I have read Lenin, and if you think he is advocating for electing socialists to the bourgeois government as something to strive for in and of itself, you have completely misread him. Winning bourgeois elections is not the goal, or even in the same playing field as the goal, for communist electoral work. The goal is agitation: using elections to expose bourgeois democracy, spread an independent communist programme, and sharpen the working class’s understanding of the state’s class character.

This quote, and the invocation of Lenin in general, does nothing to strike against the criticism I was making. My criticism was not “organization is bad” or “a political party is unnecessary.” The opposite being obviously true. My criticism was that putting socialists into a bourgeois government does nothing to alter the class character of that government. The state remains bourgeois, and anyone entering it is forced to operate according to its rules, pressures, limits, and class function.

Again, a socialist entering a capitalist government does not make that government socialist. Rather, the socialist is pressured to act as a bourgeois minister in order to administer capitalism and get minor reforms through. The result is not the conquest of the bourgeois state by socialism, but the partial conquest of the socialist by the bourgeois state.

Lenin was arguing for an independent proletarian party capable of organizing the working class for a determined struggle against the whole of capitalist society. He was not arguing for socialists to measure power by how many seats they win inside capitalist institutions, still less for tailing a reactionary party such as the Democratic Party (which the DSA appears quite fond of, which can be seen in their actions, such as the recommendation to vote for Graham Platner: another campaign inside the Democratic Party, another refusal to break from its shadow, another retreat from building a truly independent working-class party.).