I’m of the opinion that we can’t expect any improvements from the political class before we take more of the profits so we can buy those politicians like corporations have.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. — Audre Lorde
I don’t think we should try to play the game by the capitalist class’ own rules, which they created for themselves. We’re never going to be able buy the political system by outspending the capitalist class: they own the means of production and it’s their political system.
Right now labor is very divided, shattered. It was significantly more organized a hundred years ago, though still divided along racial lines, a mistake we mustn’t repeat. People don’t seem to remember now how many socialists existed back then and were deeply involved in that organizing, before they were crushed by red scares and other skulduggery. And unfortunately almost all of our surviving unions came from explicitly anti-socialist roots, the others having been purged. Socialists are still extremely few in the US.
We can’t buy government, and we know our vote alone has very little power. What we need is a resurgent, re-organized labor movement, and new labor media (we used to have our own newspapers!) to counteract corporate media, and we need new mass industrial actions that fit today’s material conditions*. That’s how we forced the state to make concessions in the past.
*Simply organizing “blue collar” workers again won’t cut it, because many of us are not that now.