After decades of union decline, the defeat of militant formations, workplace fragmentation, and the absorption of much of the left into electoral vehicles, advanced elements of the class are again seeking coherent forms of organization. The shared objective—rebuilding independent proletarian power—is increasingly recognized. The path, however, remains contested. The Left has an opportunity to rebuild that power by organizing around shortening the workweek and coordinated strike preparation, rather than centering high-profile electoral campaigns.

The current dominant political strategy concentrates energy on candidacies inside the Democratic Party, treating a presidential or major state-level electoral campaign as the primary vehicle for a breakthrough of socialist politics. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and related discussions of a “Socialist Project 2029” are the clearest current example of this approach. While it may be useful to strategize a pre-emptive orientation around this potential future, which may serve as another vehicle for bringing many into the fight much as the 2016 campaign of Bernie Sanders did, this orientation leaves much up to chance and only provides a limited space for organization, especially in terms of worker self-activity.

What proposals like a Socialist Project 2029 do exemplify is a real desire for decisive political gains. In this context, electoral campaigns can serve limited tactical purposes: they can popularize demands, test organizational capacity, or temporarily shift the terrain of struggle. Yet the strategy contains a structural limit. Campaign calendars, donor logic, vote-count metrics, messaging discipline, and short electoral horizons reshape working-class organizations around external objectives. Success is measured in doors knocked, funds raised, and ballots cast. These metrics register passive support more readily than active power. They do little to expand initiative at the point of production, increase strike capacity, or build durable rank-and-file institutions that outlast any single election cycle. The ultimate result is a subordination of the fighting organizations of the working class to the methods and rhythms of bourgeois electoral politics.

There is another path. It has been neglected and displaced not only by supporters of electoral politics–but even militant and “revolutionary” organizations that advocate abstentionism have allowed the demand for a shortening of working hours to fall by the wayside.

What is being proposed here is not meant to suggest a complete abandonment of electoralism or the contesting of state power, but a potential blueprint for the rejuvenation of a historic terrain of class struggle that proved an effective engine for spurring action among the proletariat and served as a unifying pole for the socialist left. Moreover, so much as it relates to a Socialist Project 2029, the activity put into motion by a campaign for a shorter workweek can at the same time build the kind of mass working class power and organization that can in turn exist to throw its weight behind a radical transformation of the state such as that mandated by SP2029.