Vote Working Class! Vote Ed Hershey!

Chicago DSA is abuzz with excitement over the “independent” campaign of DSA alderman Byron Sigcho-Lopez to replace Chuy Garcia in Illinois’ 4th Congressional District. But let’s get something straight: there’s nothing “independent” about this Democrat’s bid. Sigcho-Lopez was boxed out of the Democratic primary by Chuy Garcia so he could anoint his chief of staff, Patty Garcia, as his chosen successor. That’s the only reason Sigcho-Lopez is running as an independent. He’s already said he’ll seek the support of the Democratic Party, he sits on the Cook County Democratic Party Central Committee and he has been a loyal lieutenant of the deeply unpopular Brandon Johnson.

Sure, Sigcho-Lopez talks big about abolishing ICE and freeing Palestine. But you can’t do either if you’re tied by a thousand threads to the imperialist Dems—who represent the capitalists who have a class interest in exploiting immigrants as cheap labor through terror and a class interest in dominating the Middle East through their Zionist proxy. Some in the branch argue Sigcho-Lopez will buck the Dems because he’s “DSA cadre” but so is Mamdani, which didn’t stop him from betraying working people right out of the gate: apologizing for NYPD’s racist terror, keeping Zionist police commissioner Tisch, endorsing strikebreaker Hochul, already abandoning campaign promises to provide more rental assistance, and threatening to raise property taxes on working-class New Yorkers—he’s clearly sold whatever socialist soul he had to the Democratic Party devil!

As Rosa Luxemburg put it:

Hitching one’s wagon to the Dems means sacrificing the things that make “socialist” candidates popular in the first place in order to move up in the ranks—like AOC voting to spike a national rail strike. The Dems, as a capitalist party, will always do what’s best for capitalist class interests and make sure anybody who seeks their support toes the line—which means signing on to attacks on working people and the oppressed. This is the very thing that drove workers to the populist right, made socialism a dirty word to many working people and increased divisions among workers of different backgrounds.

Expecting a Democrat to lay the groundwork for an independent workers party is like expecting a chicken to give milk or a cow to lay eggs—it’s not gonna happen!! The way to build an independent socialist party and advance class consciousness lies in splitting with the Dems and fighting them on every front—in the electoral and every other arena—for our class interests against theirs!

You cannot win working people to the need for their own party, a party opposed to the Democrats, by telling them to vote for a Democrat. There is already an anti-capitalist, pro-working-class candidate on the ballot in the 4th Congressional District: Ed Hershey, running for the Working Class Party. Hershey, a CTU teacher, got 10,000 votes against Garcia in 2024. His past campaigns have been clear—the Dems and GOP are enemies of working people and the oppressed. He is for building a working-class party opposed to both. Chicago DSA should dump Democrat Sigcho-Lopez and fight to elect Ed Hershey!

Doing so would give this independent working-class campaign a much-needed boost and facilitate real debate among socialists about how best to build the campaign and strengthen its appeal. The 4th district is majority Latino: why shouldn’t socialists use this opportunity to connect the fight for a workers party with the struggle against ICE roundups and deportations? Instead of phone banking for a phony “independent,” socialists should be going to immigrant and Latino groups and explaining why really fighting back against ICE demands dumping the Dems and mobilizing labor, not appealing to the Democrats. At the same time, socialists can use the campaign to make clear why all workers have an interest in fighting back against ICE and fighting for immigrants—these attacks are aimed at driving down living standards for the whole working class, dividing us and keeping us at each other’s throats while the bosses laugh all the way to the bank.

One of the arguments we’ve heard against supporting Hershey is that Sigcho-Lopez is electable and Hershey is not. This is not how socialists should approach elections! The entire point is to use elections as a platform for revolutionary politics, raising class consciousness and exposing the fraud of bourgeois democracy. Electing a Democrat who is pretending to be an independent and campaigning on liberal reforms won’t do that. But even a losing campaign which explicitly opposes both bourgeois parties and capitalism, which mobilizes working people on the basis of their class interests, does that. This is the only metric that should matter for socialists in elections.

The Dems are widely hated and there’s a burning need to respond to Trump’s terror—spending months electing another Democrat is the opposite of what socialists should be doing. The forces in this city that are for a real working-class alternative to the Dems must join together, debate the way forward, and transform the Hershey campaign into a real vehicle for actual, independent working-class politics. No support for Democrat Sigcho-Lopez! Vote Working Class Party, Vote Ed Hershey!