For the past 6 months I worked on the electoral campaign of Zerlina Smith, a progressive candidate for Chicago City Council. She was part of a city-wide electoral revolt against austerity politics led by reform Democrats and political independents. She did not win outright or make the run-off, but some of the candidates did, including Chuy Garcia who is challenging Mayor Rahm Emanuel in the general election. I've had a little time to think about what I experienced.
I left a socialist meeting last night where we spent a couple of hours talking about the recent Chicago election. I think the word "money" came up more than the word "votes". It was an acknowledgment that in our so-called democracy, "Money doesn't talk, it swears."
It reminded me of the training session I attended for candidates and election volunteers sponsored by a progressive political alliance. We were told in complete seriousness that one of the the most important jobs of the candidate was to get on the phone and call everyone that he or she knew----and ask them for money. And it was the campaign manager's job to make sure that the candidate put in their required number of hours on the phone---whether they liked it or not.
Our trainer, a genuinely progressive woman, acknowledged that we would probably be uncomfortable at first about hitting up everyone we knew for money, but that it would get easier as we went along. I didn't want it to get easier as we went along.
I thought back to the 1980's during the heady days of the Harold Washington movement. I thought of the reform minded firebrands who went into politics then. Now some of those people are just cogs in a political system so repulsive that most Chicago voters stayed away from the polls this year in disgust. The pull of Big Money can be hard to resist, day in and day out for years on end. A thousand small compromises and you end up like Rep. Danny Davis [D-IL7], who endorsed Willie Wilson for mayor.
Wilson is allied with Republican Governor Bruce Rauner whose political model is the Eurozone that is trying to strangle the Greeks into accepting abject poverty as their lot in life.
Danny wasn't always like that. Believe me. Oh, and did I mention that millionaire Democrat Rahm Emanuel is closely allied with millionaire Republican Bruce Rauner? That doesn't mean that Big Money always wins an election. We have a Mayor and a number of City Council members who are now being reminded of that.
But those of us dedicated to working class liberation have to remember that when we win an election, we are entering enemy territory and our goal is not to fix a system that is badly broken, but to replace it with something better. That takes a broad-based massive social movement that operates from within as well as outside of the electoral system.
Personally, I'm a socialist. From my experience in the this election, I can tell you that support for socialist ideas is growing in the Chicago area, among a small minority of people to be sure, but growing. It's not because socialists have suddenly become more persuasive, but because capitalism in the State of Illinois is in deep crisis and people feel it, painfully, day in and day out. The pain is localized in the lives of individuals but the source is systemic. That is our challenge.