Is it still possible to fool oneself about the role the now perpetual preparation for coming elections plays, worldwide, in a democratic-parliamentary system which is merely a fig leaf concealing bourgeois dictatorship? The answer is NO! It’s no longer possible to go on fooling ourselves!
Over three centuries of history, the bourgeois class has made use of all the forms of dominion available for keeping a firm hold on its power over the proletariat. At the time of its revolutionary affirmation against feudalism it outlawed the workers’ political and trade union organizations. In its “liberal” phase at the end of the 1800s (the “peaceful” age of capitalist development, dearly paid for by proletarians and colonial peoples), it was already proceeding to absorb the unions and opportunist parties into its democratic-parliamentary mechanism. With the development of imperialism in the 1900s it equipped itself with structures of open political domination with an anti-proletarian and anti-communist function, interlinking them by means of skillful social and reformist legislation. Lastly, in the second post-war period, it inherited from fascism its economic, financial, social and political substance, disguising it behind a deceivingly democratic mask and, in practical and material terms, proceeded seamlessly to render the parliamentary institutions void, as initiated and practised by the previous régimes.
Yet this material reality had been clear and evident ever since the Communist Party Manifesto of 1848: “The bourgeoisie increasingly does away with the fragmentation of the means of production, property and the population. It has agglomerated the population, centralized the means of production and concentrated property into a few hands. The necessary consequence has been political centralization. Independent provinces, hardly linked at all by federal bonds, provinces with different interests, laws, governments and customs regulations have been lumped together into a single nation with a single government, a single set of laws, a single national class interest, a single customs border.” (Chapter 1, “Bourgeoisie and proletarians)
A single government a single, national class interest: this is the dictatorial rule of the bourgeoisie, independently of the form it may assume according to historical phases. Economic-financial centralization = political centralization: even limiting ourselves to the last few decades, the increasing weight of the executive, legislation by decree, the ever-closer intertwining of economy/finance and politics, state interventionism, the integration of parties and trade unions into the State… All this is reality, whilst the democratic-electoral mechanism is pretence – an increasingly miserable and loutish, cynical and stupid pretence, faced with economic and social contradictions and inter-imperialist clashes becoming more acute and destructive day by day.
In 1919, the year in which the Communist International came into being, Lenin wrote: “The bourgeois parliament, even the most democratic in the most democratic of republics, in which capitalist property and power is conserved, is a machine that serves a handful of exploiters to crush millions of workers. […] limiting oneself to bourgeois parliamentarism, to bourgeois democracy, giving it the more attractive appearance of general “democracy”, keeping quiet about its bourgeois nature, forgetting that, as long as capitalist property lasts, universal suffrage is one of the weapons of the bourgeois State, means shamefully betraying the proletariat, passing over to the side of its class enemy, the bourgeoisie, becoming a traitor and a turncoat.” And since then the list of the traitors and turncoats has grown longer and bigger.
A year later “The Soviet”, the organ of the Socialist Party fraction that was shortly to found the Communist Party of Italy, echoed Lenin: “Our abstentionism derives from the great importance we accord to the political task that falls to the Communist Parties in the present period of history: insurrectional conquest of political power, the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat and the system of the soviets. Since the greatest obstacle to this battle are the traditions and political parties of bourgeois democracy […], we state that it is indispensible to cut off any contact between the revolutionary movement and bourgeois representative organs: the isolation of the decaying corpse of parliamentary democracy.” Today that dead body, that “decaying corpse”, continues to walk abroad like a zombie and behind it follow all those drugged and uglified by the idiotic barking of infamous bourgeois politics and slavish mass media, those who still delude themselves and believe it all.
It might be objected that we are far removed from the objective and subjective conditions necessary for insurrection and the seizing of power. Of course: but for this very reason, what is necessary now is the development, the deeper knowledge and spread - particularly amongst the younger generations who suffer first-hand the inevitable instability of survival in an over-ripe capitalism condemned to death by history - of that preparation for revolution that is the only way to totally oppose preparation for elections. We are not saying: “Abandon the voting booths and do what you want.” We are saying: “Join sides with the class struggle and all that it involves at a social and political level. Abandon the voting booth.” We are not in favour of “anti-politics”, this foolish democratic scarecrow: we are for revolutionary politics which, through mobilization and the daily battles of the workers, the hard work of organizing and politically directing a proletariat under attack from all sides, still internally divided, dispersed and oppressed by decades of open or disguised counter-revolution, prepare the conditions for finally overthrowing this mode of production that tosses and turns amidst an economic crisis with no end to it and no solution apart from that of a new world war, massacring whole populations and devastating entire areas of the planet and preparing even worse massacres and devastations.
But revolutionary politics means a revolutionary party, the party that we work on tirelessly, albeit a minority proceeding against the current, so that it can put down roots and develop in every social segment of our class.
And so, abandon the voting booths! Abandon the umpteenth swindle! So that we pit our potentially enormous strength against the democratic dictatorship of the ruling class!
1Lenin, “Letter to the Workers of Europe and America” (24/1/1919).
2 “The Trends in the III International” (23/5/1920).
International Communist Party