The CPUSA National Election Conference, May 23, 2026, focused on the coming midterm elections.

For that reason, this Marxist IQ is dedicated to the question of elections and their relationship to Marxism and the struggle for socialism.

1. Beginning with the Communist Manifesto, Marxist movements and parties have defined the struggle for democracy” as the struggle for

a. Taxation with representation.
b. Political rights that would enable the working class to obtain economic and social power.
c. New capitalist market economies.
d. The abolition of the government.

2. As workers fought to achieve the right to vote in elections in many countries, Karl Marx warned that workers

a. Must support the existing bourgeois political parties in order to protect themselves.
b. Should not participate in the existing political system because they will be co-opted.
c. Should act to abolish the government.
d. Must struggle to establish labor-led socialist parties so as not to have to choose every few years what party of the ruling capitalist class would govern them.

3. Presidential elections in U.S. history have played a role in accelerating far-reaching changes of a progressive or revolutionary nature. Which of the following elections did not usher in major changes in U.S. politics and society in the interests of labor and the people?

a. Franklin Roosevelt in 1932.
b. Abraham Lincoln in 1860.
c. Ronald Reagan in 1980.
d. Lyndon Johnson in 1964.

4. Even by modern capitalist definitions of democracy, which concern “free and fair” elections, the U.S. ranks as among the least democratic among major capitalist industrialized countries because

a. There is no check on the use of money by individuals, corporations, and parties in elections.
b. Restrictions on the right to vote significantly limit voter turnout.
c. Campaigns are usually waged for many months on the basis of “negative advertising” principles, personal attacks, appeals to racism and traditional ethnic and gender biases, exaggerated and/or invented domestic and international scandals and crises.
d. All of the above

5. In concrete conditions of struggle, Lenin said

a. As long as you are unable to disperse the bourgeois parliament and every other type of reactionary institution, you must work inside them, precisely because in them there are still workers who are stupefied by the priests and by the desolateness of village life: otherwise you run the risk of becoming mere babblers.
b. Vote for the most working-class-aligned candidate available, even if they’re not socialist, as a tactical maneuver — not out of illusions in them, but to expose them.
c. Elections are a tool, not an end.
d. All of the above

Answers: here.