponding changes at all lower levels of government. The right to initiate legislative referenda and recall elected officials by popular vote will need to be instituted as well.

To destroy corporate power will require the mass expropriation of the sources of the bourgeoisie’s “soft power” over democracy, which it will use to bend even the most formally democratic system to its will if left intact. All finance capital—every bank, every Wall Street firm—will need to be seized. The largest monopolies, like Amazon and Wal-Mart, will have to be taken under public ownership. Critical instruments of social leverage will also be essential targets for expropriation, including communication, energy, healthcare, and transportation infrastructure. We will also find it necessary to reduce elected officials’ salaries to average working wages to wipe out the stains of government corruption that go hand-in-hand with the noxious influence of corporate power. To be in government must become simply another job, no more and no less.

Ending the standing army and the police state is easier said than done. These are the bourgeoisie’s means of exercising “hard power;” they are the bite that backs up the bark, and they cannot simply be willed away. The abolition of the United States military, agencies like the CIA and DHS, and existing police infrastructure will require a total reconstitution of society’s instruments of force. A militia of the whole people, with mandatory service and training, democratic rights for members, and total accountability to elected organs of civilian government will have to emerge to take up the tasks of law enforcement and martial activity in a way that empowers the proletariat rather than oppressing it. The universal workers’ militia is the antidote to capitalist militarism.

To achieve these three fundamental objectives and make the state something we can commandeer in our fight for socialism will require more than just sustained electoral efforts. None of these items are practically achievable by Constitutional means, nor through established means of amending the Constitution. The amendment process is perhaps the most radically undemocratic of our government’s foundations, requiring the simultaneous assent of the state legislatures (which reproduce all of the federal-level obstacles discussed above) of three-fourths of the states. Our entire campaign must be oriented around the premise that the Constitution is illegitimate, undemocratic, and antithetical to our existence as a free people. We must demand a Working People’s Constitution, drafted by the working class via a democratic constituent assembly and ratified on its own authority, irrespective of the norms of the current regime. 

To credibly put forth such a demand, we will need to build a movement that can mount real challenges to the ruling class on all fronts. 

We need a strong and aggressive labor movement to put capitalists on the defensive in the workplace. Socialists should try to cultivate ties with the most politically radical sections of the working class and the most militant members of labor unions. Our goal is to cohere a coalition of internally democratic unions prepared, if necessary, to bring all economic activity to a halt with a mass strike in order to force the capitalist class to accept the gains our movement makes in other arenas.

We need resilient community organizations to rally the proletariat into direct action towards its own emancipation. Tenant unions, student groups, cooperatives, and a variety of other organizations will prove vital in bridging the gap between national and international political struggles on the one hand and the day-to-day material interests of the class on the other. 

We need an independent party of the working class to run socialists for office against the Democratic and Republican parties at every level. Our elected officials should be answerable to our party and should uphold its program at every turn. Rather than attempting to broker a “fair deal” with the political cartels of the class enemy, as has been the modus operandi of our reformist socialists thus far, elected socialists should act as forces of obstruction and opposition. In city councils, state legislatures, and the House of Representatives, disciplined socialist caucuses should throw a wrench into the machinery of capitalist government by, for example, voting down capitalist candidates for parliamentary offices like Speaker of the House and refusing to vote for any annual budget that provides funding for the military. Most importantly, our elected officials must act as representatives of the socialist movement and publicly platform our agenda, which at this stage of the class struggle means, above all, one thing: down with the Constitution!