The Paradox of Icarus: Why Communists Should Vote for Democrats

by J. Ryder

‘The Death of Icarus’ by Alexandre Cabanel (1857)

His nearness to the devouring sun softened the fragrant wax that held the wings: and the wax melted: he flailed with bare arms, but losing his oar-like wings, could not ride the air.

Metamorphoses ‘ Daedalus and Icarus’ - Ovid (8 AD)

As yet another cycle of midterm elections approaches, the American left once again finds itself trapped in a familiar and yet unresolved dilemma: to vote or not to vote. What might otherwise appear as a routine question of electoral strategy has, in the present moment, taken on the weight of a political crisis. The Democratic Party’s unwavering support for Israel’s ongoing genocide in Gaza, combined with its long-standing suppression of domestic progressive reforms, has made electoral participation feel less like a tactical decision and more like a moral impasse. We know that this impasse is not new; the Democratic Party’s degeneration long predates October 7, long having abandoned the populist (yet still irredeemably capitalist) horizon of the New Deal in favor of an insipid, technocratic neoliberalism. But the imminence of the midterms this fall has forced the contradiction into the open, demanding a response rather than a posture.

This lends itself to a dilemma for the modern left: on one hand there is a potent fascist threat in the GOP, abducting and killing our neighbors while presently consolidating its power against democracy; on the other there is a Democratic Party who continues to support Israel’s ongoing genocide, compounded by consistently spitting in the face of its left-flank domestically, shooting down popular proposals surrounding universal healthcare, social justice, and other matters of public welfare. Within the parameters of this schema, the choice to vote or not to vote is rendered impossible to anyone on the left intent on being morally consistent; this rendering presents itself in the following: sacrifice support for the anti-GOP, anti-fascist vote through outright abstentionism or sacrifice ones own personal ethics in voting to advance the agenda of a Democratic Party, a political entity that is clearly accessory to genocide among many other miscellaneous instances of bourgeois oppression. Even though this debate is presented as binary, with online discourse being exhausted over recent years between the ‘morally pure abstentionists’ and the ‘damage control realists’, the following inquiry will be rather critical of both of these positions as well as the framework in which they exist, in favor of a different schema informed by Leninist electoral strategy.

Let us first deal with abstentionism. This line of thinking, although always present in some marginal form, has become an increasingly common position on the American left in recent years. This line of thinking is rather simple, and is as follows: there exists two relevant political parties in the United States today, the abstentionist does not agree with the political program of either, so they will vote for neither. In doing so, the abstentionist understands their action, or lack thereof, as equal to a political refutation of the two-party electoral system, hoping to drain its legitimacy through non-engagement. On its face, this approach makes perfect sense; why vote for someone or something so seemingly contrary to your values? Isn’t some sort of alignment of values a necessary precursor for a candidate to win your vote? Although these questions are valid, arise out of good sentiment, and correctly diagnose the morally bankrupt nature of the two major parties, the communist political perspective, i.e., the perspective that as Marxists we are exclusive to, finds it rather unproductive. 

Adherents of abstention feel that their position resolves their discontent with the given dispute through their own non-participation, subsequently delegitimizing the given choices. Although intuitively understandable, what this approach fails to consider is that relevant disputes and discourse proceed regardless of one’s participation in them (one can perhaps determine the relevance of a matter here insofar as it becomes necessary for there to be a campaign of abstention from it to begin with). When there is a ‘great debate’, i.e., a broad question or conflict that takes up the majority of political discourse in a given society, so much so that every issue finds itself siphoned through it, no amount of petty abstention can actualize its nullification. If the debate was as unimportant and unnecessary as the abstentionists would have us believe, it would not have taken up such political volume to begin with. 

The case is no different in our ongoing culture war; the conflict currently represented by the Republicans and Democrats, respectively, is the society-wide debate of our time, which seemingly every issue finds itself filtered through. As primitive and overrated a conflict as many perceive it to be, it’s precisely the culture war’s overrepresentation that signifies it as the great debate of our era, forcing us to reckon with it; this is the job of Marxists, to parse through our present conditions rather than inventing our own, more favorable versions of them.  As much as our abstentionists would love to nullify this ongoing culture war for what, in their perception, is a ‘politically primary’ class war, this transcendence of debate (political realignment) must be done so organically, through a real resolution of the present conflict that satisfies the conditions that created the great debate to begin with. As much as we may wish politics set economic classes separately across a neat political division, this is simply not the way mainstream American politics has developed, and this must be broadly understood and accepted by our abstentionists before we can proceed with a serious prognosis of American capitalism. 

 This understanding leads us to a rather sharp yet unavoidable criticism of our abstentionists: you are not negating the ongoing great debate through your abstention; rather, you are allowing it to continue without your input. Existential societal questions are not solved through campaigns of petty neglect; these sorts of campaigns, which attempt to answer the question of the day by calling the question itself irrelevant, perhaps inferior to their own ‘more sophisticated’ question, confine themselves to the margins of that society’s discourse in doing so, as our abstentionists so clearly have done. For those who claim to seek change, this approach is antithetical; as political historian Frank DiStefano writes, “realignments are the moments in which an old debate is resolved and a new national debate begins.” There is no resolving a great debate through ignorance of its existence entirely; it must be meaningfully answered in order for it to be transcended.

Our country’s Civil War, for example, was the product of the great debate over slavery, without which there could have been no ground made on later issues of political and social morality. It is difficult to imagine, during the period through which slavery and its abolition were the primary topic of discussion nationally, that a popular political group would ignore the topic entirely, claiming that another peripheral issue should be central to the national discussion. Except, there was: the Whig Party. As the national discourse over slavery sharpened in the decades preceding the Civil War, the Whigs attempted to hold together a fragile coalition of both Northern antislavery sentiment and Southern slaveholding interests by systematically avoiding the question altogether. Instead, they filled this programmatic void with vague appeals toward economic modernization and national unity. For a time, this strategy of evasion appeared viable, but once slavery became the burning question of the day, the Whigs’ refusal to meaningfully answer it proved fatal. The party did not transcend the great debate through its abstention from it; it was torn apart. Its Northern anti-slavery wing was absorbed into the emergent Republican Party, its Southern wing dissolved into the Democrats, and the Whigs, as they were known, ceased to exist as a relevant political force. A mass political organization cannot survive, let alone lead, by declaring the central contradiction of its time irrelevant. The great debate will be answered with or without you; abstention merely ensures it will be answered without your participation. Through such a framework, one might begin to see our modern abstentionism as not so synonymous with political heroism but rather as entirely apolitical; avoiding parsing through the messiness of a political conflict or election that they know will hold massive relevance and consequence, with or without their participation.

For some, this neglectful outlook on American politics is seen as purposefully counterproductive. There are those who believe things must get worse before they get better, that a mass withdrawal from politics could put pressure on the electoral system to the point where communism rises to the fore. Perhaps this is why Antonio Gramsci understood abstentionists of all sorts to be economistic (see more on economism) in his prison notebooks. “All forms of electoral abstentionism belong to [economism], and there are many such forms…linked with abstentionism is the formula 'the worse it gets, the better that will be.’” This bleak and plainly accelerationist worldview ignores the basic fact of politics that one must always be able to answer the question of the day, and to retreat from such an answer is not so noble as it is a retreat from politics itself. This, surely, is not such an approach that can be taken seriously by anyone who considers themselves a Marxist.

This leaves us with the task of attempting to answer the question of the day, that is, vote Democrat or vote Republican (because there is no viable ‘third option’ in such a binary). Even though such a choice between undeniable evils may seem like an impossibility from a communist perspective, it’s within that same inconvenience that antagonisms, discourse, and politics are found and resolved. Some self-proclaimed Marxists have sought to resolve this dilemma through a resoundingly pro-Trump position. Although the slightest acknowledgment can be given to this group in a way that cannot be said for our abstentionists for at least attempting to answer the question of the day; they do so in a way that is innately riveted with such zealotry and chauvinism that it makes them impossible to take seriously. For these reasons, I will not be reckoning with their position in depth here. It suffices for our purposes to say that the pro-Trump position is one that gives rise to elements of white supremacy, male chauvinism, and outright fascism, all of which are antithetical to the goals of revolutionary communism. Instead, it is rather cultural progressivism: the collection of popular ideas and movements supporting the ability of all people to exist freely regardless of demographic, that is the essential kernel of American Marxism. Such an assertion may be dealt with and further justified at another time if this issue is taken up with it in earnest; however, most of those who argue to the contrary (e.g., the so-called “American Communist Party”) are nothing more than elaborate con artists, unworthy of any significant refutation.

Remaining is a valid inquiry: how can any Marxist possibly feel justified in voting for the Democrats? Under Biden’s leadership, they ushered in a reign of imperialist terror on Gaza through their seemingly unabated support for Israel. This ongoing genocide, along with the general imperialist overextension of the state, became a center point in the 2024 presidential election, and for good reason. This was compounded by the Democrats' long-term neglect of the necessity for radical change on a wide variety of domestic welfare issues, becoming a very hard sell for the party’s left flank, perhaps a less negligible demographic than originally anticipated for establishment consultants. For many on the left in 2024, the situation altered from one where they may have been open to the idea of once again ‘settling for the Democrats’ to suppress the rise of the fascist threat as they were in 2020, into one of utter confusion, despair, and anger. To many, it was considered a non-choice, especially as it pertained to making a difference in the Palestinian struggle for liberation. 

As a thought experiment, however, let us consider for a moment one thing only in our decision to vote or not to vote: the advancement of a communist political agenda. Such a unilateral prioritization can be made on the (quite orthodoxly Marxist) premise that if a communist agenda could be propelled into state power, policy decisions would become subservient to our own ethical framework rather than those of the bourgeois parties. This newfound communist hegemony would implicate a state now in support of the liberation of Palestine and in hard opposition to Israeli colonialism, for example. Within this framework, we can understand communist hegemony as the fulfillment of our worldview in reality. Therefore, if we can locate the interests of advancing communism towards hegemony within our political position to vote for or to abstain from the Democrats, that would make our decision relatively straightforward. It is precisely such an interest that can be located within the communist vote for the Democratic Party.

To justify such a crucial yet controversial statement, we return, unsurprisingly, to Lenin. Regarding the Labour Party and broader electoral situation in Great Britain during the early 20th century, he begins with the following: “It is true that the Hendersons, the Clyneses, the MacDonalds and the Snowdens [the British Labour Party] are hopelessly reactionary. It is equally true that they want to assume power (though they would prefer a coalition with the bourgeoisie), that they want to “rule” along the old bourgeois lines, and that when they are in power they will certainly behave like the Scheidemanns and Noskes [German Social Democrats who betrayed left ideals once in power]. All that is true. But it does not at all follow that to support them means treachery to the revolution; what does follow is that, in the interests of the revolution, working-class revolutionaries should give these gentlemen a certain amount of parliamentary support.” His justification follows that, “on the contrary, the fact that most British workers still follow the lead of the British Kerenskys or Scheidemanns and have not yet had experience of a government composed of these people—an experience which was necessary in Russia and Germany so as to secure the mass transition of the workers to communism—undoubtedly indicates that the British Communists should participate in parliamentary action, that they should, from within parliament, help the masses of the workers see the results of a Henderson and Snowden government in practice, and that they should help the Hendersons and Snowdens defeat the united forces of Lloyd George and Churchill [the British Conservatives]. To act otherwise would mean hampering the cause of the revolution, since revolution is impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by the political experience of the masses, never by propaganda alone. [my comments]” 

He then concludes, “At present, British Communists very often find it hard even to approach the masses, and even to get a hearing from them. If I come out as a Communist and call upon them to vote for Henderson and against Lloyd George, they will certainly give me a hearing. And I shall be able to explain in a popular manner, not only why the Soviets are better than a parliament and why the dictatorship of the proletariat is better than the dictatorship of Churchill (disguised with the signboard of bourgeois “democracy”), but also that, with my vote, I want to support Henderson in the same way as the rope supports a hanged man—that the impending establishment of a government of the Hendersons will prove that I am right, will bring the masses over to my side, and will hasten the political death of the Hendersons and the Snowdens just as was the case with their kindred spirits in Russia and Germany. [my emphasis]”

Lenin rejects both sides of our now popular yet false dichotomization of the voting issue; he says we must not become so self-indulgent in our virtue that we abandon politics entirely and abstain, yet at the same time we cannot vote in the same way a liberal does, which would amount to nothing but an endorsement of the continuation of the status quo with all of its implicit atrocities. Rather, we must vote through our virtue, rather than in spite of it. We vote not because we wish to settle for and tolerate the Democrats in spite of our hate for them (a position our abstentionists are right to criticize as liberal), but rather because we resent them and wish to see their demise, which we can only actualize through the voting campaign. This “support in the same way the rope supports a hanged man” is, for Lenin, a completely disingenuous and purely political kind of support, in that it does not really serve the interests of the Democrats at all, but rather only that of the organized Marxists who lend it.  This ‘support’ is so temporary and duplicitous that it should not be criticized as liberal by our abstentionists, as they do for those who advocate ‘settling’ for Democrats. Like a rug that ‘supports’ the contents on top of it yet can be pulled out from under them by its handler at any point; or, in Lenin’s example, as the rope that ‘supports’ the neck of the subject yet can be tugged at will by the executioner to the point of complete asphyxiation. Our strategy should be perceived through this very same analogy, through a mass campaign of voting as explicit communists, we can truthfully attain the title of executioner of those same Democrats we ‘support’. 

Although such an explanation is painfully relevant for our purposes, a few points of contention tend to arise when its content is repeated today. The first being that Lenin was speaking of the British Labour Party of 100 years ago, that surely a party of social democracy (modern context social democracy, not Lenin’s), such as Labour, is incomparable to that of the modern Democrats. This misconception can, funnily enough, be refuted in the above quotes from Lenin themselves. Irrelevant to Lenin is the difference between a social democratic candidate and a liberal candidate in such a scenario; in fact, his only mention of ideology here is entirely relative. He importantly locates the Labour Party (much like our Democrats of today) as left of the Conservatives, and therefore equipped with the type of progressivism that need necessarily be experienced by the masses for socialism to enter the fray. Simultaneously, Lenin finds the importance of voting for them not within their specific brand of liberalism, but rather in their non-hegemony. He understands the impending necessity as one of letting the masses live through the experience of the Labour Party because “revolution is impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by the political experience of the masses, never by propaganda alone.” In commenting on the Labour Party, Lenin calls them “hopelessly reactionary”. A label we can hopefully unanimously agree is true for both the Labour Party Lenin speaks of as well as the modern Democrats; yet our modern abstentionists are claiming this is a decisive factor in not voting for the Democrats in our contemporary context.

There is a common response to Lenin's line of thinking that is perhaps more substantial and relevant, however, as it is not explicitly explored in detail in Left-Wing Communism. That is: haven’t the masses already experienced a liberal party government? Why do we need to bring about a necessary lived experience to advance the political situation if that experience has already occurred? As Lenin proclaims, “revolution is impossible without a change in the views of the majority of the working class, a change brought about by the political experience of the masses, never by propaganda alone.” Although it is true that the masses have experienced Democratic governance, I think a vital distinction must be drawn between governance and hegemony. Governance is often temporary, especially in the United States executive and legislative branches, for example, where presidential party power changes hands more often than not every election cycle. The latter, hegemony, is a term often misunderstood; many definitions exist, but one in particular proves useful here: “the social, cultural, ideological, or economic influence exerted by a dominant group. [my italics] (Merriam Webster).” The keyword here is dominant, a word that cannot be considered true for either major party over the other in the current political landscape.

It is precisely this domination that is required to form a meaningful lived political experience, as Lenin outlines for the situation to advance past the necessity of such a dominant group’s existence. Such a dynamic seems contradictory; why would one’s domination equal their demise? This is because the moment of hegemony, or as I call it: ‘total victory’, is quite simply that, a moment. Although some of our contemporary partisans, both Republican and Democrat, would like to think otherwise, total victory is inherently unsustainable under the current political framework. No major party will ever assert itself in a way that will cease opposition indefinitely; opposition will always form on the terms of the ‘great debate’ of a given era. However, this is no reason to throw away the concept of total victory altogether. Total victory is not to be understood as a sustained situation, but rather as the briefest moment in time, so much so that it may not be recognizable until well after the fact. Yet much like the Big Bang, the explosive event that created all that came after it, total victory is the moment that defines the terms of the following landscape.

The Democrats, for example, will never defeat the GOP in a way that would establish their own consistent rule for the rest of American history. They could, however, defeat the GOP in a way that would make the Republicans unable to win an election again in their current form. An institutional and ideological exclusivizing of the given political landscape through decisively resolving the question of the day would force the GOP into a situation where they would be unable to claw themselves back into power in their current form. This undertaking could take many forms, but perhaps in a Democratic Party context, we could see this happen through successful campaigns to abolish the electoral college and Supreme Court, for example. These are some of the only institutional formalities keeping the GOP within striking distance of the Democrats over the last 20 years. These reforms would of course have to come as a result of a necessarily preceding ideological dominance on behalf of the Democrats (a process they of course will not initiate on their own, we’ll touch more on that later), but rather its institutional byproducts would ultimately be what tilt the scales harshly away from the GOP and its political potential due to their reliance on said institutions. Progressivism’s true majority (which has been obscured by these said institutions, gerrymandering, as well as uninspiring and out-of-touch presidential tickets like Harris/Walz) would show itself fully, and the GOP would become extinct. However such a reality plays out is not vital understand for our purposes today because it is presently impossible to predict, but what’s clear is that such a momentary total victory for the Democrats would force the complete re-articulation of the Republicans as a party, the actors within being forced to do so in order to remain afloat in a newly transformed dynamic that made their own program, as well as fascism itself, redundant. This is what creates political realignments, great debates are resolved, and the winner sets the terms for the next one. The losing party and its component parts attempt to reform and negate that hegemony in the exact moment it forms, reconstituting a new two-party dichotomy. This process is often so subtle that it goes without notice entirely, with parties often re-articulating themselves under the same party brand to retain name recognition, while in reality, the flesh of their programmatic content has completely changed along with its given political landscape. 

This political re-articulation of the hegemon’s opposition within the moment of total victory is not the primary point of interest in regards to our vote, however. Rather, it is the re-articulation of the momentary hegemon itself in the process of total victory that concerns us. If the Democrats structurally push the Republicans out of the Overton window, it is not only the GOP that will need to re-form but also the Democratic Party itself. This is because in the moment of total victory, the terms and goals that the hegemon’s political bloc (in this hypothetical case, being the Democrats) were formed upon are necessarily fulfilled (because what else could possibly constitute ‘total victory’ for a given party but the resolution of its existential goals), and are therefore no longer adequate to unite under. The terms of this Democratic bloc are almost solely to defeat the GOP, with little to no standalone thesis or program that would otherwise unite their big tent. Extinguishing the GOP’s ability to maintain its sociopolitical position as it stands would mean pushing this Democratic bloc into sole hegemony, ultimately fulfilling its existential purpose and subsequently causing its complete fragmentation and subsequent reformation into anew. Like Icarus, who flew too close to the sun only for that same luminous freedom he sought out in his flight to melt the very wings that got him there, the Democratic bloc is equally self-destructive in the moment of achieving its intended goals. Their party’s big tent is articulated almost entirely on the grounds of defeating the Republican Party. What else could keep corrupt neo-liberals like Chuck Schumer in the same party as ideological social democrats like Zohran Mamdani? Opposition to the fascist threat has done so. Schumer types and Mamdani types (with their accompanying bases) exist respectively as the wax and the feathers to Icarus’ wings, held together only through Republican opposition. As the proverbial sun of total victory looms nearer, the component parts of the Democratic bloc’s wings will become impossible to hold together. It is only through total victory for the Democrats that the fracturing of such a bloc could see the light of day, and it is precisely for that reason that it is in communists’ interests to pursue it as a goal.

The ‘two-party duopoly’ that remains the thorn in the side of the communist left is not here fracturable in form but rather in its content. Total victory is the natural precursor to the necessary re-articulation (and therefore destruction) of both parties as we currently know them. This realignment can be otherwise understood as the product of a democratic revolution of sorts, one that could give way to a real communist party in the United States for the first time. This ‘democratic revolution’ can be schematically understood on the following grounds. The Democrats defeat the Republicans in their achievement of total victory, and two new parties emerge, chiefly led by the two primary camps of the victor: the aforementioned Schumer and Mamdani types. Schumer, more naturally tending toward a liberalism of the old world may create the new ‘right party’, for example; while Mamdani and the other left-democrats may create the new ‘left party’ (one that may even find itself continuing to indulge in terming itself ‘socialist’). This new schema can only be seen as beneficial to communists, even those who don’t see themselves in the camp of the Zohran-style social democrats who would likely constitute this new left party. This is because for the first time in the last century, socialism (or at least some interpretation of it) will be a viable political option in the United States. Although socialism is often mentioned and referenced in the contemporary, it can, at this stage, only be done so somewhat superficially; indicative of one's position in regards to the general state of American capitalism but not so toward the ongoing great debate, therefore excluding it from the central discourse of our time. Socialism cannot genuinely be considered by the American voter until the terms of the ongoing great debate, through the parameters set by the ongoing culture war, have been satisfied. 

Our abstentionists would like to have you believe that the ongoing culture war and its accompanying party representatives can simply be ignored in favor of their dogmatically contrived class war narrative. As we have already established though, any debate that is great enough to take up the near-entirety of a given society’s discourse must necessarily have its terms satisfied before another discourse can begin. This is to say, if there was one day to be a class war dichotomy dominating national discourse, it could not be actualized until the ongoing contradiction between the essentially progressive and the essentially reactionary has been resolved. This can perhaps be more intuitively understood through the following inquiry: how can socialism be on the agenda before we have even decided whether or not we even want to move forward with cultural progressivism, a necessary precursor to the American Marxist worldview, or to dwell in the dark ages through a malicious fascist orthodoxy? This war on American culture is arguably more crucial to us than the participants themselves, yet we still choose to sit on the sidelines, bystanders to our own fate.

Our intervention into such a dynamic must instead be to actively heighten the present contradictions we have located, both between the Democrats and Republicans and within the Democrats themselves. There is perhaps a grain of truth to our abstentionists’ program when they say that the ongoing contradiction between the Democrats and Republicans is currently nonantagonistic, that it could go on indefinitely. This theory doesn’t account for, however, a left actively pressuring this schema, through our own, somewhat intransigent and hardened participation in the interest of our own goals, taking up space in a system that has no room for us (see our proposal for a project 2026). This is what will ultimately sharpen the antagonisms both between the Democrats and Republicans as well as the internal antagonisms within the Democratic Party, as recently displayed with Zohran Mamdani’s quick ascension within the party as an explicit socialist . A non-abstentionist campaign for Socialism is exactly the necessary force to create a Democratic Party that is so internally stratified that it finds itself exceedingly bound by nothing more than the bare necessity to extinguish the GOP, an objective that once achieved will reconstruct the entirety of the existing paradigm in favor of a revolutionary future. It is precisely outside pressure on behalf of a non-abstentionist left that creates the conditions necessary for the contradictions in the present bourgeois politico-electoral dynamic to become irrefutably antagonistic and implode. 

The form this ‘outside pressure’ will take has become a primary talking point of the American left over the last decade especially within DSA, perhaps because they are the socialist group perhaps most engaged in the Democrats internal divisions. This discourse within DSA is platformed heavily by the ‘Marxist Unity Group’ (MUG), and their accompanying Cosmonaut Magazine, who are intent on tiredly repeating empty slogans about ‘class independence’ and rallying people against the so-called ‘revisionism’ of those who think engaging the Democrats is in any way important. In a Cosmonaut piece on the recent DSA convention last year they write on the subject that, “despite the preponderance of electoral resolutions, not a single resolution proposing a break from the Democrats reached the convention floor. In fact, this idea was not even broached during discussion. Comrades who would condemn the Democrats’ support of the Palestinian genocide, would in the same breath suggest that we run more Democratic candidates.”

From Cosmonaut’s vantage point, atop the steep mountain of their treasured ‘independence’  where they stand far from us ‘revisionists’ (as well as quite ironically far from the masses themselves), condemning Democratic crimes while running candidates on the Democratic ballot is incoherent. They assert that such dual action amounts to a failure of “class independence.” Yet, as we have seen, the temporary alignment of electoral support with the Democrats is precisely the instrument by which internal contradictions are sharpened and the bloc’s hegemonic moment brought into relief. What appears to Cosmonaut as a moral compromise is, in fact, a tactical position: the very act of voting under these conditions does not legitimize the Democrats’ policies in practice, but rather exposes and exacerbates the fissures that can later be actualized as our assertion into the fray. In this light, their claim that voting while opposing Democratic support for Gaza is inherently contradictory collapses; the apparent tension is not a failing of strategy, but rather the very mechanism through which our strategy operates.

What is striking about this line of criticism is not merely its content, but its implication. In framing the absence of a formal break with the Democrats as a political failure in itself, Cosmonaut reveals a conception of “class independence” that is almost entirely negative; defined not by any affirmative intervention into mass politics, but by a ritualized and fetishistic refusal to engage with the only arena in which political power presently circulates. Independence, here, is reduced to a posture rather than a strategy; a declaration rather than a relation. The question of how such a vapid independence is meant to materially alter the existing political configuration is conspicuously absent. This is not a minor omission. To the extent that class independence is treated as a principle that must precede engagement, rather than something forged through struggle within existing contradictions, it becomes indistinguishable from abstentionism in practice, even if it avoids the name. One may continue to run third-party candidates, pass resolutions, and issue condemnations, but if all of this activity is oriented toward preserving one’s separation from the dominant political field rather than destabilizing it, the result is not rupture but actually liquidationism, the same fate their campaign of independence is claiming to avoid. The Democratic Party is not weakened by this position; it is relieved of pressure. Its internal contradictions are not sharpened, but neutralized by a left that insists on announcing its distance rather than forcing confrontation. 

Cosmonaut’s complaint, that socialists are willing to denounce Democratic crimes while still running candidates on the Democratic ballot, misses precisely this point. The contradiction they identify is not evidence of incoherence, but of real political struggle. It is only through such contradictions that the limits of liberalism can be made legible to the masses. To demand a ‘clean break’ as a precondition for engagement is to confuse politics as a performance of one’s personal ethics. It assumes that independence is something one declares before entering battle, rather than something produced through the escalation of antagonisms within it. In this sense, the Marxist Unity Group’s appeal to class independence functions less as a revolutionary principle than as a moral alibi.

 By positioning themselves perpetually above engaging with the Democratic Party (which, as we have exhibited, means very little other than one’s only condemnation to marginality), they exempt themselves from responsibility for the messiness that unfolds within it, yet it is precisely within this terrain that the decisive conflicts of the present moment are being fought. The result is a politics that appears radical in its denunciations but rather liberal in effect; content to allow the Democratic bloc to manage its own contradictions in peace; this is class independence in name only. In reality, it is a form of political quietism that leaves the structure of liberal hegemony intact. Class independence worthy of the name cannot be achieved through distance alone. It must be wrested from within the very formations that presently organize mass political life, even when doing so entails inhabiting uncomfortable, unstable, and seemingly morally compromised positions. To refuse this discomfort is not to preserve revolutionary integrity, but to surrender initiative. A left that insists on standing apart from the central political conflict of its time does not hasten its resolution; it ensures that it will be resolved without them. This provides an almost humorous irony when our abstentionists at Cosmonaut make the righteous claim that,  “there is no acceptable compromise between making the workers’ movement a junior partner in the Democratic Party and working to build independent working-class organizations.” You have done just that, comrades.

Where Cosmonaut and its ultra-leftist allies err through distance, the right-wing of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA) errs through assimilation. Unlike our abstentionists, who maintain their moral purity by refusing to engage, the party recognizes the necessity of intervention in contemporary politics, but they interpret it entirely through the prism of conformity to existing structures. They do not vote as communists in the spirit of Lenin, casting ballots to illuminate contradictions and educate the masses, but as Democrats themselves. Oftentimes this involves campaigning for Democrats as literal Democrats, hiding their real perspective for the sake of some misplaced sense of righteousness in putting on a different hat for the cause. In doing so, they abandon any critical edge, subordinating their revolutionary potential to the perpetuation of liberal hegemony.

This quasi-liquidationist approach manifests in multiple ways. Campaigns to elect Democratic candidates are conducted with no explicit identification as communists, erasing the opportunity to introduce Marxist analysis into public discourse and instead reinforcing the legitimacy of the Democratic Party. The message becomes: support the Democrats as they are, as damage control, not as a foil for revolutionary insight. Lenin’s formula of voting for a reformist party to reveal its limits to the masses is replaced with uncritical advocacy, producing no rupture, only consolidation. This same economistic logic that pervades the CPUSA bleeds into its rather desperate fetishization with union organizing and mutual aid. These activities, while socially valuable and directly beneficial to those involved, are also entirely severed from the broader political struggle against liberal hegemony. They occupy energies and resources that could be leveraged for explicit political confrontation, yet they lack an overtly political strategy and subsequently fall flat, miming the advocacies of the popular social-democrats yet without any of the influence or sway, essentially becoming an unwanted, useless, and yet bizarrely disciplined “junior partner” to the Democrats, as our abstentionist friends like to say.

The CPUSA demonstrates the danger of politics that acknowledge the necessity of intervention without retaining autonomy; their politics operate in a single register: integration. Whereas the Cosmonaut writers wish to preserve their separateness at the cost of any potential of influence in its intervention, the CPUSA preserves the potential of intervention (although seemingly still without any potential for influence) at the cost of identity, producing no antagonistic force to challenge the prevailing order. Both positions, though superficially opposed through endless online debate, essentially share the same camp: they fail to reconcile engagement with rupture and are subsequently absent from the real movement of politics in the United States today. A truly Marxist intervention must occupy the tension between these poles, acting within the existing political landscape while simultaneously sharpening the contradictions that will allow liberal hegemony to collapse. Without this dialectical tension, political participation either becomes ineffectual moralism or wholesale assimilation, and the revolutionary potential of the left is irretrievably dissipated.

Icarus’ Paradox here lends more than a metaphor; it offers a warning and a guide. The Democratic Party, like Icarus, flies on wings held together by tenuous forces: the big tent that unites liberals and social-democrats only in their shared opposition to the GOP. The closer the party approaches the sun of total victory, the more its wings begin to melt, threatening the stability of the bloc. Abstentionists, by refusing to engage in this arena, leave our Icarus to fly well below the sun, allowing the party to continue its dichotomous and relatively comfortable relationship with the GOP without pressure, leaving the ongoing great debate unresolved. Liquidationists like the CPUSA, by semi-merging into the Democratic Party, erase their critical edge and surrender autonomy, reinforcing the very wings we hope to fall apart. A truly Marxist engagement should occupy the path between these extremes: a strategy of participation and rupture. By voting for Democrats as communists, we act not as passengers on Icarus’ fatal flight but as the metaphorical wind that guides him closer toward the sun. Our intervention does not endorse the party’s policies; it heightens the contradictions, sharpens internal disputes, and ensures that when its wings fail, communism can begin to readily take flight itself. In that moment, communism will no longer be an abstract theory or subculture, but a movement grounded in the concrete collapse of a bloc whose unity depended on opposition to a common foe. Just as the rope supports the hanged man, our proposed intervention supports the Democratic Party only insofar as it enables the eventual unraveling of its bloc, as well as the emergence of a new political landscape in which the appeal to communism is more than empty phrase-mongering, but rather an appeal to a very tangible and imminent future.