{"id":10620,"date":"2018-10-30T18:12:50","date_gmt":"2018-10-30T18:12:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/?p=10620"},"modified":"2018-10-30T18:12:50","modified_gmt":"2018-10-30T18:12:50","slug":"revolutionaries-and-elections","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/litci.org\/en\/revolutionaries-and-elections\/","title":{"rendered":"Revolutionaries and Elections"},"content":{"rendered":"

The role of socialists in electoral politics during the period of competitive capitalism<\/strong><\/h2>\n

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\nMarx and Engels studied the French Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, along with the Paris Commune of 1871. They argued that while parliaments were key for the bourgeoisie to articulate itself as a class and mediate its collective class interests \u2013 managing competition both between individual capitalists and sectors of the bourgeois class with divergent interests \u2013 bourgeois parliaments did not function in the same way for the working class and indeed could pose dangerous pitfalls if approached in a theoretically naive way.
\nBy Workers\u2019 Voice<\/em>
\nThe working class, according to Marx and Engels, could only constitute its identity and program independently, outside of parliaments. It did this through the class struggle broadly, and specifically through the building of trade unions and socialist organizations. The emergence of parliaments in the early-mid 19th Century in Europe and the Americas, in short, had a different effect on the political formation of the working class than it did on that of the bourgeoisie. The working class could not become, as Marx illuminates for example in the Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte, a \u201cclass for itself,\u201d merely through participation in bourgeois parliaments. It could only do this through the formation of independent organizations in class struggle.[1]<\/sup><\/a>
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\nBy this, Marx and Engels however did not imply that the working class should abstain from bourgeois elections, quite the opposite. Indeed, what they argued \u2013 and what leading revolutionary socialists such as Rosa Luxemburg, Lenin, Eugene Debs, and Anton Pannekoek would do after them \u2013 was that the organized working class indeed should have\u00a0a more active engagement<\/em>\u00a0with elections and parliamentarism than bourgeois \u201ccommon sense\u201d or the logic of bourgeois electoralism imagined. For revolutionary socialists, bourgeois parliaments provided necessary political experience for the working class in its struggle to overcome bourgeois democracy and develop workers\u2019 democracy\u2014 a deeper more authentic democracy, as occurred during the Paris Commune of 1871 and the Petrograd Soviet of 1905.
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\nThe strategy that Marx and Engels proposed in this, the period of free-competition capitalism, was for the working class to struggle to achieve full political rights in order to participate in elections and bourgeois parliaments.[2]<\/sup><\/a>This would have two important effects. First it would, so to say, nationalize the working class struggle, bringing the revolutionary proletarian message to a national audience. Second, and relatedly, it would allow a working class party to more easily expose the contradictions of capitalism and bourgeois democracy and more clearly contrast two conflicting strategies for emancipation: bourgeois reform versus socialist revolution. Combined with the intensification of the class struggle in the streets, the struggle for political rights and parliamentary agitation would prove to be politically transformative for the working class and therefore of society as a whole.
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\nOne of the main themes running through liberalism, as well as social democracy (which we discuss below), is the idea that parliamentarism can resolve the contradictions and crises inherent to capitalism. Today this idea is expressed by many progressives, from self-styled democratic socialists such as Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, to liberal billionaires such as George Soros, to the pages of the leading liberal (and even \u201csocialist\u201d) media organs. It is the idea that electing progressive candidates will tame the crisis tendencies of capitalism through reforms such as taxing the rich and redistributive policies to fund universal healthcare and tuition-free primary \u2013 post secondary education. Some progressives and even some\u00a0socialists<\/a><\/u>, claiming that a revolutionary rupture through elections \u201cis not on the cards,\u201d expand upon this by arguing that reforms will accumulate and eventually overcome capitalism through \u201cattrition<\/a><\/u>.\u201d
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\nNo serious socialist can be opposed to such reforms, which if implemented would indeed massively benefit the working class and oppressed, and our party is in full support of them. However, what distinguishes a reformist (or what might today be called a \u201cprogressive\u201d) political perspective from a revolutionary socialist or a Marxist one is that the former believes that profound, long-lasting reforms are possible within the limits of bourgeois hegemony and liberal parliamentarism, and that reforms in themselves will magically translate into social democracy or even socialism. This perspective, which revolutionaries have traditionally referred to either as \u201creformism,\u201d \u201crevisionism,\u201d or \u201copportunism,\u201d disconnects reforms from the independent self-organization and combativity of the working class that has always been the material condition of possibility for reforms. The German revolutionary socialist Rosa Luxemburg cuttingly referred to this as \u201csausage socialism.\u201d[3]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0The success of the recent wildcat strikes by teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma, and Arizona is only the most recent and most prominent example, in the US context, of the correctness of Luxemburg\u2019s insight.
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\nThe assumption that socialism could be voted in at the ballot box has a long history. It is an idea against which Marx vehemently battled but which nevertheless came to dominate European and American socialism around the time of his death in 1883. And indeed, the successes of socialist parties, especially in Europe, in elections in between the last quarter of the nineteenth century and the World War I, seemed to win the argument for the electorally-focused, \u201crevisionist\u201d socialists. This wing of the socialist movement, epitomized by the German socialist leader Eduard Bernstein, could simply and triumphantly point to statistics. Between 1867 and 1908 socialist parties across Europe counted over 400 members of parliament, to which could be added numerous other representatives in regional and city governments. The number of voters for socialist candidates went from 30,000 to about 10 million. In France the socialist Parti Ouvrier Francais, representing only one wing of the socialist movement, had by 1904 gained control of 63 municipalities and counted around 1300 municipal councilors in 174 cities and towns. The Socialist Party of France counted 3800 representatives and officers in 500 municipalities. Socialists had also made impressive electoral gains in Austria, Belgium, Denmark, England, Norway, and Sweden. But it was Germany that was the citadel of European socialism during this period. By 1890, the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) could boast over 1.4 million votes, nearly 20 percent of the electorate, which translated into 35 seats in the Reichstag making it the strongest party in the German parliament.[4]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0By 1903, the SPD had upped its vote to 3 million, nearly 35 percent of the total vote, giving it 110 parliamentary seats. On the eve of the First World War in 1913,\u00a0 nearly 1.1 million Germans were members of the SPD, with over 13,000 members in local and municipal elected office.
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\nThis formidable success \u2013 all the more remarkable given that the German party was illegal during the 1880s \u2013 nevertheless masked contradictions in the socialist movement that would soon be revealed, in a time of war and revolution. For Bernstein, author of the seminal revisionist text\u00a0Evolutionary Socialism\u00a0<\/em>(1899), and his comrades had managed to move the socialist movement away from the principles of working class independence, combativity, and class struggle, and toward class collaboration.[5]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0The aforementioned electoral successes combined with a period of capitalist stability and prosperity (based \u2013 as revisionists studiously avoided mentioning \u2013 on colonial plunder) led the Bernsteinians to conclude that capitalism would after all resolve its own contradictions, that it had transcended its tendencies toward crisis. Instead of the necessity of revolution, they envisioned socialism coming about through what they called \u201cthe free state\u201d (free of capitalism) based upon principles of \u201ccommonwealth cooperativism.\u201d What this meant, in today\u2019s terminology, was that the main task for socialists was to take over the state \u2013 \u201cby electing representatives to parliament\u201d \u2013 and turn it into an instrument for cooperation instead of class exploitation. In short, they removed any hint of class from the nature of the state itself.
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\nSeen in this historical light, then, we can say that parliamentarism is basically a faith in capitalism\u2019s ability and willingness to resolve its own crises. However, historically, it has been more the case that both progressive legislation and advances in working class power more generally are the outcome \u2013 one possible outcome but necessarily an outcome \u2013 of class conflict rather than than cross-class collaboration. As Marx, Luxemburg, and Lenin recognized \u2013 the first based upon his critical examination of the French revolutions between 1830 and 1871, the latter two based upon their respective analyses of the Russian revolutionary process between the 1880s and 1905 \u2013 parliamentarism does not resolve the contradictions of capitalism. Quite the opposite. And this is for a simple reason: any advance in working class power calls forth renewed and escalated efforts, often violent, by the bourgeoisie to roll back that power.
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\nIn 1908, Lenin noted that:
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\nParliamentarism does not eliminate, but lays bare the innate character even of the most democratic bourgeois republics as organs of class oppression. By helping to enlighten and to organize immeasurably wider masses of the population than whose which previously took an active part in political events, parliamentarism does not make for the elimination of crises and political revolutions, but for the maximum intensification of civil war during such revolutions. The events in Paris in the spring of 1871 and the events in Russia in the winter of 1905 showed as clearly as could be how inevitably this intensification comes about. The French bourgeoisie without a moment\u2019s hesitation made a deal with the enemy of the whole nation, with the foreign army which had ruined its country, in order to crush the proletarian movement.[6]<\/sup><\/a>
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\nWhat he had in mind here were the repressions that followed the 1905 revolution in Russia and, in particular, the 1871 Paris Commune, whose bloody defeat by the bourgeoisie inaugurated a high point of French parliamentarism. There were two reasons, according to Lenin, why parliamentarism intensified rather than resolved class conflict. First, bourgeois parliaments formed a space where workers and other oppressed groups had access to a national discussion where political and economic issues were debated. Parliamentarism in this sense helps the working class transcend local scales of struggle while at the same time highlighting the class nature of bourgeois society, its rule by a tiny minority of exploiters. Second, the parliament polarizes the working class itself, dividing that segment of the working class active in the class struggle and that which is inactive. The parliament, for Lenin, organizes the working class and oppressed in a passive way, subsuming political action to legislative action within the limits of bourgeois legality. There is therefore a dialectical character to parliamentarism in the period of competitive capitalism, a basic contradiction within it. While drawing masses of the working class, the oppressed, and the poor into national-scale political debates, it simultaneously depoliticizes the same forces, channeling their energies away from self-organization, self-activity, and combativity in the struggle against the bourgeoisie.
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\nIt was, in part, this inherent contradiction in bourgeois electoral politics that led revolutionary socialists to so passionately defend the centrality of a socialist political program in relation to socialist parliamentary work. As the US socialist leader Eugene Debs put it in the early 20th century, around the time of peak US Socialist Party electoral power, socialists should seek not simply to maximize their votes but to maximize what he called \u201cintelligent\u201d votes, votes that reflected agreement with the socialist program. It was these votes that would enable socialists to mobilize for independent political action. As Debs wrote in 1904, in socialist electoral campaigns, it is \u201cthe value of the socialist principle that is taught and emphasized, and if this is not understood and approved the vote is not wanted.\u201d[7]<\/sup><\/a>\u00a0This was done, according to revolutionary socialists such as Debs, by means of the socialists\u2019 program. The socialist program distinguished itself from that of the reformists not so much in proposing needed reforms to the existing system \u2013 both revisionists and revolutionaries tended to share this so-called minimum program. What distinguished the socialist program was its strategy to achieve those reforms and, more fundamentally, to achieve workers power: the so-called maximum program. Socialists such as Debs argued that workers\u2019 victories were not durable under a capitalist regime. Only workers\u2019 power \u2013 referred to in the contemporary terminology of the time as \u201cthe dictatorship of the proletariat\u201d or workers\u2019 government \u2013 would ensure the durability of the positive achievements of the workers\u2019 movement. All power and democracy to the workers and the oppressed, none to the bourgeoisie. All socialist electoral work should, from a revolutionary perspective, offer this alternative and magnify its appeal.
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\nTo summarize thus far the analysis of revolutionary socialists in this, the first period of parliamentarism (as the 1920 Comintern Theses referred to it): socialists should participate in bourgeois parliaments in a principled manner for the purposes of agitation, awakening the class consciousness of the proletariat against the exploiting ruling class. This entailed:<\/p>\n