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Marxists on Elections

The question of elections has become key because of the mass social-democratic candidacy of Bernie Sanders, an unprecedented event in recent U.S. politics.  There are at least four positions among Marxists and labor people on running in elections and on Sanders.

#1 is to never participate in elections, which is the position of many ultra-lefts and anarchists and some union syndicalists. 

#2 is because Sanders is running in the bourgeois corporate Democratic Party, it is unprincipled to vote for him, a position common to some Trotskyists and Maoists.  

#3 is because Sanders is running a ‘Trojan Horse’ primary candidacy within the Democratic Party without any bourgeois support, it is principled to vote for him, a position of other Trotskyists.  

#4 is the long-entry position of many leftists in Democratic Socialists of America, some Maoists and the Communist Party, who have been voting for or attempting to change the Democratic Party from within for many years and always vote for a Democrat.  This is also the position of the labor bureaucracy in the U.S., though ‘changing’ the DP is not even on their agenda.

Riffing off a 1964 speech by Malcolm X

Missing from this description is how the specific Sanders’ candidacy is advancing socialist goals or retarding them among the U.S. population, irrespective of perfect programs.  I think his candidacy is advancing certain transitional proletarian goals, as well as the movement for socialism itself.  A version of socialism has come out of the closet in a mass way for the first time since the 1930s.

I want to take aim at Position #1, which has been with us for years and was a topic of discussion in FB's 'Marxist Discussion Group.'  To do this I had to re-read parts of “Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder” by Lenin; SWP leader Doug Jenness’s 1970 lecture “Lenin as Campaign Manager” and parts of professor August Nimtz’ new 2020 book “The Ballot or the Streets or Both?” All are available at May Day Books.

Both Marx and Engels made it clear that working-class suffrage, elections and bourgeois-democratic rights were extremely significant, though not the end point of socialist struggle.  Lenin also carried on this tradition, as the Bolsheviks ran in elections to the Russian Duma (its parliament), also forming electoral blocs or boycotting – running even in 1917!  In a bourgeois-democratic republic like the U.S. a significant mass of proletarians still think elections are the only form of political change.  Lenin, like Marx and Engels, understood that running in elections can play a transitional role to the rising of new forms of mass working-class democracy – the commune, the soviet, the council, or what we in the U.S. might  call ‘assemblies.’

  

I’ll just list some quotes that I dug up to refute Position #1:

1.  “Parliamentarism has become ‘historically obsolete.’  That is true as regards propaganda.  But everyone knows that this is still a long way from overcoming it practically.” (Lenin)

2.  “…participation in a bourgeois-democratic parliament even a few weeks before the victory of a Soviet republic and even after such a victory not only does not harm the revolutionary proletariat, but actually helps it to prove to the backward masses why such parliaments deserve to be dispersed; it helps their successful dispersal and helps to make bourgeois parliamentarianism ‘politically obsolete.”  (Lenin)

3.   “… the Russian experience (relates) … to the importance of combining legal with illegal struggle.” “… how very useful during a revolution is the combination of mass action outside the reactionary parliament with an opposition sympathetic to (or better yet, directly supporting) the revolution inside it.” (both by Lenin)

4.  “You want to create a new society, yet you fear the difficulties involved in forming a good parliamentary group made up of convinced, devoted, heroic Communists in a reactionary parliament?” (Lenin)

5.  “On the day the thermometer of universal suffrage registers boiling point among the workers, both they and the capitalists will know where they stand.” (Engels)

6.  Marx “knew how to break with anarchism ruthlessly for its inability to make use even of the ‘pigsty’ of bourgeois parliamentarism, especially when the situation was not obviously revolutionary, but at the same time he knew how to subject parliamentarism to genuinely revolutionary proletarian criticism.” (Lenin on Marx)

7.   One of the goals is “…to win the battle for democracy,..” (1848 Communist Manifesto)

8.  “Every German, having reached the age of 21, shall have the right to vote and be elected… (1848 Program of the Communist Party of Germany)

9.  “That everywhere worker’s candidates are put up alongside the bourgeois-democratic candidates…” (1850 Address by Marx/Engels)

10.  “…the possessing class rules directly through the medium of universal suffrage.  As long as the oppressed class, in our case, therefore, the proletariat, is not yet ripe to emancipate itself, it will in its majority regard the existing order of society as the only one possible and, politically, will form the tail of the capitalist class, its extreme left wing.” (Engels)

11.  “In election propaganda it provided us with a means, second to none, of getting in touch with the masses…” (Engels)

12.  “…the bourgeoisie and the government came to be much more afraid of the legal than of the illegal action of the workers’ party…” (Engels)

13.  “Refusal to participate in elections in principle is a naïve, childish doctrine.”  (Jenness summing up the electoral position of the 2^nd Congress of the Communist International.)

14.  “…the Communists must learn to create a new, uncustomary, non-opportunist, and non-careerist parliamentarianism” (Lenin)

15.  “We must work to accomplish practical tasks, ever more varied and ever more closely connected with all branches of social life, winning branch after branch, and sphere after sphere from the bourgeoisie.”  (Lenin)

All of this might also relate to the abstentionist slant of Position #2 and the reformist slant of Position #4 over the unique and dual role of Sanders in this presidential campaign.

Other prior reviews on this subject, use blog search box, upper left:  Use terms “Sanders” or “elections.”  In Mayday’s stock: “Left Wing Communism, an Infantile Disorder,” “Lenin as Campaign Manager,” “The Ballot or the Streets or Both?”

Red Frog

February 28, 2020